unabashedly borrowed from infidelsarecool.com 

 http://infidelsarecool.com/2007/02/14/the-eve-of-world-war-iii/

The Eve of World War III

Meir Amit, former Mossad Chief, and one of the highest respected intelligence officials in Israel says that we are on the eve of WWIII:

While the former Mossad chief did not call for a military strike against Iran, Amit said he foresees a war in the region in the future.

He said global civilization is on the verge of “World War III,” a massive conflict in which the Islamic world is attempting to impose its ideology on Western nations.

“I am worried about a regional war, but also we need to look at the bigger picture and see that Islam is fighting western world and not only Israel. Look at the terror in Spain, France, London, the U.S.,” said Amit.

“I call it World War III. You must look at it from this angle and treat it wider, not as a problem of terrorism here and there. The war is not being waged just by Iran and in Iraq, it’s being launched by Muslims all over the world,” said Amit.

Amit referenced recent terror attacks against Israel, Europe and the United States; Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions; the insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan; and recent worldwide Muslim riots.

“It looks to me like it is a kind of coordinated or contemplated problem to somehow impose the Islamic idea all over the world,” Amit said.

Amit urged Western nations to “unite and work together. Unfortunately, the world is not uniting. Russia is playing its own game, and so is China.”

___ 

It's not just me thinking this, folks. 

You can say "the clouds are gathering,"

you can do a Barry McGuire and sing off-key about "The Eve of Destruction,"

you can compare what's happening now to the headlines of 1938 to 1940 -

the one thing you can't do is deny that a war's about to happen. 

The headlines haven't been this ominous since 1983, when Yuri Andropov (projecting his own warlike tendencies on President Reagan) pushed the world to the very edge of nuclear war by deciding that if he were us, he'd be getting ready to fight a nuclear war.   Meanwhile, we had the absurd spectacle of John Kerry (lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts at the time) forbidding his fellow citizens of Massachusetts to prepare for World War III - I guess he wanted to make sure the side he was rooting for won.

Now we have one of Andropov's protegés, Vladimir Putin, talking just like a parody of a bellicose, blustering moron, er, Kruschchev as he turns his country into a one-party dictatorship, and no one in the White House or the mainstream press seems to be taking notice.  At least he's done away with the pretense that Russia was going to even try to conform to any of the arms control treaties they've signed.  

The significant thing to me is the degree to which our missile defense program has enraged Putin.   I was under the impression that we and the Russians had agreed not to target each other's territory with nuclear weapons back in the 1990s - that's what the Clintons were going around telling everyone, after all - but now that we've actually acquired the means to physically blunt a surprise nuclear attack, Putin is responding with anger and surprise!  Why?  If he wasn't targeting us, why is it so important to him that we leave ourselves open to a surprise nuclear attack?

The only answer that comes close to making sense is that Russia had intended all along to continue targeting us in fact - it takes from minutes to just under an hour to re-install the targeting data in our countries' fleets of ICBMs, and Putin's anger at not being able to steal a march on us can only mean that a surprise nuclear attack has continued to be the cornerstone of Russian nuclear strategy all along.  

Whether we realized it or not, Clinton allowed us to be deceived all this time, disassembling our Peacekeeper missiles and embarking on a continuing effort to disarm our nuclear-armed cruise missiles under the assumption that the Russians were doing the same thing.  Well, guess what?   All this time, we've remained on their nuclear target list for all intents and purposes.   

If history is any indication, the next step will be for the close relationship between Russia and Iran to gel into another Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, at which time even the pretense that the Iranians aren't being outfitted top-to-bottom with a complete suite of nuclear offensive weapons and delivery systems will go by the wayside.  All because we, as a species, don't like to study history, so we must repeat the less pleasant parts of it from time to time.

Why don't we ever learn? 

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 4:51 PM MST

Updated: Thursday, 14 February 2008 4:55 PM MST

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Mood:  incredulous

In his James Bond novel "Dr. No," Ian Fleming once wrote:

"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. 

Over the past two weeks, undersea Internet and telephone cables have been cut.  Five times in two weeks. 

Why?

What's in the works this time?  You don't go to all the trouble to pull telephone cables off the bottom of the ocean and cut it for no reason.  So whoever's doing this HAS a reason.  It can't be a good one for us. 

Just another news item you don't get from Katie Couric. 

___

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 9:55 AM MST

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Mood:  incredulous

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

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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

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Mood:  irritated

http://iranvajahan.net/cgi-bin/news.pl?l=en&y=2004&m=04&d=24&a=6

The Fruits of Appeasement
Victor Davis Hanson

Imagine a different November 4, 1979, in Teheran. Shortly after Iranian
terrorists storm the American embassy and take some 90 American hostages, President Jimmy Carter announces that Islamic fundamentalism is not a legitimate response to the excess of the Shah but a new and dangerous fascism that threatens all that liberal society holds dear. And then he issues an ultimatum to Teheran’s leaders: Release the captives or face a devastating military response.

When that demand is not met, instead of freezing Iran’s assets, stopping the importation of its oil, or seeking support at the UN, Carter orders an immediate blockade of the country, followed by promises to bomb, first, all of its major military assets, and then its main government buildings and residences of its ruling mullocracy.

The Ayatollah Khomeini may well have called his bluff; we may well have tragically lost the hostages (151 fewer American lives than the Iranian-backed Hezbollah would take four years later in a single day in Lebanon). And there may well have been the sort of chaos in Teheran that we now witness in Baghdad. But we would have seen it all in 1979—and not in 2001, after almost a quarter-century of continuous Middle East terrorism, culminating in the mass murder of 3,000 Americans and the leveling of the World Trade Center.

The twentieth century should have taught the citizens of liberal democracies the catastrophic consequences of placating tyrants. British and French restraint over the occupation of the Rhineland, the Anschluss, the absorption of the Czech Sudetenland, and the incorporation of Bohemia and Moravia did not win gratitude but rather Hitler’s contempt for their weakness. Fifty million dead, the Holocaust, and the near destruction of European civilization were the wages of “appeasement”—a term that early-1930s liberals proudly embraced as far more enlightened than the old idea of “deterrence” and “military readiness.”

So too did Western excuses for the Russians’ violation of guarantees of free elections in postwar Eastern Europe, China, and Southeast Asia only embolden the Soviet Union. What eventually contained Stalinism was the Truman Doctrine, NATO, and nuclear deterrence — not the United Nations—and what destroyed its legacy was Ronald Reagan’s assertiveness, not Jimmy Carter’s accommodation or Richard Nixon’s détente.

As long ago as the fourth century b.c., Demosthenes warned how complacency and self-delusion among an affluent and free Athenian people allowed a Macedonian thug like Philip II to end some four centuries of Greek liberty—and in a mere 20 years of creeping aggrandizement down the Greek peninsula. Thereafter, these historical lessons should have been clear to citizens of any liberal society: we must neither presume that comfort and security are our birthrights and are guaranteed without constant sacrifice and vigilance, nor expect that peoples outside the purview of bourgeois liberalism share our commitment to reason, tolerance, and enlightened self-interest.

Most important, military deterrence and the willingness to use force against evil in its infancy usually end up, in the terrible arithmetic of war, saving more lives than they cost. All this can be a hard lesson to relearn each generation, especially now that we contend with the sirens of the mall, Oprah, and latte. Our affluence and leisure are as antithetical to the use of force as rural life and relative poverty once were catalysts for muscular action. The age-old lure of appeasement — perhaps they will cease with this latest concession, perhaps we provoked our enemies, perhaps demonstrations of our future good intentions will win their approval—was never more evident than in the recent Spanish elections, when an affluent European electorate, reeling from the horrific terrorist attack of 3/11, swept from power the pro-U.S. center-right government on the grounds that the mass murders were more the fault of the United States for dragging Spain into the effort to remove fascists and implant democracy in Iraq than of the primordial al-Qaidist culprits, who long ago promised the Western and Christian Iberians ruin for the Crusades and the Reconquista.

What went wrong with the West—and with the United States in particular—when not just the classical but especially the recent antecedents to September 11, from the Iranian hostage-taking to the attack on the USS Cole, were so clear? Though Americans in an election year, legitimately concerned about our war dead, may now be divided over the Iraqi occupation, polls nevertheless show a surprising consensus that the many precursors to the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings were acts of war, not police matters. Roll the tape backward from the USS Cole in 2000, through the bombing of the Khobar Towers and the U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the destruction of the American embassy and annex in Beirut in 1983, the mass murder of 241 U.S. Marine peacekeepers asleep in their Lebanese barracks that same year, and assorted kidnappings and gruesome murders of American citizens and diplomats (including TWA Flight 800, Pan Am 103, William R. Higgins, Leon Klinghoffer, Robert Dean Stethem, and CIA operative William Francis Buckley), until we arrive at the Iranian hostage-taking of November 1979: that debacle is where we first saw the strange brew of Islamic fascism, autocracy, and Middle East state terrorism—and failed to grasp its menace, condemn it, and go to war against it.

That lapse, worth meditating upon in this 25th anniversary year of
Khomeinism, then set the precedent that such aggression against the United States was better adjudicated as a matter of law than settled by war.  Criminals were to be understood, not punished; and we, not our enemies, were at fault for our past behavior. Whether Carter’s impotence sprang from his deep-seated moral distrust of using American power unilaterally or from real remorse over past American actions in the cold war or even from his innate pessimism about the military capability of the United States mattered little to the hostage takers in Teheran, who for some 444 days humiliated the United States through a variety of public demands for changes in U.S. foreign policy, the return of the exiled Shah, and reparations.

But if we know how we failed to respond in the last three decades, do we yet grasp why we were so afraid to act decisively at these earlier junctures, which might have stopped the chain of events that would lead to the al-Qaida terrorist acts of September 11? Our failure was never due to a lack of the necessary wealth or military resources, but rather to a deeply ingrained assumption that we should not retaliate — a hesitancy al-Qaida perceives and plays upon.

Along that sad succession of provocations, we can look back and see
particularly critical turning points that reflected this now - institutionalized state policy of worrying more about what the enemy was going to do to us than we to him, to paraphrase Grant’s dictum: not hammering back after the murder of the marines in Lebanon for fear of ending up like the Israelis in a Lebanese quagmire; not going to Baghdad in 1991 because of paranoia that the “coalition” would collapse and we would polarize the Arabs; pulling abruptly out of Somalia once pictures of American bodies dragged through the streets of Mogadishu were broadcast around the world; or turning down offers in 1995 from Sudan to place Usama bin Ladin into our custody, for fear that U.S. diplomats or citizens might be murdered abroad.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 9:26 PM MDT

Updated: Saturday, 22 September 2007 7:43 PM MDT

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Mood:  incredulous

From the "Captain's Quarters" blog.   More news that the "mainstream media" is soft-pedaling.  Why?

"http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/009050.php

January 31, 2007
Did Iran Attack American Troops In Iraq?

CNN reports that American military investigators believe the January 20th attack on a military compound that killed five US soldiers may have either been conducted by Iran or by Iranian-run insurgents. The level of sophistication in the attack, conducted by terrorists in American military uniforms, showed too much sophistication to have originated from one of the native insurgencies:

The Pentagon is investigating whether a recent attack on a military compound in Karbala was carried out by Iranians or Iranian-trained operatives, two officials from separate U.S. government agencies said.

"People are looking at it seriously," one of the officials said.

That official added the Iranian connection was a leading theory in the investigation into the January 20 attack that killed five soldiers.

The second official said: "We believe it's possible the executors of the attack were Iranian or Iranian-trained."

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 10:21 AM MST

Updated: Wednesday, 31 January 2007 11:00 AM MST

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Mood:  incredulous

There's the version you get from Big Media, and there's the truth. 

(And why on Earth would someone make up stories about the war in Iraq turning out a whole lot better than the news people are telling us for the rare privilege of staying out there to be shot at?)

Quoted from Col. Jill Morgenthaler's "GI Jill's Adventures in Baghdad" blog:

"May 22, 2004

Hey, Everyone,

Things are quiet right now.  We begin the countdown to sovereignty for Iraq.  Good things are happening.  The Reserve unit that has received so much bad press has done good things.  Here’s one of their stories:

Men, women of the 372nd are also the good guys.
JAMES RADA
Times-News Staff Writer
CUMBERLAND:  What would you call a man who jumped into a creek to help people caught inside a truck that had rolled there? What would you call a group that helped build a center to enable women to become successfully independent? What would you call a group that made an entire city feel safer?  Would you call them heroes? Civic activists? Friends? Lately, these people have been called sadists, monsters and criminals. That’s because the good deeds and good work done by the 372nd Army  Reserve Unit have been forgotten and tarnished by the alleged misdeeds of a  few.  Sgt. Roger Plummer of Ridgeley, W.Va., served in Iraq from June 2003 to January 2004. He knows the men and women of the 372nd because he has lived with them, fought with them and worked with them.  Al Hilla was named one of the safest cities in Iraq because of the work done by the 372nd police,” said Plummer.

The Coalition Provisional Authority recognized the South Central Region of Iraq as progressing faster than any other unit, in part, because of the work done by Plummer and his fellow reservists.   Our personalities really helped us with that city,  said Plummer.  He said that when the 372nd was in charge of security there, the city had been safe and the Iraqi police department had been an open place where Iraqis knew they could come to get help. 

“We were open and the people felt comfortable with us, said Plummer.  Then the 372nd was sent to do other work and the replacement unit came in and turned the police department into a “fortress.  And that’s when all the trouble started when we closed ourselves off from them, said Plummer.  Plummer was part of a group of 372nd soldiers that was helping train an Iraqi boxing team to qualify for the Olympics as a way to restore national pride.  When a truck went off the road and into a creek, it was a member of the 372nd who dove into the water and began pulling Iraqis out of the truck.   He gave one old guy CPR for 20 minutes trying to save him, said Plummer.  The 372nd also held police academies for Iraqi policemen who had little or no training.  Plummer said that during the four months his platoon was assigned to the Coalition Provisional Authority it participated in the following projects:

• 8 women’s rights centers were built
• 6 schools were built or remodeled
• 6 youth centers were built
• 4 hydroelectric turbines were repaired
• 2 universities were built or remodeled
• 2 democracy centers were built
• 2 water filtration plants were rebuilt
• 1 airfield was built

“I couldn’t tell you how many miles of road I saw paved. I saw electrical lines run into cities that didn’t have power,” added Plummer.  The construction was performed by Iraqi contractors who bid on the jobs.  They were paid from money that had been confiscated from Saddam Hussein. 

The 372nd also did little things, too, like making sure students had plenty of paper, pencils and erasers.  All of this was not easy for members of the 372nd, either. They were shot at with bullets and rockets. Some members survived car bomb blasts.  They endured this because they felt it was the right thing to do. They could see the progress being made with the people, according to Plummer.  He wants people to know of all the good work his unit did, and is still doing, in Iraq. James Rada can be reached at jrada@times-news.com"

and

"Good news:  Great stuff still happening here for a better and free Iraq.  Below is an excerpt from American Daily.

Mainstream Media Robbing Us Of Iraqi War Heroes

By Joe Mariani (06/04/2004) (Joe Mariani was born and raised in New Jersey. He now lives in Pennsylvania, where the gun laws are less restrictive and taxes are lower. Joe always thought of himself as politically neutral until he saw how far left the left had really gone after 9/11.)

 …The New York Times will probably never report the story of Corporal Samuel Toloza, one of 380 soldiers from El Salvador, which was carried in the Washington Times. Corporal Toloza, out of ammunition, bravely defended fallen members of his unit from Iraqi insurgents. He charged the enemy, armed only with a knife. ''One of his friends was dead, 12 others lay wounded, and the four soldiers still left standing were surrounded and out of ammunition. So Salvadoran Cpl. Samuel Toloza said a prayer, whipped out his knife, and charged the Iraqi gunmen." The Iraqis broke, and more Coalition troops arrived before they could regroup. Phil Kosnett, who heads the CPA in Najaf, has nominated six El Salvadorans for the Bronze Star.

''These guys are punching way above their weight,'' Kosnett said. ''They're probably the bravest and most professional troops I've every worked with.'' Yet their story is almost completely buried by the mainstream media's endless liturgy of doom, gloom, and quagmire.

You will probably never see the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders mentioned on ABC, CBS or NBC. When attacked by over 100 of Moqtada al-Sadr's so-called militia (in reality a gang of thugs with a religious motif), the 20 or so soldiers fixed bayonets and mounted a 19-century style charge. Taking only three casualties, the Scots captured or killed 35 of the enemy. No American media outlet saw fit to even mention this action, except those who carry Mark Steyn's opinion column. Not one seems to have thought of the Highlanders' action as newsworthy." 

Thank you, Col. Morgenthaler, for the straight poop.  God bless you, ma'am.

I guess the BBC might have passed that action over, too.  Just a guess. 

Sorry it took me so long to get around to it, but I had surgery not too long ago, and I'm just now getting my act together again.

Why spend time on this?  Because my son Armand Luke Frickey would have wanted me to remind you people that the folks on TV, NPR and the big papers are lying to you.  The one sure way to make this Iraq thing a fiasco is to bail out because Pelosi and Company have decided that's how it'll play out.  He died so that the rest of us could live here in peace.  It's time we began to earn that.

Someone's got to get the truth out.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 12:45 PM MST

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Mood:  sad

From an editorial page in Romania...
Mood:  surprised
Topic: ...Those Who Will Not See 

 

Lately, and especially during the election, we were force-fed information by our news media about how the rest of the world despises us because of things like the war in Iraq. To hear them talk, no one over there ever disagrees with the people who have nothing to do but show up at street rallies to burn the President in effigy and trample and spit on our flag.

Well, this came in my Email the other day. It's an editorial in the Romanian newspaper Evenimentulzilei (which translates to "The Daily Event" or "News of the Day"). A fellow over there named Cornel Nistorescu sent in a letter and the paper ran it. So much for European opinion being solidly against us. Then again, the Romanians can probably remember being oppressed by Muslims recently enough that they aren't interested in having it happen again.

"God Bless America
We rarely get a chance to see another country's editorial about the USA.
Read this excerpt from a Romanian Newspaper.

The article was written by Mr. Cornel Nistorescu and published under the title "C"ntarea Americii, meaning "Ode To America") in the Romanian newspaper Evenimentulzilei "The Daily Event" or "News of the Day".

An Ode to America~

Why are Americans so united? They would not resemble one another even if you painted them all one color!
They speak all the languages of the world and form an astonishing mixture of civilizations and religious beliefs.

Still, the American tragedy turned three hundred million people into a hand put on the heart. Nobody rushed to accuse the White House, the army, and the secret services that they are only a bunch of losers. Nobody rushed to empty their bank accounts. Nobody rushed out onto the streets nearby to gape about. The Americans volunteered to donate blood and to give a helping hand. After the first moments of panic, they raised their flag over the smoking ruins, putting on T-shirts, caps and ties in the colors of the national flag. They placed flags on buildings and cars as if in every place and on every car a government official or the president was passing. On every occasion, they started singing their traditional song: "God Bless America!" I watched the live broadcast and rerun after rerun for hours.

Listening to the story of the guy who went down one hundred floors with a woman in a wheelchair without knowing who she was, or of the Californian hockey player, who gave his life fighting with the terrorists and prevented the plane from hitting a target that could have killed other hundreds or thousands of people. How on earth were they able to respond united as one human being?

Imperceptibly, with every word and musical note, the memory of some turned into a modern myth of tragic heroes. And with every phone call, millions and millions of dollars were put in a collection aimed at rewarding not a man or a family, but a spirit, which no money can buy. What on earth can unite the Americans in such a way? Their land? Their galloping history? Their economic Power? Money? I tried for hours to find an answer, humming songs and murmuring phrases with the risk of sounding commonplace. I thought things over, but I reached only one conclusion...Only freedom can work such miracles.

Cornel Nistorescu"

Thanks, Mr. Nistorescu. And good luck with your country's own democracy. We appreciate the help your people are giving us in the Coalition of the Willing, and appearances to the contrary, we don't forget our friends.

---- 

A year and some months later, it's saddening to note how optimistic Mr. Nistorescu was in his praise of the American nation.

The Democratic Party jumps on every reverse in the war on terror as a sign of how morally and intellectually bankrupt the Bush Administration is (and the national leadership of the Democratic Party knows all about moral and intellectual bankruptcy - from the inside, having nominated a Communist fellow-traveler and lying bastard like John Kerry to the Presidency).

These people do not care at all about the lives of either innocent Iraqis,  Afghans, Europeans, Americans or our troops overseas.  My son and five other Louisiana National Guardsmen died because the terrorists in Iraq know that killing six Americans in one detonation would give them ten days of continuous television coverage in this country - at least.  

CBS News pestered me on the phone for over a month for permission to do one of those obnoxious minor-key woodwind "Isn't it horrible we're still in this war" features on their Evening News show about my son's death, because his widow wanted time to think about whether he would have appreciated being used in antiwar leftist agitprop.  They apparently had no problem with going around her back for permission from someone not my son's next-of-kin.  (And this was when Dick Thornburgh and company was busy giving CBS a clean bill of health for their handling of Rather's and Mapes' solicitation and use of the phony Bush National Guard memos.)

Going back to the general from the specific, it didn't take very long for the vaunted solidarity between Americans after 9/11/2001 to vanish. 

No charge is too scurrilous for the left wing in this country to make about the Bush White House, no lie too transparent to tell.  And nothing the left wing says is too ridiculous for the "mainstream press" (in other words, the press with massive amounts of money behind it) to report as straight news, rather than as partisan opinion.

It's just like living over the fence from a particularly psychotic mother-in-law - no, in this day of ridiculously cheap long-distance telephone calls, it's more like, for your beloved spouse's sake, being reluctant to block incoming calls from her phone number and that of the family members who will let her use their phones.

The hard-line socialists in our country's electorate want power, and they literally will destroy our country and its government to get it.  They see themselves as morally superior to us and thus qualified to peel away right after right from us until we behave in a way pleasing to them.  (Remember the Clinton administration, guys?)

The hard left wing in this country are the psychotic in-laws of America.  It's long past time for a family intervention.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 3:36 PM MDT

Updated: Saturday, 9 September 2006 11:50 PM MDT

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