Retired Carrier USS America Sunk Off U.S.

This is old news. The ship was sunk on May 14th, though it wasn’t reported by the Navy at the time. It made the news on the 20th, though I didn’t notice it until a couple of days later due to the bad case of Starwarsitis I was suffering from at the time. I thought I’d mention it here quick since I had been watching the story earlier.

We saw this F-4 on the flight deck of the USS YORKTOWN yesterday afternoon:

Notice this bit:

The ship is gone but not forgotten. And I still think that the next carrier should be named AMERICA.

I’ll be posting lightly over the next couple of days, depending on internet availability.

Been traveling the past couple of days and away from the computer. But I wanted to make sure I got a Memorial Day post up. I’m going to post a pic my wife took last year and played with a bit. Click for a higher-res version.

The men and women who have died in our wars were fighting for me and my family, even though they didn’t know us and we didn’t know them. I possess merely a tiny fraction of the understanding needed to comprehend the sacrifice that they made. With that tiny fraction, I do my best to remember them. Every day, of course, but on this day especially.

While on my travels, I had the pleasure of visiting the USS YORKTOWN in Charleston, South Carolina, this afternoon. While wandering the great ship, I happened to notice this among the thousands of displays:

Click for closer look

It says WITHIN AND NEAR THESE EXHIBIT COMPARTMENTS 32 MEN DIED AND 71 WERE WOUNDED 16 APRIL 1945 WHILE FIGHTING 50 KAMIKAZES.

Right there. Right where I and my family were standing.

Sixty years ago. Before my kids were born. Before I was born. Before my parents were born.

And those men died fighting for all of us.

I don’t know what else to say about it.

Predator Anti-Tank Missile for Urban Assault

More military transformation. Right before our eyes.

Responding to an urgent request from warfighters, Lockheed Martin expanded the capabilities of its Predator anti-tank weapon and delivered 400 rounds to the U.S. Marine Corps.

The U.S. Marine Corps requested Lockheed Martin to modify the shoulder- fired, short-range Predator anti-tank weapon into a direct-attack urban assault weapon. Renamed the Short-Range Assault Weapon-Multiple Purpose Variant (SRAW-MPV), the new urban assault missile has a multiple-purpose blast warhead, enabling it to defeat a variety of targets such as buildings and bunkers, as well as light-armored vehicles.

Don’t confuse this with missiles fired from the Predator UAV. Those on the receiving end, though, won’t care that if it’s the same or different.

Lockheed Martin previously delivered 344 Predator rounds under a Low-Rate Initial Production-I contract. Both the Predator and SRAW-MPV weapons are fully man-rated (all qualification, safety certification and gunner hazard tests are complete, any limitations on the use of the weapon are quantified and documented, and the weapon is tested as safe to fire within the defined limitations) — ready to deploy.

The U.S. Army is evaluating options for upgrading its urban assault weapon capabilities for fire from enclosure and improved performance over the next few years, and SRAW-MPV, in its current configuration, will meet most of these upgrade requirements. U.S. allies also have urban warfare requirements that SRAW-MPV will meet.

Something tells me the Marines will be on to the next generation of this bad boy before their evaluations complete. Maybe, assuming it’s effective in Iraq, the usage by the Marines will speed things along a bit.

I just finished the book BAT BOMB by Jack Couffer. It’s the personal account of a member of Project X-Ray, the super-secret World War II effort to use bats as incendiary device carriers in the war against Japan. Seems to me, as outrageous as it sounds, that it could have worked.

The basic idea was that a bomb-like canister filled with bats would be dropped from high altitude over the target area. The bats would be in a sort of hibernation, but as the bomb fell (slowed by a parachute) they would warm up and awaken. At the appropriate altitude, the bomb would open and over one thousand bats, each carrying a tiny time-delay napalm incendiary device, would flutter away and roost in various nooks and crannies, many of them in extremely flammable wooden Japanese buildings. The napalm devices would go off more or less simultaneously, and thousands of little fires would start at the same time. Many of them would grow into large fires, and the ability of the Japanese firefighters to contain them would quickly be overwhelmed.

Yes, it sounds outrageous. I’d heard of this idea before (though many people seem to the think the idea was simply to release bats in order to scare the Japanese, not to burn them out) but I never took it terribly seriously.

But, while I’ll agree it sounds outlandish, reading the book by a member of the team that worked to develop it has convinced me that they might have been on to something.

In fact, one afternoon while demonstrating the napalm devices, several bats woke too early in the lab, flew off, and ended up burning down the brand-new but uninhabited Carlsbad Auxiliary Army Air Base in New Mexico. Really.

Besides, a book with chapters entitled “This man is not a nut”, “The suggestion is returned as impractical”, “No questions will be tolerated”, and “The bat-shit man” has got to have something going for it, doesn’t it?

I’ll include two excerpts, neither of which is about the bat bomb itself.

The first regards one of the reasons that Project X-Ray was ultimately canceled:

“I heard the damnedest thing while I was in D.C.,” Doc said when he got back from Washington. “Some general I met regarding appropriations confused our secret project with another secret project that’s apparently going on somewhere. It’s the silliest nonsense you ever heard of. And evidently this project has got the backing of the president and they’re blowing millions of dollars on it.”

Von Blocker looked up through his smoke and frowned.

“This general practically threw me out of his office, he was so enraged at the waste of time and money. ‘Don’t tell me you’re the one promoting that crazy notion of making bombs out of atoms?’”

“I had a hell of a time convincing him that I had nothing to do with that kind of fraud,” Doc continued.

“What are atoms?” Frank Benish asked.

“The smallest particles of matter. You know, everything’s made out of cells. You break down cells and you’ve got something even smaller — atoms. Something like that.”

“And they think they can make bombs out of them?” Benish shook his head. “Man, they don’t know ’sic ‘em’ from ‘come here’.”

“Can you imagine such an idea?” Doc said. “They’re throwing away millions, and I can’t get a staff car and driver!”

“Where’s all this happening?” v. B. asked.

Doc shrugged. “As soon as he found out I had nothing to do with it he clammed up. But he first got the idea I was involved when I said we had some work to do in New Mexico.”

“Unbelievable!” v. B. said.

“Yeah! We got a sure thing like the bat bomb going, something that could really win the war, and they’re jerking off with tiny little atoms. It makes me want to cry.”

Adding to the humor of this chance encounter is the fact that the bat bomb people, at the time struggling to get their project the green light, are having trouble convincing superiors that a 15 or 20 ounce incendiary device will be effective. Then the team leader runs into someone who informs him that another secret project is building a bomb measured not in ounces but in atoms, and that the crazy idea is getting tons of money.

Sixty years later and it’s still funnier than Hades.

The next excerpt takes place after an early test of the bat bomb release mechanism. They didn’t take the wind at altitude into account, and they ended up chasing the swarm of flying creatures (each carrying a dummy incendiary device) miles across the New Mexico countryside. It’s long, but I’m pretty sure you will be glad you read it.
(more…)

Anti-U.S. rallies erupt over handling of Quran

Newsweek is mentioned twice in this AP story. Once in a paragraph that begins

The rallies in Pakistan, Egypt, Lebanon, Indonesia, Malaysia and elsewhere followed an admission Thursday by U.S. investigators that Islam’s holy book was mishandled at Guantanamo.

and once at the end of the article in this paragraph:

Anti-U.S. sentiment has been running high in Muslim countries since the Newsweek report. The Bush administration blamed it for demonstrations this month in Afghanistan, where more than a dozen people died and scores were injured.

So we’re back to the “the Bush administration blamed it” defense, are we? The AP apparently didn’t get the memo from the Washington Post authorizing the switch to the “the White House, the Pentagon, and others” talking point.

In neither paragraph is it mentioned that these riots were organized specifically in response to the Newsweek report as I noted last week:

Islamic groups in Pakistan have called for international anti-US protest on May 27.

“Islamic groups will hold demonstrations on May 27 across the world to condemn the desecration of Holy Qur’an in the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay,” Qazi Hussain Ahmad, head of coalition of six politico-religious groups said on Sunday.

In fact, that first paragraph I quoted seems to give the impression that it’s yesterday’s reports that sparked the demonstrations.

A simple Google for “Qazi Hussain Ahmad” and Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal, the group the AP story writes organized the protests, reveals that he is the president of the group. So it’s the same guy and these are the demonstrations he called for.

Yet no one seems to be making the connection.

UPDATE: It just gets worse.

Read the rest at Michelle Malkin’s. As I said recently, Legacy Media has become a caricature of itself.

Violence against border agents at record pace

I’ve been watching the violence against US Border Patrol agents lately. In February I noted that our guys had been shot at six times in one week. Well, the trend doesn’t seem to have changed much:

In the first eight months of fiscal year 2005 there have been 163 recorded acts of violence against border agents compared with 118 for all of fiscal year 2004, according to the U.S. Border Patrol.

Border patrol officials in other sectors contacted by MSNBC.com had no figures readily available; however, all those contacted acknowledged that violence is on the increase.

First of all, as the article notes and I wrote in February, this increase in violence means that our security isn’t totally worthless. The fact that attacks of one sort or another are going up means that our efforts to improve control of our borders have been at least partially successful. They wouldn’t be attacking if they didn’t need to.

But this demonstrates that the problem is not as minor as many make it out to be. Sure, many well-meaning folks looking for a better existence cross the border illegally in hopes of improving their lot in life. But I doubt few of them attack the US Border Patrol.

It’s the more serious criminals, especially drug traffickers, I’d think, that are willing to fight for access to the US. If terrorists would try to use the porous Mexican border, they’d quite likely be willing to fight, as well, if what they were up to was important enough.

If we continue to step up border security, the attacks are going to increase. We need to be prepared for that. If someone is killed, some will argue that it’s not really worth the life of a Border Patrol agent to keep illegal immigrants out. But the fact of the matter is this: If the illegal immigrants are willing to kill in order to get in, we need to spend a lot more effort on keeping them out.

It isn’t the inexpensive housekeepers and fruit pickers that are shooting at our guys on the border.

UPDATE: I fully realize that this Koran abuse story is just plain stupid. But I believe that it’s important to cover the coverage. It brings me no joy to do so, believe me. In fact, it really sucks the fun right out of writing.

That’s the sort of thing we ought to be hearing more about.

This latest breaking Koran story sure has legs. The WaPo continues to crank out the information, and we are rapt with attention. Here’s the latest front page headline:

Yes, I know it’s the same headline that ran earlier for a story by Lexie Verdon. But it’s a good headline.

This latest installment reveals details too gory for prime time, but we’ll run them anyway:

[Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood] said most of the 13 cases involved accidental or inadvertent touching of the Koran by guards and interrogators — such as someone bumping into the holy book, or one case when an interrogator stacked two Korans on a television.

He then went on to detail how many atrocities were committed by guards and how many were committed by interrogators.

Fortunately, the tone of this latest article is even-handed and informative:

Hood took pains to specifically deny a now-retracted report in Newsweek magazine’s May 9 issue that said officials had confirmed a detainee’s claim that a guard had flushed a Koran down a toilet. The White House, the Pentagon and others have linked that report to riots overseas that left 16 people dead.

Last time it was the “Bush administration” that linked the reports to “deadly riots overseas”. Now they not only elaborate on “deadly”, but they admit that it’s not just the Bush administration that links the Newsweek report to the riots.

Now, if we’re lucky, they’ll soon point out that some of the “others” that make the link are the rioters themselves.

But I’m not holding my breath.

It’s sort of surreal, actually, to read this story. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that Gen. Hood was the one most likely to be lying. He “characterized” some things. “Hood took pains to specifically deny” other things. “Hood emphasized” yet more things. But maybe I’m just thin-skinned.

Also, Guantanamo Bay is a government facility. Doesn’t the presence of the Koran and prayer time allowance threaten to tear down our precious separation of church and state? Just think of the example we’re setting for the Cubans.

The only problem I see with the incident where two Korans were accidentally stacked on top of a television set, however, is the fact that there was a television set present. What is that even doing there?

(I’d like to reiterate my belief that Newsweek’s decision to run the Koran flushing story was “unpatriotic”. This belief is not dependent upon the story being false. Last night, when I first noticed a new front page story in the Washington Post about the Koran, I gave them the benefit of the doubt as far as patriotism went. Give ‘em an inch…)

Also, tomorrow is the day that an international day of protest was scheduled to occur according to some Pakistani religious leaders. I wasn’t able to figure out how prominent these particular guys were, and I don’t know if the big show is still on or not. We’ll see.

If it comes off, though, remember that it is specifically and particularly a day of demonstration over the Newsweek story. I fully expect media coverage to doubt the connection. If they do, they are intentionally LYING.

Brigade soldiers rescue pair of Iraqi hostages

Sometimes they get there in time:

MOSUL, Iraq — They’ve uncovered caches of enemy weapons and flushed out a variety of shady characters since coming to Iraq last fall.
But the most astonishing find of the war for several Tacoma-area soldiers turned up this week in a secret room behind a bookshelf in a northeast Mosul basement.

Following a tip from an Iraqi source, Stryker troops rescued two handcuffed and hooded citizens from a squalid concrete-block room.

One of the captives was an Iraqi government official who works closely with American forces. He had been missing 58 days, said officials with the 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division from Fort Lewis.

The other was a wealthy merchant whose family was close to paying a $150,000 ransom, officials said.

A quick glance around the Legacy Media websites turns up nothing on this.

Isn’t this news? An Iraqi government official who had been kidnapped 58 days ago was rescued. And another kidnapping victim, as well. What sort of good news in Iraq will it take to make headlines?

Put another way…If an Iraqi government official had been kidnapped or killed today, do you think it might have made headlines?

The early-afternoon patrol started ordinarily enough, with 2nd Platoon, Alpha Company working the streets for information. The heat kept most people indoors, but the soldiers started talking with a man who mentioned a friend in the rental property business who had a suspicious tenant, said Lt. Ryan Turner.

Two squads of soldiers rolled to the house and stopped the tenant as he tried to slip away.

“I gave him an ultimatum and said if he doesn’t help us, I was going to take him away, which I really couldn’t do,” said Turner, 24, of Lakewood.

The tenant didn’t call the platoon leader’s bluff. Instead, he disclosed that there were people of interest in the basement, though he denied any involvement.

Sgt. Jared McNulty took his squad downstairs and at first didn’t believe anyone was there. The room was too small, with just enough space for several containers on the floor and a bookshelf against the wall.

But when the tenant persisted, the soldiers went back down for a closer look. McNulty said they noticed a fresh coat of paint on the walls and on a panel behind the bookshelf. Like a scene from a “Hardy Boys” book, they pulled back the shelf and started exposing what turned out to be a square opening.

Inside was a roughly 10-by-10-foot room just tall enough to stand in, with four U.S. Army cots and a bag stuffed with black masks, keys, chains, locks and 20 sets of handcuffs. The air was humid, and up to 4 inches of standing water covered the floor.

“The smell was horrible in there; that’s the first thing that hit you,” said McNulty, 23, of Tumwater.

The two cuffed, hooded prisoners were sheepish at first, repeating “Don’t shoot” as they kneeled at the entrance. The sound of footsteps for them had heralded a move to another location, or perhaps an even worse fate.

But their fear quickly turned to joy, and they were taken to get food and water, contact their families and receive medical treatment. They reported being tortured every day, Turner and Hoogendorn said.

Oops. I see. This is going to make headlines. If it does, here’s my guess at what those headlines will be:

U.S. Soldiers wrongly threaten Iraqi civilian with arrest

They did so. They rescued two kidnap victims because they did.

Quran ‘mishandling’ verified at Guantanamo: But prison commander says no evidence supports flushing report

The AP on MSNBC.com:

WASHINGTON – U.S. officials have substantiated five cases in which military guards or interrogators mishandled the Quran of Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo Bay but found “no credible evidence” to confirm a prisoner’s report that a holy book was flushed in a toilet, the prison’s commander said Thursday.

See? Newsweek IS vindicated!

UPDATE: Nyah, nyah, nyahh, nyah, nahhhh, nyah!

UPDATE 3: Unfortunately, this story continues to roll. More here.

Iraqi forces are playing a big part in this operation in Baghdad’s Rusafa neighborhood. Here are some pics from Defend America:

Taking and returning fire.

Preparing to take an alley.

Scanning the rooftops. Looks like a Dragunov SVD.

Taking prisoners.

Mission accomplished.

Check out the whole series at Defend America.

UPDATE: Also, check out this series showing Iraqi armored forces patrolling the same areas a few weeks back in support of Operation Commando Brickyard.

Go check out the whole series.