What good is intelligence if you can’t/won’t use it?
The US says it warned Indian authorities that terrorists from Pakistan would be arriving by water and targeting Mumbai. This sounds like a “good news/bad news” story: it’s reassuring the US knew that much, distressing that India chose to ignore it.
But did they? Since US officials are refusing to say when the information was conveyed and how much detail it involved, it’s difficult to evaluate what really happened.
As with all such warnings, it is only possible ex-post-facto to know which were important ones. But decisions most be made without the benefit of such hindsight.
In this case, the area to be guarded was large. How much care was India already taking to protect its coast? Was the effort stepped up, and did the terrorists succeed despite such measures? How many warnings from Washington does India get on a regular basis? Was this one just in the nature of the hum of the background noise, or was there something that made it stand out? To know whether India was negligent or not, and to what extent, we must know the answers to these questions.
This is one of the major problems with modern-day intelligence. It is not always that we have too little of it—it’s that we have too little of the exceptionally detailed variety, and too much of the very general type. How do we sort out the wheat from the chaff?
Logic indicates that the best information would come from infiltration of terror groups. I am certain this occurs—but how much, and to what effect, we do not know. As President Bush said long ago:
Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success.
The failures, on the other hand, are not secret. That is the nature of this war.
With Mumbai, and also some renewed bombings in Baghdad, I get a sense that the terrorists are ramping up in the wake of the Obama election. I’m afraid Biden’s prediction that is going to come true earlier than even he expected.
Take a look at the Mumbai map. Lots of coast, lots of places for fishing boats to come in. Even if they’d been told, the local Coasties would have had to make miles of shore off limits indefinitely.
This is why I get very impatient with claims that 9/11 represented a failure of intelligence. Yes, if someone had connected all of the right dots, the attacks might have been prevented. But there are more dots than there are people, and authorities can’t investigate every potential threat.
The billion-plus Muslims in the world need to step up and condemn the atrocities committed in the name of Islam. But even if the Islamofascists are defeated or tamed, terrorism is with us to stay. There will always be people who think they have a grievance.
It will be interesting – and maybe it is the one good thing to come of this election – to see the left finally care about defending our country.
Just think – while they were tilting at ‘impeach bush’ windmills, the Mumbai terrorists were preparing to murder as many people as possible, as brutally as possible.
Rose
Wondering, what did Bush do to prevent 9/11 in your country ?
Anyway, the defense secretary being the same, I don’t think Obama would have any radically different policy on defending your country. During the primaries, he was always for a war..though not in Iraq but Afghanistan. So I am pretty sure you wont be dissapointed. You all will be safe in the US.
Also, Not so long ago, I recollect watching Rambo II on cable. and guess what, the American hero fights alongside the Afghan mujahideens and kicks butt of the russians. Seems unthinkable now. Bad guys have turned good good and the good have turned bad..just perspective I guess..uh..
noblesavage,
Someone still watches Stallone and his kooky “Rambo” movies?
Not a very good source for information regarding international relations…
Bush and his administration didn’t prevent 9-11, but they certainly have prevented it from happening again!
Anyway, if memory serves me correctly, The Chosen One described Iraq as the wrong war – but is now going to keep the SecDef who is currently bringing that unpleasantness to a successful conclusion.
Tell me again how many Al Quaeda were exterminated in Iraq? Seems like the flypaper strategy worked, and AQ has suffered a pretty massive defeat that they can’t spin to their advantage.
The Chosen One described how Afghanistan required a Surge – even though he swore such a surge would not work in Iraq and to this day has not admitted that the surge worked in Iraq, but now wants to deploy massive numbers of troops to Iraq (ironically, the very thing Bush was already doing by rotating troops out of Iraq and into Afghanistan).
The Chosen One has assured us that he will hunt down Bin Laden, and threatens to invade Pakistan (one of the nuclear armed countries in the world).
Pakistan, btw, being more or less a soup of different tribes, ethnicities, religious preferences (all extreme, apparently), and rife with rogue elements of police and military that are supportive of terrorists, located in one of the most inhospitable regions on the planet.
Yeah, invading them is gonna turn out well….
India had better start posting more troops on their border!
As for being safe in the US, that illusion died many years ago. You may have heard of it? It happened in September….
I’m with the comment by Richard Aubrey about the coastline. Friends of mine who were around at the time have told me that wartime rationing was meaningless around New Orleans because the Louisiana coastline is so squiggly and there are so many bayous a shallow-draft boat can hang out in that there was no problem getting anything.
Scottie’s comment illustrates just how deep the thinking on the Mumbai raid was. If India puts more troops on the Pakistan border Pakistan will pull troops now at least doing something to keep the Taliban in check and put them on the eastern border which will leave the Afghan border an open playground for the Taliban and maybe al Qaeda. And if they can get something going between India and Pakistan then maybe they can destabilize Pakistan enough to get their hands on it and voila! Nukes!
You all will be safe in the US.
We don’t value safety in return for slavery.
I recollect watching Rambo II on cable. and guess what, the American hero fights alongside the Afghan mujahideens and kicks butt of the russians. Seems unthinkable now. Bad guys have turned good good and the good have turned bad..just perspective I guess..uh..
I’m not going to call you stupid, since ignorance is not the same thing as stupidity, but certainly you must realize that the Northern Alliance and its martyred leader, Massoud, fought against our common enemies in Afghanistan: both Russia and the Taliban. The US, in the form of Carter, gave Massoud and the NOrther Alliance weapons and support to fight Russians and Bush gave the Northern Alliance and Massoud’s tribe and clan even more support and some actual US troops.
Perspective? Perhaps. Or maybe you need to fix your own for certainly you are lacking in the proper knowledge to back up the proper perspective.
Neo
The US says it warned Indian authorities
Although it’s badly for the Indian government or inelegance. But let just go back to the horrific and tragic 9/11 incident we knew that there was warring before that savage attack by terrorists and again inelegance ignored the info.
So sad happening again, but the problem normal people all the time thinking in very peaceful way while terrorists minds so dirty looks to the dark spots to go through and attacks us.
May God bless those died and give us all the help to win this fight which will be long long term.
Let’s agree on this: the United States needs to shore up its security even more. Hindsight, for India, is 20/20. We know that lesson all too well.
Great quote from Bush. There are a lot of men and women working to make the world a safer place, no matter what the leftist illuminati may insinuate about the honor of our armed forces.
Scottie says –
>Someone still watches Stallone and his >kooky “Rambo” movies?
>Not a very good source for information regarding >international relations…
Neither is fox news or Cnn.
Ymarsarkar,
You don’t know what you are talking about. Unless you are Buddha, we are all slaves to something or someone. No ?
Anyway,you can call me stupid or ignorant but some sources do state that Osama, Al-Q, Taliban were all supported and funded by the CIA to fight against the soviets. At least the common enemy then was the Soviets not Taliban or the Pakistani terrorists.
http://middleeast.about.com/od/terrorism/p/070908a.htm
Fighting Soviets in Afghanistan:
In 1984 Osama moved to Pakistan, the hub of the CIA’s secret war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. He formed forming an organization called Makhtab al Khadimat to recruit and train Muslim volunteers from the Arab world and elsewhere willing to fight in Afghanistan. Makhtab al Khadimat would become al-Qaeda. The CIA funded Makhtab al Khadimat in its anti-Soviet phase, even though Osama made it clear even then that he would fight any Western influence anywhere in Islamic lands
http://middleeast.about.com/od/afghanistan/ss/me080914a_5.htm
In the 1980s, the Reagan administration armed and financed Saddam Hussein under the assumption that a totalitarian Iraq was more acceptable than an unbridled, Islamic Iran. The policy backfired in the form of two wars, one of which has yet to end.
I don’t know who started the war or why people are fighting and killing. I think if you think you understand middle eastern politics and culture being in America then I must say you are delusional. I strongly suspect it has to do a lot with economics and greed.
But did they? Since US officials are refusing to say when the information was conveyed and how much detail it involved, it’s difficult to evaluate what really happened.
Healthy skepticism; an obvious that’s not always obvious!
Actionable intelligence is hard to obtain for our CIA. HUMINT is now one of the CIA’s weakest links. In some countries there are no case officers or agents. We rely more on technology and what other intelligence services are willing to share with us. That’s very bad news for us – and for countries we have good relations with, because relying on satellites and the NSA will only get you so far.
The downfall of the CIA was the Church Hearings. The CIA was put on a short leash and tethered to the Senate and House intelligence committees, which are notorious for leaks coming from staff and even members themselves. We have politicians who put their careers or even our enemies’ needs ahead of this nation.
I foresee a day when we will have to have an intelligence organization that is so secret that it is really black. Only a handful, at most, of people in the government will know about it. It will have to be financed through creative means outside of the government.
Wondering, what did Bush do to prevent 9/11 in your country?
Not much, considering that Bush was in office only 8 months before 9/11. A more pertinent question might be: What did Clinton do to prevent 9/11 in the preceding 8 years?
Also, Not so long ago, I recollect watching Rambo II on cable. and guess what, the American hero fights alongside the Afghan mujahideens and kicks butt of the russians. Seems unthinkable now. Bad guys have turned good good and the good have turned bad..just perspective I guess..uh.
I’m wondering who the writer means with “bad guys have turned good.” The Soviets? It would have to be some entity considered “good” these days but the trouble is I can’t think of any actors in the writer’s smug(yet vague) scenario, other than the US, that I would consider “good” at the present time.
And helping ANYONE against the Soviets seems anything but “unthinkable.”
The writer apparently has a problem wrapping his brain around the concept of opposition to the USSR. I certainly have no problem with the strategy of opposing the Soviet’s expansion of power during the years it existed, or with opposition to the present regime in Russia.
Yes, the US helped the Afghans to defeat the Soviets. And how was the US rewarded for this commendable deed? Why, the Taliban regime sheltered bin Laden as he plotted 9/11, that’s how. A little gratitude would have been nice. And then they refused to hand bin Laden over. Too bad for them, but they had a choice and chose the hard way … just a different perspective I guess …
The Left really hates us for funding the guerrilla war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. As far as the Communists, in Russia and here in the West, are concerned, we are getting our just desserts now. They fling al Qaeda’s potency in our faces and laugh at us, thinking they’ve disguised their spite inside of a cute argument.
That’s the agenda behind their hackneyed “blowback” argument. So, whenever you see this kind of argument understand where it is coming from. It is coming right out of the minds of our enemies, even if they are fellow Americans. Their loyalty is really to the subtle, relentless war for the hegemony of cultural Marxism.
Talking about OBL and his criminality, I suggested few time these guys like him and those who work with him like Ayman Al-Thawahiry, or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who killed in Iraq these criminals should hold their families accountable for their action while its laughable that Zarqawi’s Family Members Condemn His Actions, his family regarded him as a martyrIn Zarqawi’s home town, family talk with pride about their heroic cousin for killing innocents Iraqis for no ground at all religiously and others.
Should all his family detained before his running whiled until killed later after killing tens of hundreds of Iraqis.
So as for OBL who still on large hiding some where of for his 2nd in command Ayman Al-Thawahiry from time to time coming with his criminal massages their families (all members and all kids and wife’s) should be detained in prison till they surrender. Spacailly Bin Laden’s son seeks asylum in some western courtiers and like to be Ambassador for Peace .
Some will say its human right issue with doing so, we are more human with them, it’s enough with these criminals and there heroics crimes they should pay the cost for their criminality.
This act worked with Israelis with US in Iraq, and most importantly tyrants’ regimes in ME using it with their appositions and it’s worked for them.
In this case, the area to be guarded was large. How much care was India already taking to protect its coast?
im afraid to say that they dont have much protection. as their leader says, they are one of the most unpoliced countries in the world… so they are not protected at all…
Was the effort stepped up, and did the terrorists succeed despite such measures?
nothing was done.. the poor guys had only plastic helmets and plastic armor for protectoin from rocks… they had wwi wwii era weapons.. forgot the type but they are like our old enfields. they also have little training.
the guys they were up against were well equipped with ak47s, grenades, and very well trained. they were completely outclassed. they also had the heads of the terrorist orgs and police killed before the other operations so the responding forces were in their own turmoil.
To know whether India was negligent or not, and to what extent, we must know the answers to these questions.
even if your questions were answered, you wouldnt be honestly able to say they were negligent. they are not only in touch with americans, they are also in touch with other countries, and they have MANY messages given to them. some are real, some are fake. there is a reason why there is so much paranoia in the smaller states, everyone is playing games and you cant afford to that way.
india is closer to russia than america. remember when russia invaded afghanistan? india supported that campaign.
america is also friends with pakistan, and india has always been worrys about american power. they have had a very long relationship with russia going back to their independence.. it was russia that negotiated the treaty that ended the war between india and pakistan… and russia is indias biggest weapons supplier…
This is one of the major problems with modern-day intelligence. It is not always that we have too little of it–it’s that we have too little of the exceptionally detailed variety, and too much of the very general type. How do we sort out the wheat from the chaff?
we USED to do it with what you start asking after this… with HUMINT… but we gutted our spy agencies. mostly we use imint and sigint now.
if you want to learn more i suggest here (federation of american scientists)
An Overview of the Intelligence Community
http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/int023.html
i will bet you had no idea how complicated and distributed this whole thing is. (and it may ruin movies for you as they dont seem to have read much). unlike the movies though, you literally have hundreds of thousands of people involved in the “great game” all aroun the globe.
ours has a huge number, and somehow all that they do gets boiled up and given as a summary for one person to glean in a short time. our quality has gone down a lot for many reasons.
and there are other agencies that try to feed our agencies garbage and junk… so everyone is operating in a very scary “hall of mirrors” kind of thing… (where only the leaders of the strongest nations are confident because they have the better players, while leaders of small and poor nations are paranoid, as they have angels and devils in their ears and no way to know whom is which)
Logic indicates that the best information would come from infiltration of terror groups. I am certain this occurs–but how much
thats humint and our cia is gutted compared to yesteryears… they had no one… in fact they didnt have people that spoke the languages on staff from what i remember.
The CIA’s lack of HUMINT was partly due to a belief within the U.S. political and judicial apparatus that the CIA had, in the past, run rogue operatives, with terrible consequences. In some respects, that was true and for several decades there had been little oversight of the agency’s handling of agents, particularly those recruited from the criminal world or from organizations with a dubious past.
your talking about why dont we have cowboys there… we got rid of the cowboys, put in suits and analysts, and now have little humint. our escapades were revealed by other agencies, and as with this whole wacky area, used against us politically.
the left especially has been gutting it because so many of their ‘friends’ tend to go on trips and meet others and guess who were monitoring things like that? in the past some of the SDS and weather underground met others in europe and cuba… so it was high priority to remove humint that would provide that info too.
bottom line it took 9/11 to get us to start trying to rebuild it… but we have a radical left that has an agenda of hobbling it any way they can.
do note that in order to get humint this way, we have to work with terrorists… these are family clans and cells and there really is no way to insert a trained person from the US into that system. so you need to turn people in it. which means the same old crappy thing of paying someone who murders and kills and ignoring that becuase the juicy informatoin they trade is worth more.
your queries in the world are small… answers are always larger than queries…
i am trying to keep the artfldgr quotient down… but heck, everyone is discussing the surface news as if the rest of all this isnt there… unless like this post, your actually focused on it.
but, even when things are happening and were not seeing the worst most horrible events, they are still chugging away (as we are), and they are influencing things (as we are), and everyone pretends that they are not a part of things till things get wacky or extreme…
artfldgr,
You are responding to a person who believes deeply that the CIA in its best years was a criminal enterprise. There is no reaching this kind of mind. Notice that you never hear those people bellowing about how dirty the KGB/FSB are? And you won’t. That’s because their loyalty is not to the United States of America but to America’s enemies.
I don’t give people like that any quarter and I expect none from them. I call it as I see it.
When I was a Leftist back in my undergraduate days the I participated in a Communist front organization called CISPES. The leader of our local chapter was in fact an Israeli graduate student who was also a Communist. He hated the CIA and never had anything bad to say about the KGB. Yes, he slipped out sometimes and visited Cuba and Nicaragua.
If you are an enemy of this country, then I think you deserve to be spied on. Ted Kennedy and the Democratic Party were upset with the CIA because the CIA had the goods on John Kerry. Kerry was given a General Discharge from the Navy because of violations of U.S. law and the UCMJ while he was still in uniform. Kerry had trouble getting into law school because of his less than honorable discharge. Later, he had trouble getting accepted to the Bar because of his activities. And because he was under the political patronage of the Kennedy’s, they went to bat for him and put Sen. Church on the CIA like a pit bull.
N E O,
The HowObamaGotelected website updated with a new commissioned poll on how informed McCain voters are.
Astonishing results…
In the 1980s, the Reagan administration armed and financed Saddam Hussein under the assumption that a totalitarian Iraq was more acceptable than an unbridled, Islamic Iran. The policy backfired in the form of two wars, one of which has yet to end.
In the 1980s the Reagan administration opposed Iran in its war with Iraq on the assumption that opposing Iran was better than not opposing Iran, a regime that had taken over the US embassy(an act of war) and held 52 U.S. diplomats hostage for 444 days in 1979. I would have done the same as Reagan and supported Iraq in its war with Iran. Just how this support “backfired” or resulted in “two wars” is not something the writer cares to explain.
Did Saddam invade Kuwait because the US supported Iraq against Iran? I wouldn’t venture to guess just what form Saddam’s rationalizations took but it’s evident that he thought he could get away with invading Kuwait. If so, his subsequent defeat should have dissuaded him from such unrealistic notions. That’s war #1.
Were the Taliban and bin Laden so outraged by a US policy opposing Iran that 9/11 was hatched in retaliation? I suppose bin Laden would look askance at ANY US presence in the Middle East. But should the US let a murderous private individual, representative only of himself and his detestable organization, dictate US foreign policy? War #2.
Did Saddam perform his shenanigans for 13 years after his defeat in Kuwait because the US supported him years before against the Iranians? After Kuwait he should have known better. But how is such poor judgement on his part the fault of the US? Another regime, like the Taliban, that chose the hard way. War #3.
And to which 2 of the 3 wars does the writer refer? We readers can only guess – or does it even matter? These unstated assumptions are a subtle variation of the often openly touted meme: America Creates Tyrants, Terrorists and Other Bad Guys, which is a subset of the main meme: America Is The Cause Of All Bad Things That Happen In The World.
The adequacy of the intelligence the US may or may not have provided the Indian intelligence services is not the primary issue in the Mumbai attack.
Certainly a minimum amount of heightened awareness seems reasonable.
But the issue is the appalling inadequacy of the Indian police.
See: Mumbai photographer: I wish I’d had a gun, not a camera. Armed police would not fire back.
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/article14086308.ece
There were up to 60 policemen in just the train station. Reportedly the terrorists made no attempts to conceal themselves from counter-attack.
As for the enfields and ‘old’ hand revolvers. An awful lot of men died from such WWI & WWII weapons.
At the point blank range they would have been employed in, they would have been more than adequate. Yet the police watched the terrorists REPEATEDLY slaughter the INNOCENT.
Hundreds of people died needlessly because personal safety counts for more in India than the public’s safety.
Seriously, if Mumbai happened in Grand Central Station… can ANYONE imagine New York’s finest doing NOTHING?
Anyone want to bet that the Indian police will escape with at most a hand slap? Where’s the Indian public’s hue and cry?
“we are more human with them, it’s enough with these criminals and there heroics crimes they should pay the cost for their criminality.”
Truth — You make a very good point but the deep division over politics in our country is illustrative of just how difficult it is to walk that line between rightfully protecting ourselves (and others) and committing what some regard as the “violation of human rights.”
I don’t think we could ever hold members of a terrorist’s (or any criminals’) families as an action designed to prevent more terrorism It simply would not work. The one rule we most of us have come to learn and believe in is that one cannot, under any circumstances, negotiate with a terrorist. (That includes taking family members hostage — whether innocent or not and using this as leverage against terrorists.)
As you note, these are a different breed of people. Honor is of no value to them. Keeping their word is a weakness. Only the end goal of killing all the “Infidels” is what counts. Ironically, they have clearly shown that fellow Muslims have no more value to them as we do since they have willingly killed hundreds of thousands in these last few years, unfortunately. The fight is so difficult because of this, and the fact that these enemies value nothing — not even their own lives. Nor do their families! Instead, they have been taught to be proud of their dead relatives who they are told have become honored martyrs. I don’t know how Jihadists regard the value of their family members’ lives, but our Western culture and our consciences — which we believe differentiate us from such evil people — would not permit such action.
At this time, I believe that there are a good many Americans — such as most on this site — that are tired of the judgements of others alluding to criminal actions, violations of human rights, etc. when referring to action taken in the effort to defend our country (and others, even tho’ many of those citizens deny reality, criticize us, and will continue to do so — until the ugly reality presents itself at their homes) Many of us have continued to support our govt. in the fight, while more than half no longer do (when we went to war there was a clear majority in support of it) — and that has split our country idealogically. Long before the credit/economic crisis barged into our lives, our citizenry was clearly split with regard to those who agree we have done that which has been necessary to protect and defend and make headway in destroying as much of the many-headed Terrorism monster as we can, and those who don’t.
I don’t think anyone would deny mistakes have been made in the procedure of the war, but then show me a perfect war that has been waged. There are many liberals among our own citizens whose memories have faded and the horrors of 9/11 have receded (let alone the many other attacks against the U.S. on foreign shores which are frequently not even acknowledged due to ignorance or not having had to live with the consequences “up close and personal” i.e. bombing of the USS Cole, bombing of our soldiers, diplomatic missions, etc.) They live in a false security which they have created — it’s more comfortable… more convenient. They are vocal, often patronizing to those who hold different perspectives and opinions and critical of those of us who truly understood those words neo quoted from Bush in her post today:
“Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success.”
Personally, I remember those words as if they were spoken yesterday, and their meaning, along with witnessing 9/11 changed life for me. I regard the world differently, as I do mankind. We are not all “equal” in that I know now that there are those who have a completely different thought process, and more importantly, no regard for life.
The events in Mumbai have rocked the world, and perhaps shaken a bit of dust from the memories of some. But other events have come and gone (bombings in England, in Spain which caused a voting public to turn their backs on a prime minister who recognized danger….even a big bombing of a hotel in Pakistan that was little more than a month ago…How much attention did it get?) Official will scurry around for awhile, exchanging intelligence and defensive technology. But for how long? There are all too many “noblesavages” out there who neither want to face facts, or G-d Forbid, be faced with giving up some creature comforts to face an enemy they refuse to acknowledge and therefore deny.
By the way, neo-, before I got off on the subject above, I had intended to thank you for reminding people about those words Bush spoke — after 9/11 — a time which seems long ago, doesn’t it He did his best to prepare us, but I suppose it isn’t possible to prepare those who don’t accept a new and very “foreign” (to say the least) concept which really does threaten our existence. Unfortunately, sometimes the only way to learn is the hard way. The spectres of 9/11, of Beslan, and the coordinated attacks now of Mumbai have haunted me since I “got it.” I grew up in Miami Beach surrounded by water, and early on thought how easy it would be to access a city via a tourist boat. So simple. No customs, no gateways.. Coast Guard doesn’t stop you unless something looks suspicious. Find a private dock among the myriad of inlets and you’re good! And every single Christmas since 9/11, I’ve lived on edge with the fear of coordinated attacks at busy malls and shopping centers. I know I have a vivid imagination, but I do wish the images it presents to me were baseless fears instead of the realities we have come to know.
The grossly understaffed and undertrained police in the major cities in India are equipped with WWI rifles while we sell advanced warplanes to Saudi Arabia? The U.N., with member nations as currently organized, still sits in Manhattan? Obama is about to be formally ensconced as POTUS, while it is pretty much a foregone conclusion now that he is in reality a Kenyan national by birth? Illegal aliens are running amuck in America? Complacency is going to kill us, not “terrorism”…
A Way Out of Guanté¡namo
Christopher Boucek
csimon,
With due respect your view, the number of those key hardcore terrorists not thousands if these hardcore terrorists family hold accountable to their terrorist’s son acts, then we have put clear massage to those who have well to be recruited be aware or you will be next.
By doing so this will reduce the blood streams to these terrorists’ organizations.
The Enfield rifle is said to be a first-class killer, even by today’s standards. My question is, is it the everyday weapon of an Indian cop on the beat? Side arms are more practical, unless of course you’re expecting to do more than the usual amount of shooting.
“Anyone want to bet that the Indian police will escape with at most a hand slap? Where’s the Indian public’s hue and cry?”
The Indian public’s hue and cry was already issued before the attack, when the police “unjustly” killed another man who was firing a gun into the air. The barriers were imposed to prevent another such instance of police brutality from occurring, even if it meant that more innocent bystanders might be killed.
What do you think would happen if the police were now condemned for obeying the public will by refusing to fire upon the Mumbai terrorists without waiting for confirmation from the public’s representatives that such force was warranted? Perhaps you think the police would magically develop psychic and/or precognitive powers, like comic book superheroes always do when faced with sufficient adversity or impossible situations.
In the real world, however, people forced to accomplish the impossible can only do one of two things: fail, or run a con game to trick people into thinking they have succeeded when they have actually done nothing. Neither option will stop the terrorists, but the latter can put an end to individual liberties, so think about which would be preferable.
Intelligence, not aggression, is the key to preventing this kind of thing.
After reading the above comments, an observation:
While many have pointed out how extensive the Indian coastline is, and how difficult – if not impossible – it is to defend that coastline against infiltrators, what has not been discussed or pointed out (yet again) is that there is a very simple solution to that problem.
If the government and police cannot observe, protect, and defend the coastline of India, then allow locals to do so themselves.
Of course, that means allowing the common Indian citizen the means to do so (guns), so I’m sure there will be plenty of handwringers to decry such a proposition as “it will only make the situation worse” (as if it can be any worse than having foreign terrorists invading and shooting up your country!).
Such a proposal would not even require high tech weaponry as the aforementioned Lee Enfields are quite adequate to the task of taking out an AK armed terrorist at hundreds of yards while he’s skimming in on a boat – whereas the AK is at a definite disadvantage to the Lee Enfield in such a circumstance.
The Lee Enfield has the added advantage of being useful for other purposes, such as hunting for instance, is an older technology that most (at least in the US) would have no issue with being in private hands, and is robust enough to be easily maintained even under primitive circumstances.
If only we could come up with a name for such groups of locals…hmmm….a *militia*, perhaps? You know, one that is well regulated – meaning able to effectively use it’s weapons.
Beyond that modest suggestion, I find some of the commentators to be quite naive.
Take Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion, for instance.
While I’d have to research it, I believe it has already been quite disproven that Bin Laden ever was funded by the CIA, but it never stops the left from continuing to fling that excrement against the wall again and again in the hopes that it will eventually stick.
The various factions in Afghanistan have never had a history of really getting along with anyone, but there have been specific groups that have remained steadfast allies of the US, even after the Taliban took over. The Northern Alliance comes to mind. Unless I’m mistaken, those are generally the kinds of groups the US backed.
Oh, did I mention that the Lee Enfields were also used by the Afghans to shoot up the Soviet invaders (who were carrying AK47’s and AK74’s)? I understand they were even somewhat effective against low flying helicopters!
The Taliban, on the other hand, were a creation of Pakistani military and intelligence organizations.
You know, the same rogue elements in the Pakistani intelligence agencies that apparently aided the development and implementation of the recent terrorist attacks into India?
grackle has effectively dismantled the argument that the US *supported* Hussein and generated wars, so I’ll only note that he has generally given a pretty good analysis on the matter.
An additional comment regarding human intelligence sources (humint).
While humint was deplorable during the early years – and helped contribute to 9-11 – I would suggest that after 8 years of Bush that situation has been greatly relieved now, albeit very quietly, and that even the Democrats in congress are not going to dismantle that capability at this stage regardless of any screeching from the handwringers.
The reason I say that humint has been restored at least partially, is because we have not had another 9-11 occur within the US.
There’s a reason that’s the case….
Fredhjr,
most people dont understand what real espionage is. they do not realize that there is no way to even stay in the game and survive unless your willing to meet toe to toe.
I do understand that leftists love the kgb, and hate the CIA, but they have VERY little understanding how both are structured and how both work. Other than CIA is a potential enemy in revealing what games they are playing in foreign circles, and the FBI is there enemy in internal circles. so there is a lot of focus on at least these two and making them even a little less effective.
orgs like the kgb and cia were originally temporary… the OSI, the precursor to the cia was disbanded at the end of wwii, but withing a very short time that was halted and the cia was created because the socialists never stopped being at war with the capitalists… and once the habit was set, there was no way anyone could afford not to play.
what the left cant do is avoid being caught in stings when these two agencies are investigating… its just a matter of time before someone working an angle on some foreign entity will link up information. and in fact a lot of that IS generated, but rarely acted upon… do you prosecute, or do you leave them alone, neutralize them, and let them be? the latter turns out is how they do it… pay them to write papers… give them jobs… etc.
its just frustrating that people dont ALWAYS use whole cloth to assess things… ESPECIALLY when the subject is heavily related to those agencies.
the CIA never actually reached the depravity of the KGB. not even by a long shot… but what they DID do was pose a danger to subversives, terrorists, political terrorists (activists), etc…
to compare the two agencies is a farce… CIA may waterboard… but the kgb tortures and games make that look like watersking for fun…
the US never had a doctrine of unlimited and amoral pragmatism… however, on some level, you have to fight fire with some fire…
and its even harder when the other side continues to work as they did before, while people pretend they dont in an effort to force an impossible outcome. their realization and complicity in the future. they want it all, and nothing less will satisfy… it matters not if their doctrine is one of sadistic utopia, it grants power, and thats all that really matters in their game.
wall street journal has an article on how tech savvy the terrorsits were… (as i detailed and couldnt do in a shorter piece)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/02/AR2008120203519.html?hpid=topnews
The heavily armed attackers who set out for Mumbai by sea last week navigated with Global Positioning System equipment, according to Indian investigators and police. They carried BlackBerrys, CDs holding high-resolution satellite images like those used for Google Earth maps, and multiple cellphones with switchable SIM cards that would be hard to track. They spoke by satellite telephone. And as television channels broadcast live coverage of the young men carrying out the terrorist attack, TV sets were turned on in the hotel rooms occupied by the gunmen, eyewitnesses recalled.
they didnt use military, since military would give who sourced this… who planned it and MOST IMPORTANT, the large number of others who supported this externally without revealing they were doing so.
During the attacks, an organization calling itself Deccan Mujaheddin asserted responsibility in an e-mail to news outlets that was traced to a computer server in Moscow, said Praveen Swami, a terrorism expert and media commentator. The message, it was later discovered, originated in Lahore, Pakistan. Investigators have said the e-mail was produced using Urdu-language voice-recognition software to “anonymatize” regional spellings and accents so police would be unable to identify their ethnic or geographic origins.
this shows a level of planning that usually only large states have the capability of… (or some very talented terrorists).
each component replaces with civilian equpment the same thing that a particular military piece would do… so instead of radios that frequency hop, they used cell phones… instead of military gps, they used civilan, since its good enough… they used a conveniently set up remailer in a uncooperative state (well uncooperative to us, but to them helpful). they use voice generating software to prevent the kind of sophisticated analysis that the common people and even terrorists are not that savvy at realizing
And a lot of the kind of stuff that i have detailed. how articles are analysed, borders, photo croppings, background audio, geology, the large agencies like the kgb and cia, and such go to an incredible extreme that they often generate tons of false information that has no intent.
oh… one thing to set straight… this kind of action really would not be kgb… thsi action would technically be GRU… a separate organization with its own complete spy network, and everything else… they are just as nasty, but much less talked about…
the reason the terrorists had punk style hair, is thats what you get whn you have a crew cut, and you start working on your mission about 2 months before it happens… which means that they were already very well trained (like spetnaz) and that they were ready to be tuned to particular missions.
their manors show that they have killed before and had very little to adapt to in situe (unlike americans who are inexperienced in real combat).
i believe the lone survivor is a plant… he is the odd ball…. he is the one who is not as well trained, and makes the ethic case of proof… he is not what the others are or rather were.
most havent noticed that unlike other incidents there is less information this time… how long before we had face pictures of every terrorist when they attacked the US? two of them had british papers, where are the images from that?
this is dirty… or rather more dirty than what it appears to be… it has marks all over it… and its ambiguous enough that you can tell others are playing games with information.
fred… nothing is going to change the peoples minds that cia is a criminal org… they dont understand that the states monopoly on deadly force can excuse any act in its defense… and so they are not criminal, they are sanctioned… and unlike many other similar organizaions, they are much more limited in the choices of action that they can take… whether that is believed or not.
thansk for the comment 🙂
The Lee Enfield fires the Brit .303. Until the Sixties, most armies had armed their Infantry with one or another weapon firing roughly equivalent ammo. German 8mm, US 30.06, Japanese 7.7mmm, Russian 7.65mm. The same ammo was used in light and medium machine guns, and frequently in aircraft machine guns.
NATO, to improve interoperability, designed the 7.62mm for all its members, which was equivalent.
There is no choice for which to be shot with or at. All same same. Armies now have short rounds such as our M16 5.56mm for riflemen and squad automatics. Medium machine guns, designated marksmen, and some vehicle weapons still use the heavier 7.62mm in their various weapons.
Point of all this is that the Lee Enfield firing the .303 like all its equivalent cousins is a very effective weapon. It has two shortcomings. It is heavy, about ten pounds, and it is a bolt action weapon, which reduces its rate of fire. It is, however, more accurate and more effective when hitting than the lighter more modern weapons, so a high rate of fire is less necessary. If you hit the guy the first time, you don’t have to shoot at him again.
So, yes, arming the Indian militia with the venerable Lee Enfield would be a good idea. Ammo is cheap, the weapons already exist and won’t come from some army’s depots.
Having said the foregoing, the easy part, the problem will be cultural. Are Indians by nature prone to buck fever? It’s hard to pull on another human. And will society allow power to be devolved downward?
An armed man is a citizen, not a subject. Some governments and ruling elites are not comfortable with the former.
An armed society can actually be a more polite and law-abiding one. There is ample evidence of this. Of course, there are enclaves where human animals/cockroaches in the throes of a criminal/ghetto culture, who get their weapons ON THE BLACK MARKET, are counterexamples of a civil society.
Where I live a LOT of the men (and some women) own firearms. Very, very low crime incidence. Where crime does happen it tends to be in the towns and cities, where all the Devil’s denizens gather for the anonymity of their nefarious activities.
Noblesavage
Here is what you don’t get…
Its not about finding information that confirms your bias, it’s about finding information that is CONFIRMED to be TRUE. Previously I have listed out several things that everyone knows is true, but not. Like the soviet active measure that HIV was invented in American bio labs. Do YOU know that was an active measure they ADMITTED to?
Now, please tell me your thinking as to why your sources information is valid, and other less common information is invalid, when the method of the big lie is to keep distributing invalid information till everyone, like you, believes THAT’S the information and adapts the mentality of a world in which that information is true.
What you don’t have, and most leftists don’t have, or care, is enough information to start to vette your sources. You can watch tons of crap documentaries trying to raise the amazing ability of nostrodamus because he predicted hilter and that hilter would lose. Did YOU know that that was an American disinformation campaign from WWII against Hitler, who was superstitious? Psyops.
First of all. a main stream media source will rarely if ever include the information about the agencies, other than promoting things confirming left bias, which promotes self hate and the removal of defenses.
One cant get the whole picture unless one understands the different modes of tactics and strategies that each side employs, and what, if any, limitations they have.
The CIA laden story is not so simple… because laden was burning the candle at both ends, and that in order to understand the whole story, you have to go back to Hitler and the mullahs, and his rewriting of the Koran to promote more intergroup hatred. From their you have to study the moves of agencies like the STB (Czech), and the Romanian Secret services, who often did the dirty work for the KGB and GRU. The Romanian services took over where Hitler left off, and promoted terrorism and basically destabilization so as to have a constant buyer of weapons, and a higher sale price for natural resources while impacting your neighbors.
So you cant just start in the middle and say… this is the player who is responsible, you have to actually know what BOTH players were doing, and I will bet you know a lot of negative things about the CIA, believe NSA does things they don’t, and have absolutely no idea what KGB and GRU have actually done in the world, and each groups techniques and source.
How about hearing something from a defector who left the soviets and was validated?
I would call your attention to ion pacepa, he was a spy who worked in the Romanian services, and who divulged an awful lot about how the soviets were working things.
I don’t want to do another 6 page post… and I am already too long… so I will only touch on one thing… Hussien
In the 1980s, the Reagan administration armed and financed Saddam Hussein under the assumption that a totalitarian Iraq was more acceptable than an unbridled, Islamic Iran. The policy backfired in the form of two wars, one of which has yet to end.
Really? Well, how about if I tell you that the story goes back farther… go back to 1970s… and “Sarinder”
In the early 1970s, the Kremlin established a “socialist division of labor” for persuading the governments of Iraq and Libya to join the terrorist war against the US. KGB chairman Yury Andropov (who would later become the leader of the Soviet Union), told me that either of those two countries could inflict more damage on the Americans than could the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof group and all other terrorist organizations taken together. The governments of those Arab countries, Andropov explained, not only had inexhaustible financial resources (read: oil), but they also had huge intelligence services that were being run by “our razvedka advisers” and could extend their tentacles to every corner of the earth. There was one major danger, though: by raising terrorism to the state level we risked American reprisal. Washington would never dispatch its airplanes and rockets to exterminate the Baader-Meinhof, but it might well deploy them to destroy a terrorist state. We therefore were also tasked to provide those countries secretly with weapons of mass destruction, because Andropov concluded that the Yankees would never attack a country that could retaliate with such deadly weapons.
Bet you know NOTHING of this…
There is HUGE amounts of information around this… but almost none of it gets to the fore of the mainstream media.
They realized that they could create stateless organizations in which it was impossible to actually trace back through the cells who was pulling the strings.
It made it easy to do things that you couldn’t do otherwise, and then through disinformation campaigns and active measures pin the rap on any number of others and let them argue till doomsday over wrong information.
What I DO find interesting is that when you know this other information, the actions of the state department make a lot more sense than they do when you don’t have a iota of knowledge of it.
You probably remember but don’t know a lot about the PLO, the precursors to the organizations that your talking about…
The PLO was dreamt up by the KGB, which had a penchant for “liberation” organizations. There was the National Liberation Army of Bolivia, created by the KGB in 1964 with help from Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Then there was the National Liberation Army of Colombia, created by the KGB in 1965 with help from Fidel Castro, which was soon deeply involved in kidnappings, hijackings, bombings and guerrilla warfare. In later years the KGB also created the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which carried out numerous bombing attacks on the “Palestinian territories” occupied by Israel, and the “Secret Army for Liberation of Armenia,” created by the KGB in 1975, which organized numerous bombing attacks against US airline offices in Western Europe.
In 1964 the first PLO Council, consisting of 422 Palestinian representatives handpicked by the KGB, approved the Palestinian National Charteré³a document that had been drafted in Moscow. The Palestinian National Covenant and the Palestinian Constitution were also born in Moscow, with the help of Ahmed Shuqairy, a KGB influence agent who became the first PLO chairman.
Bet you didn’t know these back links… but I will tell you… our agencies know, and our leaders know… and they do what Nixon said… they treat us like the small child in the family and tell us little of what would scare the bejesus out of us (and has been normal operation for longer than most people have been alive).
This new PLO was headed by a Soviet-style Executive Committee made up of 15 members who, like their comrades in Moscow, also headed departments. As in Moscowé³and Bucharesté³the chairman of the Executive Committee became the general commander of the armed forces as well. The new PLO also had a General Assembly, which was the Soviet-inspired name given to all East European parliaments after World War II.
Based on another “socialist division of labor,” the Romanian espionage service (DIE) was responsible for providing the PLO with logistical support. Except for the arms, which were supplied by the KGB and the East German Stasi, everything else came from Bucharest. Even the PLO uniforms and the PLO stationery were manufactured in Romania free of charge, as a “comradely help.” During those years, two Romanian cargo planes filled with goodies for the PLO landed in Beirut every week, and were unloaded by Arafat’s men.
I am already way too long…and there is literally a library of information that is commonly not known, and is NOT from the tin hat crowd.
Since I don’t have space, and I piss people off with too much info.. fast forward to hear what pacepa says
Just know that there is a whole other area of information that has a clear line of history of who was doing what where… this is different than the publics leftist revisioned (Stalinist) histories.
Pacepa on Islamic terrorism:
September 11, 2001 was directly rooted in a joint Soviet/Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) operation conceived in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day Arab-Israeli War. The object of this joint operation was to repair Moscow’s prestige by turning the Islamic world against Israel and by creating a rabid and violent hatred for its main supporter, the United States. The strategy was to portray the US, this land of freedom, as a Nazi-style “imperial-Zionist country” financed by Jewish money and run by a rapacious “Council of the Elders of Zion” (the Kremlin’s epithet for the US Congress), the aim of which was allegedly to transform the rest of the world into a Jewish fiefdom. In other words, the heart of the joint plan was to convert the historical Arab and Islamic hatred of the Jews into a new hatred of the United States. We threw many millions of dollars at this gigantic task, which involved whole armies of intelligence officers.
In the late 1960s, a new element was added to the Soviet/PLO war against Israel and American imperial-Zionism: international terrorism. Before 1969 came to an end, the KGB’s Thirteenth Department-known in our intelligence jargon as the Department for Wet Affairs, wet being a euphemism for bloody-invented airplane hijacking. The KGB constantly lectured at us that no one within the
American/Zionist sphere of influence should feel safe anymore. The hijacked airplane became an instrument of Soviet foreign policy-and eventually the weapon of choice for September 11, 2001.
During those years of intensive airplane hijackings, I became amazed at the almost identical pride both Arafat and KGB General Sakharovsky exhibited over their prowess as terrorists. “I invented the hijacking of [passenger] airplanes,” Arafat bragged to me in the early 1970s, when I first met him. A few months later I met with Sakharovsky at his Lubyanka office. He pointed to the red flags pinned onto a world map hanging on his wall. “Look at that,” he said. Each flag represented a plane that had been downed. “Airplane hijacking is my own invention,” he boasted.
Sakharovskyés subordinates are now reigning in the Kremlin. Until they fully disclose their involvement in creating anti-American terrorism and condemn Arafatés terrorism, there is no reason to believe they have changed.
That’s it… there is so much more… and whats interesting is that when you grab a thread of it… you can trace even more and it all knits together…
No need to invoke, as you did, these ephermeral meaningless phrases… like greed… nothing is greedier than wanting to own the whole world, and that’s what communisms goal has ALWAYS been from its inception up to now…
Darn… way too long… sigh…
The Enfield rifle is said to be a first-class killer, even by today’s standards.
i am not picking a person up.. i was informing about the kind of assumetry that was going on.
its VERY easy for armchair guys here to say that the enfield was deadly.. sure it was… but ask any wwii guy if he wanted to go up against the MG42, and you will get a hell no… but they did anyway..
i looked it up so that we can get it straight since everyone is going to say that troops who cant afford to practice because ammunition is too expensive, have to go up against a guy with a new ak-100 or maybe a 103.
ok.. they were using british .303 rifles…
this rifle was first developed in the 1880s as a black powder rifle… it was standard british commonwealth military cartridge from 1889 to 1950…
Martini-Enfield rifles were mostly conversions of the Zulu War era .450/577 Martini-Henry, rechambered to the .303 British calibre, although a number were newly manufactured. Early Martini-Henry conversions, began in 1889, using Metford rifled barrels (Martini-Metford rifles), which were more than suitable for the first black powder .303 cartridges, but they wore out very quickly when fired with the more powerful smokeless ammunition introduced in 1895, so that year the Enfield rifled barrel was introduced, which was suitable for smokeless ammunition. The Martini-Enfield was in service from 1895-1918 (Lawrence of Arabia’s Arab Irregulars were known to have used them during the Arab Revolt of 1916-1918), and it remained a reserve arm in places like India and New Zealand well into World War II.
in case you dont know… these are not repeating rifles… you had to use the bolt action…
but remember, a WELL TRAINED person with such can do very well… lee harvy oswald and the guy on the texas am tower did very well… but they were both trained by the US military.
no one would argue that a skilled person from a distance and not being seen can pick off one of these guys…
but i will say that its foolish and silly to start ranting as to police quality in a third world country where overpopulation starvation and such are not strangers.
the operation killed the heads of the antiterrorist org, the head of police, and other leaders BEFORE they went into the crapper… the average police officer in india doe snot have the bad as asswipes that america does, and so they have very few police…
about 100 per 100,000 people while the west has on average 300-500 per 100,000 and special divisions with special training…
it took 8 hours for their special groups to get to the area.
what i was hoping is that rather than people start blaming the poor blokes… they would maybe appreciate how the wealth of america creates a safe sitution that is incomparable to most other places of the world..
that our current politics is moving us towards THEIR systems, not maintaining and pushing forwards our systems.
the lefts seem to only want to complain and whine.
the police should have died trying to save others lives… for how much? less than $100 a month in salary? with poor bolt action rifles that have to be loaded each shot? 5 shots a minute against 600 rounds a minute
what they dont see is a reason to be thankful that the conservatives in the US have preserved such a wonderful police force… (which people who ahve traveled the world would know is so great… most other places the police are only a slight better thing than a corrupt thug – as is most other postal agencies too).
nope… no appreciation for how go they have it that they are tearing down… just complainst that the poor people arent rich enough to have the same defense as the rich people.
its kind of like marie antoinettes let em eat cake kind of ignroance.
art.
The German squad in WW II had an MG42. Also about seven guys armed with bolt-action Mauser 8mm rifles. Same rounds.
Not as good as the Garand, but about as good as the Enfield of WW II era, of which I have one.
Artfldgr,
There are so many inaccuracies in your statements that I think I’m just going to hit the highpoints. There’s just too much to waste time refuting each and every item, but after this anyone determining the accuracy of the statements you’re making should be able to come to a decent conclusion.
BTW, my comments are from personally owning and shooting several of these weapons over the years, plus quite a bit of informal personal research on the matter since I have such an interest in these weapons and their history as a collector.
First of all, you are wrong – the .303 Lee Enfield is in fact, a “repeater” — just as the old lever action Winchester Repeating rifles and old Spencers (of Civil War era) were “repeaters”. You load them, keep working the action, and keep firing until you are out of ammo and have to reload again.
Second, it appears you were confusing the terms “repeater”, “automatic”, and “semi-automatic”. A repeater is one you fire, then work the action manually to eject the spent shell casing and insert a new one by virtue of working a lever or bolt. A semi-automatic fires once each time you pull the trigger. A full automatic (ie, machine gun) fires continuously until you release the trigger.
Third, you seem to be combining notes you’ve copied from two sources. One is on the .303 Caliber cartridge, and the other is on the Lee Enfield itself. You kinda got some of it right, but it was convoluted as to how you presented the information.
Allow me to clarify it for you (and anyone else interested).
While true that this caliber was introduced during the black powder era, it’s not an unusual circumstance in cartridge development. There are plenty of calibers that were introduced during this same time frame that likewise used black powder originally, but have long ago transitioned to modern smokeless powder.
The 7x57mm Mauser was developed earlier than the .303 and the US 30.06 was developed not too long after — and all 3 calibers are still widely used throughout the world and are highly effective ammo. The inference to black powder was obviously an attempt to play down the effectiveness of the ammo.
Let me put it this way, why would the British army have kept an obsolete caliber in front line service for so long? The answer, just as obviously, is they didn’t as it was not obsolete.
The only reason the British replaced the .303 was due to NATO standardization. Had it not been for that the British would have probably kept it in service even longer.
The rifle itself is not something designed in the 1880’s, but rather was a continuous development process over the decades. The rifle produced in the 1950’s for the British army was not the same rifle that was produced in WWI, nor the Lee Metford that started the original rifle design in the first place.
It’s also interesting that India, of all places, actually produced .308 caliber versions of the Lee Enfield into the 1960’s, and depending on sources may have produced some from spare parts as late as the early 1970’s!
The .308, btw, is still in service in NATO.
Fourth, the Lee Enfield has a 10 round magazine. That’s 10 rounds at the fingertips — not 5 rounds as you stated, with provision for reloading via stripper clips. Stripper clips are simply sheet metal stampings preloaded with ammo. You stick it into a bridge in the top of the receiver and shove the cartridges down into the weapon. When you work the bolt forward the stripper clip falls off and the first round is chambered.
Fifth, it was not “5 rounds per minute” as you claim, but more like a couple of dozen aimed shots per minute that an experienced soldier could effectively put on target. If you’re not aiming, and just trying to keep the enemy’s head down while your buddies flank him, then you can get off even more rounds per minute than that.
It’s far faster than you realize to do this operation — and even a relatively inexperienced and untrained soldier can be capable of decent accuracy using this rifle.
Sixth, the Lee Enfield is one of the fastest bolt actions ever designed. It has only about a 60 degree lift vs. most others having a 90 degree lift on the bolt handle. Germans in WWI actually thought they were facing machine gun nests when it was just British soldiers accurately firing their bolt action rifles in mass and hitting what they were shooting at.
While it’s true that British soldiers would not want to go up against a German 8mm MG42 in WWII, it’s also true that neither did the US soldiers who were carrying full automatic Thompson submachine guns, full automatic 30.06 BAR rifles, and semi-automatic 30.06 M-1 Garands.
Despite this obvious point, they still did it and did it successfully.
I for one have yet to accuse the Indian authorities on the scene of cowardice, but I do insist on continuing to believe until shown otherwise that the failure was one of training — the police and military were waiting for someone to direct them as to what to do because that is what they were conditioned to do.
They lacked personal initiative in the face of unforeseen circumstances.
Oh, and I am jealous of Richard Aubrey for having the Mauser while I have yet to procure one for my collection (dammit!).
If you need to know more about this particular subject, feel free to ask rather than copy and paste from god knows where…
History class dismissed.
Scottie,
read up at the top… i said ENFIELD LIKE as i didnt know the designation… then after everyone picked up on enfield and ASSUMED lee enfield, while there were versions before that.
the repeater and other terminology i got from a gun history site and cross checked with a few others to get the right .303 gun…
First of all, you are wrong – the .303 Lee Enfield is in fact, a “repeater” — just as the old lever action Winchester Repeating rifles and old Spencers (of Civil War era) were “repeaters”. You load them, keep working the action, and keep firing until you are out of ammo and have to reload again.
go up… read carefully, and read Martini-Enfield NOT lee enfield… right after that paragraph i said that the MARTINI-ENFEILD was NOT a repeater. it was a BOLT ACTION..
Third, you seem to be combining notes you’ve copied from two sources. One is on the .303 Caliber cartridge, and the other is on the Lee Enfield itself. You kinda got some of it right, but it was convoluted as to how you presented the information.
this is totally correct.. i didnt have much time… so i started with the caliber… then tracked down the date of the guns… and then was trying to correct my flippant use of lee in my statment “like”… since at that time, i didnt know it was the earlier kind…
100% valid that i was too quick, and was trying not to plagerize…
the whole point was that it was not LEE enfields..
also… i was not arguing that it wasnt a good rifle… it is… i was arguing that in the hands of someone not trained to use it to its fullest, its not that great… after all, the most expensive tool sucks inthe hands of someont that doesnt know how to use it… and i did point out that similar rifles in the hands of some historically nefarious people hacve done some amazing things.
however, poor low educated police officers, with old weapons up against an vastly asymetrical foe, who has killed before (a difference in training between certain coutnries), was not a good thing unless the police officer could be shooting from a distance and scoot.
not 5 rounds as you stated
i never stated how many rounds… it might have been in the cut and paste… but i NEVER talked number of rounds.. and i know what stripper clips are… i have no idea how many are in different ones or what each rifle uses, nor would claim so.
Fifth, it was not “5 rounds per minute” as you claim, but more like a couple of dozen aimed shots per minute that an experienced soldier could effectively put on target.
and how many rounds can a person issued a rifle but not allowed to practice or actually fire it get?
the police in india are not trained that way… so we are talking about a person with not enough ammo since they cant be trusted, and poor shooting ability…
they are not going to squeeze off a couple of dozen shots while being shot at by an ak47… they are going to get one, maybe two off, and then they are gokng to have to scoot, or prey they dont supress and move in..
so again… i DID give that speed credit in referncing the texas am massacre, and the assasination of kenedy… some fast shooting there.
i will say that you and i know how to supress and let someone else work it… but they dont… they are not trained that way… and for a good reason..
in a country in which someting like this can happen, a small well trained police force can take over what? you cant make the police strong enough to fight such, and not make them strong enough to do other things if there isnt the rest of the infrastructure to control the forces.
It’s far faster than you realize to do this operation — and even a relatively inexperienced and untrained soldier can be capable of decent accuracy using this rifle.
soldiers get different training than police… one is trained to kill, the other is trained to attempt not to kill.. which is why cops are vulnerable to supress and move in.. (like the california bankrobbery with the auto weapons and body armor).
as far as your information… its dead on… 100% accurate and much better stated than mine…
EXCELLENT!!!!
I for one have yet to accuse the Indian authorities on the scene of cowardice, but I do insist on continuing to believe until shown otherwise that the failure was one of training — the police and military were waiting for someone to direct them as to what to do because that is what they were conditioned to do.
i agree 100%… and with their leaders killed before the other fights, they had no one to direct them… they had insufficient body armor… insufficient weapons for the untrained (my case is that an low trained officer with an ak47 would do better than a low trained officer on a single shooter… but that a well trained person on a single shooter can easily beat a machine gun IF they can work the conditions).
they had no idea what to do… and unlike american boys playing cops and robbers and other nastier games, they ahve no natural proclivity to acting in a pack and being effective… its just a different cultural mindset that prepares them differently… not bad, not good in this case…
If you need to know more about this particular subject, feel free to ask rather than copy and paste from god knows where…
I wouild love to!!! this is not my area of specialty at all… i admit that… i know enough that if i was in mumbai, i would have taken the rifle from a cop… then probably died doing somthign… i have been shot at before… though never shot at someone…
i am a very good shot… have shot lots of different rifles… but that says i can aim… i can fire.. it does not mean that i know the details of the weapons and their detailed history otehr than over views… and i dont claim to… i hope that i made that clear in my response to you.
now for my question if you can undulge me…
off topic, but at least its a quck answer…
the football guy that shot himself in the leg..
i cant help think that the idiot not only had chambered a round by pulling the slide (if semi, i dont think it was a revolver, do you know?)… but left the hammer back…
i know that some old revolvers could go off when dropped, and then they created a double clutch (or something like that)… and a few newer autos could go off if cocked and dropped…
but for the life of me i cant imagine him pulling the trigger hard enjough to fire the weapon if the weapon wasnt already cocked… (given his size you would think that he could fire from a trigger uncocked for the first shot).
and i assume that when the hammer is cocked, the safety doesnt work… (or does it now in some models).
THANKS SO MUCH FOR CORRECTING AND ASSISTING MY POST….
ITS HONESTLY AND GREATLY WELCOMED AND APPRECIATED!!!
i
artfldgr,
I have read a lot about Gen. Pacepa’s career and work when he was in Romania.
The thing that actually makes the Soviet-Russian operations that enable terrorism work so well… is our political and legal culture. How so? Well, you know about the concept of “plausible deniability?” It works because our political culture enables it. Our politicians tend to be overwhelmingly from the legal profession. This is especially true of Democrats. When Democrats are in power, they tend to bring to foreign affairs the same mentality that they bring to domestic disruption: they think like cops and DA’s. They want HARD proof of everything that would pass the evidentiary bar. The Soviets-Russians know this, which is why they designed their Third World programs and terrorist organizations so that “plausible deniability” worked in their favor. This is how terrorism works against the West.
Nothing has changed since the Cold War.
The American Left works hand in glove with dezinformatzia from Moscow. You and I know this. And some on the Left know this, but the majority of them are useful idiots who think they are being liberal patriots.
on another note…
iranian media covering russian venezuelan naval exercises in carribean sea, are reverred to as SOVIET warships…
“Tehran’s Press TV stated that “Russian television on Tuesday showed images of a Venezuelan-operated Sukhoi fighter jet swooping low over Soviet warships in a simulated air attack.”
the Moscow Times contains the same sentence quoted from the Press TV article above, although reference is made to “Russian” rather than “Soviet” warships.
on anothe note…
“It is increasingly obvious that socialism is not a product of propaganda, but a natural and unavoidable phase of development,” boasted Zyuganov, a hard-core Stalinist, “The collapse of the speculative financial market is a turning point.”
CPRF is not what it appears to be in the open…
[check the history of the names, and have solid connections to the old regime… and tend to operated from behind the scenes. how many people get to attempt a coupe and then get to remain a major player of a party in that state? oleg shenin]
add to this the mumbai thing..
AND add to it the fact that russia attaced US computers and broke into them…
on nov 7th 150,000 took to the streets to celebrate the bolshivik revolution… of reds marched from Pushkin Square to Teatralnaya Ploshchad
and now… india and pakasitan are moving closer to a war… or rather are trying to drag the bigger states into the conflict and escalate it.
india wants ibrahim… he masterminded the bombings in mumbai in 93 that claimed 250 lives…
Times of India: “It’s war”
“This nation is under attack. The scale, intensity and level of orchestration of terror attacks in Mumbai put one thing beyond doubt: India is effectively at war and it has deadly enemies in its midst.”
pentagon announced that 20,000 federal troops will be put around the US by 2011… (posse comitatus? see Insurrection Act changes)
so the big question is…
was it a false flag operation to get two nuclear powers with less self control and more paranoia squaring off?
all i ask…
cui buono?
fred… if your ever in ny area… i will buy ya a beer if ya drink… something else if not..
seems like we spent a lot of time reading a lot of the same material, and casting out the same bad tin hat things..
read the mitroken and golitsyn stuff? others?
there is a lot of good informatino out there… but i bet you can confirm.. that if you dont know your history, at least in a detailed over view… you will find it hard wading through angletons house of mirrors.
the world right now is so scary… and most are oblivious to the seriousness ofit.
or as i put in another post… they sem to be disconnected from reality… that the most srious nasty things arent real, and only the product of movie entertainment (which is worse than desensitization).. that they learn to tell wahts fake not by facts, but by a schema that says if its really evil, then no onw really does that… so it must be fake…
meanwhile… the stuff that these people in these political states do makes the SAW series into a disney movie..
in fact, the horros are so bad… that besides hiding the history… some havent done the history as the images are too hard to take!!!!!!!
if you think the images you commonly see are bad.. you should see whats in the archive that they dont use… (a documentarist acquantance was telling me while explaining why its not the history channel but the hitler channel)
i tell someone that I know personally a person who saw a family member get some of the treatment…
they cut the belly, and then nailed the intestines to a tree, then forced the person to walk arond the tree to unravel their insides slowly as they walked around
and we complain about waterboarding…
Artfldgr,
Regarding the last post, bolt actions are still repeaters.
Anyway, moving on…lol.
OK, it took a bit of digging but the gun that Plaxico Burress the football player shot himself with was a Glock .40 caliber pistol that he had apparently just shoved into his pants pocket as he entered a club.
This explains a lot.
The glock does not use a regular safety. It’s safety is built into the trigger itself, and is visible as a small protrusion on the trigger that sort of looks like a mini-trigger at a slightly different angle.
That is the ONLY safety on the weapon.
The very act of pulling the trigger actuates the firearm, so anything that touches that trigger can set it off, unlike the Colt 1911 for instance that has both a manual safety on the left side in addition to a grip safety – both of which have to be actuated before the weapon will fire.
Ask any instructor at any concealed carry course and he will tell you this is probably the second dumbest way to carry a weapon – the dumbest being the idiot who shoves a loaded weapon into the front of his pants with the muzzle pointing at his gonads.
Yes, people have blown off their gonads doing this.
So, Plaxico shoves this weapon into his pocket and walks around with it. At some point prior to entering the club he obviously worked the slide of the weapon (it’s a semi-automatic), so there was a round in the chamber.
All it took was one touch to the trigger for the gun to go off – it could have been his car keys, spare change rattling around in his pocket, cigarette lighter, whatever. It doesn’t matter – he was carrying it in a very unsafe manner and obviously had not had any proper training in how to carry the weapon.
The best way to concealed carry is with a proper holster!
As such, he ended up at the hospital with a bullet wound in his leg. Refer to the gonad reference and you could say he was actually lucky!
Regarding weapons going off if you drop them, it can happen with certain weapons and certain other weapons are designed such that this is almost impossible.
Toss in the various safety designs and different iterations of the same design and it gets complicated enough that you can’t give a hard and fast answer to how a particular weapon will do if you drop it – so best policy is don’t.
For instance, old Smith & Wesson “Victory” model revolvers of WWII were redesigned slightly after one weapon went off and killed a sailor after it was dropped. All subsequent revolvers were reengineered to eliminate this possibility.
The Colt 1911 I referenced earlier has a similar issue in that older designs (and their clones) may be capable of going off even with the safeties engaged if you drop them butt first hard enough.
The reason is the firing pin is just moving back and forth in a hole on a spring and inertia can cause the firing pin to move enough to impact a primer on a chambered live round, thereby firing it. Modern Colts are designed to prevent this possibility.
Any other questions feel free to ask!
Sorry if I kicked off a side discussion of the merits of the Enfield, although it would be an interesting discussion whether the savages like these are instinctively attracted to machine guns because they make loud noises and shoot bolts of fire, qualities perhaps less valued by disciplined troops.
The point of my post was to inquire whether Indian cops routinely carry rifles. If not, then wouldn’t that imply they were using the intelligence?
Scottie,
Regarding the last post, bolt actions are still repeaters.
thanks!!! that i didnt know… 🙂
and thanks so much for the answer…
that was a great answer..
though one tiny thing i am not clear of… i guess since you werent explicit.
we both agree that he chambered a round by pulling the slide…
however, when i used a browning, we released the hammer slowly letting it back into place. (dont know what htis is called, i just know how do do it).
its this little step that bothers me…
that when he chambered, it was cocked, and so he didnt release the hammer to make it safe(r).
if that was the case, then wouldnt it take a lot more pressure like on the browning? (i know there is a term for this).
last time i shot was about 4 years ago… i was up at the old woolworth lodge place on long island with a freind that was a competition shooter…
they actually spent as much as a home on their guns. forgot the name… but they were some of the sweetest guns i ever saw… mechanisms that broke out and were built so they wouldnt loosten. and all other nice things.
that was the first time i shot trap… the guy i was with was incredible… he would do three sets of 100 and only miss one clay. he was totally saturated in shooting (and his business)… even at the office he would have posters up so that he could do eye exercises during the day here and there… loads his own…
i thought i did ok my first time out… shot 80 and a 90… which is all we had time for that day… i was excited to go again some time (the lodge is incredible…elephant inside… and all manner of ranges. trap, skeet, robotic animals, and long range target)…
he died later that year… i didnt know him long… i was more freinds with is wife… but i am sure glad i met him…
its been like that all my life… since i am hearing impared i dont own any firearms… two air weapons, but they are for plink targeting when i am upstate at my friends house (he holds them for me since i moved down to the city).
i have had lots of people hand me weapons… and i liked them… but i guess tactics and analysis and stuff was more of a fun pattern puzzle (as was the science of weaponry, physics, etc)… so i never got into super detail since i chose never to own one… but i did enjoy every time the opportunity came up to shoot… (automatic weapons are a blast!!! as are some of the big things… thanks collectors)
thanks again for your time and a good answer…
it is appreciated… 🙂
on another fast note so i dont waste space…
check out a unphotoshopped portrait of Nikolai Ezhov…(moonbattery put it up).
http://www.peoples.ru/state/leader/fsb/nikolay_ejov/ejov_ezhov.png
makes ya wonder why he named his daugher alex… i mean sasha…
armchair pessimist,
while it might be fun to try to link the fun of weapons to some kind of “boys with toys” kind of reasoning… that just totally ignores leaders vs subjects.
this was not some operation where the people doing it have not killed before. thats a major difference between training in the different militaries around the world…
when a new american special forces person goes into the field, they have not yet practiced killing a real person. In some other countries forces soldiers DO get to kill as part of their training.
The point of my post was to inquire whether Indian cops routinely carry rifles. If not, then wouldn’t that imply they were using the intelligence?
you can infer both ways so there is no way to figure it out from that unless you have a biased preference… you can imagine they were told, so that they were looking out… and so had rifles.. or you can imagine that the bosses didnt tell them so that when things went wrong, the police would be there…(and have not run away knowing they are coming to ak47 and grenads).
no way to know… sometimes you can look at something a person or thing does, and you can say.. nope, it can only be that one thing… or some incredible long shot of coincidence… (once is an accident, twice is coincidence, three times is on purpose. learn it, live by it, stay away from those that ignore it going for four times).
other things you may want to assert the more likely interpretation, or one that sounds good to you, but the information really doesnt support a conclusion, just some scenarios.
one must accept the limits of the information or else one does what the left always does… assert this knowing that turns out to be wrong that they then have to get punitive to force it. like the noble savage and tabula rasa.
the loud noises thing might be a reason why someone who doesnt have direction may choose to look into the military, and maybe even want to play with such toys and that being the only way…
but its not why incidents like mumbai happen…
that is a level of malice of forthought that most people do not want to accept and comprehend as normal, and well reasoned pragmatism…
which in a state absent religion, means anything that works to acheive the goal and not cost more than its worth is acceptable
the more paranoid word on the sttreet is that this is to create destabilization in the US economy by having a small war break out there… or conflict..
people are not thinking to the next level.. they are too busy trying to fathom why people would do this… and then when they fail to want to comprehend whats is very distastful, they call em crazy…
the next level is that shipping between china and the US gets halted, and shipping from india and the US gets halted.
and we find out why the left played outsourcing games rather than have things happen at normal rates wihtout manuplation (taxes, laws, etc)…
a war between india and pakistan would derail a lot in afghanistan… and it would halt a lot of shipping as third parties could pot shot ships and others would be blamed.
also, it looks like both india and pakistan want to suck the US into the conflict in different ways…
as i said, way way long ago… this is about economic warfare, and the past 20 years has been a chess game of maneuvering pieces to get things in place so that dominoes fall…
each time that biggie thing happens we moved faster towards totalitarianism… this time, we wont come out of it to regain normalcy if this is allowed to keep goind and there are no other moves.
checkmate in how many moves may already be set up.
after all, we abdicated making intelligent moves and playing to the same degree… so how hard is it to move pieces around when everyone is suckered into a false peace and reformation?
the group that wins this, owns the planet and the rest of us will be evicted…
our people havent taken that seriously… but everyone else has… especially since they have been coordinated for 90 years…
Artfldgr,
The Glock has an internal hammer – nothing is exposed that you can hook your thumb into and lower.
Once you rack the slide it’s ready to go bang.
Regarding why Indian police may or may not have been carrying rifles at the start of the attack, it may have been more historical conditioning.
Sorry for the upcoming history lesson, but here goes.
When the Brits ruled India as part of the empire they would often take older Lee Enfields and rechamber them to take shotgun shells. These were the weapons that would then be issued to Indian police.
It may be the case that local police still carry Lee Enfields (the .303 caliber version) for that very reason, but I admit I’m guessing at this point and defer to anyone with firsthand knowledge.
In one sense I feel sorry for Plaxico Burress. A lot of high profile athletes are targets of criminal scum and he obviously does not feel safe in the NY-NJ area and the club scene. With all the incredible hassle that people in that area have to go through to get a gun permit – and I guess in NYC you can’t own guns, period. So, Plaxico probably just thinks, “Hey, man, I might as well just buy one elsewhere and carry it off the books.” I am pretty much against gun regulation, except for convicted criminals and the insane. But he obviously did not understand all the subtleties of a Glock pistol.
A lot of professional athletes in a place like NYC probably should hire a bodyguard. If they’re are earning big bucks, I’m sure they could afford one.
artfldgr,
I just started reading “Shadow World: Resurgent Russia, The Global New Left, and Radical Islam” by Robert Chandler. It is EXCELLENT. I found out about this book via a book review at americanthinker.com:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/11/shadow_world_resurgent_russia.html
The review is by Janet Levy
We live in very dangerous and pivotal times. That is why the conservative movement and anyone else who believes in our heritage, traditions, Constitution, capitalism, and Western civilization MUST get to work NOW.
I’ve fired both the Enfield and the Springfield rifles. Sweet weapons and accurate as hell. But they are heavy. If I were a military guy my weapon of choice would be the M14. The Marines love that weapon, especially the M14 designed for them (with sights) for use in light infantry work. The bastards they shoot don’t get up. They stay down.
scottie,
THANKS so much… the internal hammer was what i didnt know was on his gun… not that it really changes his idiot status much.
so basically to make it safe you have to remove the clip, and rack the slide to eject the round…
if one were to have ownership levels for guns, then glock is for experts who take them seriously. in my meaningless opinion.
THANKS for making the thing make sense…
fredhjr,
Thanks for the book and article link… dont know if i will get a chance to read it. not much reading time lately… just finishing pinkers the blank slate, and about half a dozen others (i read in groups). dont have the time i used to now i am married… ah well, trading something good for something better i guess. 🙂
thanks
one small addition to grackle’s fine refutation of the claim that the united states ‘armed and financed’ saddam hussein against iraq: the stockholm international peace research institute, hardly a pro-american voice, ran the numbers about the time the current war started, and found that saddam got something like 1 percent of his weapons from us. his big suppliers were france, china and the ussr and his successor states.
and about pacepa’s claims: i’ve seen a lot of them, but does anyone know how reliable he really is? is there any way of finding out?
greenyshade,
What are your issues with Pacepa? Exactly what troubles you about him?
and about pacepa’s claims: i’ve seen a lot of them, but does anyone know how reliable he really is? is there any way of finding out?
honest answer?
more reliable than most others, never 100% reliable… he is a traitor after all, and could be a plant who mixes up infoprmation and disinformation.
however, some sources in the game have been vetted more than others… usually by what happens when they turn… they basically eitehr confirm known histories, or their info leads to lots of arrests, and finds…
and you also have opinion…
for instance… most people side with golitsyn… however another agent that defected shortly after runs interference… golitsyn had a relationship with angleton, and angleton was out and pretty much slandered… so the agency didnt know who to beleive…. they ended up siding with the latter spy… however the latter one is out in the open, he likes to give interviews, speeches, and his information never was as rich or as good as golitsyn…
when analysed, golitsyns points in his book that were factually confimational, he had a incredibly high prediction success rate (over 90%)… and this is for things that he predicted decades before they happened.
so one has to balance what is being given… and usually one gets a sense of the validity as one reads many many of these stories and they start to make a coherient image or not, and whether they are confirmed by other histories and other agencies comparing notes.
the newer spy that gives the interviews is in the open, golitsyn has a price on his head and you cant find him and has always been in hiding.
mitrokhen was also (dont know if he is still alive) permanently in hiding…
but litvenenko was one in the open, and ended up being poisioned with radioactive polonium 210.
in a game of lies and tricks, reversals, betrayals, and really bizarre things… one will never know a confirmed clear thing as one will only be able, like in science, to know after a lone while and knowing more and more as time goes by.
for instance… mccarthy is totally tainted… he changed the language… he said lattimore was a spy… lattimore denied it, wrote a book where he coined the term McCarthyism… so the whole thing was one big noisy mess, and no way to actually know… both sides had their take, and the left had the more organized negative campaign and lying practices to work.. and so seemed to win… for a time.
years later.. after time passed… information about VENONA transcripts became public…(which is part of all this process), and when they became public… the history of the past get corrected..
at least in the better history books…
so today if you read a good history, you will find out that lattimore WAS a spy… his book was a way to deflect that… and mccarthy was very right…
the msm public is still on the public old thread and hasnt updated the history with venona information, mitrokhen info, etc.
so take from this what you will..
that in all honesty… you have to use your skills and work the information yourself and try to catch them at lying then adjust your trust… never trust them or anything 100% from the start, and basically constantly assess, reassess, and adjust as more empirical information comes around..
life was always to be a learning thing througout…
given the limitations of knowing… this should be clear… nothing is static… and we have to navigate that…
[even if you knew the spies personally, you cant trust what you may think you know or dont know]
good luck…
Christopher Boucek–
In response to your comment, first, I found it very difficult to understand what you were saying, perhaps because of a language problem, or perhaps because of typos.
In any case, you definitely misread/misunderstood what I wrote. I was responding to a previous post by Truth who suggested that maybe we should hold terrorists’ families as leverage (he noted that they are so proud of the evil things their loved ones do, etc.). I was writing that this was something we could and would NEVER do. Many of us feel that we should absolutely hold those responsible for terrorist acts accountable: those who carried out the act(s) (should they survive) and those who planned and financed the acts, and/or enabled them. It’s pretty simple. I also said that even if one were to think that might give a Jihadist pause (i.e. holding family members), I don’t think it would at all; they are focused on their goal completely. In addition, they know our culture all too well and are well aware we would do nothing to harm innocent people. These terrorists spend months, if not years, making intricate plans designed to exploit our weaknesses and use them against us.
found that saddam got something like 1 percent of his weapons from us. his big suppliers were france, china and the ussr and his successor states.
This relevant point, did not matter at all, Saddam had weapons form here or there to fight.
What you should do under your democracy and freedom , ask both your folks Rumsfeld and April Glaspy if they can tell you 13 years history what they talk with Saddam and what they promised him at their meeting in 1985 then in 199 just 2 day or weeks when Saddam went to Kuwaiti invasion in
“My question is, is it the everyday weapon of an Indian cop on the beat?”
The everyday weapon of an Indian cop on the beat is the “lathi” aka a wooden staff:
http://indianlathi.com/
To the best of my knowledge, most Indian cops are not armed with rifles or pistols. I have not seen armed cops outside of a few places (airports, train stations) when I have visited the country.
Truth…
april glaspy was an ass… she didnt take her own language seriously… you can read the transcrpt of the conversation.
however… you do realize that the thing that is up front about why things happen is seldom the only reason. and that many big bad things have happened due to accidents in history.
but lets be truthful truth… the game is complain…
doesnt matter what action the US takes, either choice you would complain… its not to change anything or improve anything, since critical theory and alinsky says, just complain, never suggest solutions…
if we go in, you complain and make up ulterior purposes that dont make sense.
we dont go in, and you complain that we are inhuman and are not doing enough to help the poor kurds or some other thing..
we give him weapons, we are enabling killers.
we let him get weapons from russia, we arent doing our best to mediate and prevent that.
it really doesnt matter, your never going to see any act as valid other than what?
experience means nothing to you…
nor does history…
This relevant point, did not matter at all, Saddam had weapons form here or there to fight.
actually it does… because it means that his dealings with others were greater than his dealings with us. it shows that he was burning the candle at both ends, and the other end you conveniently ignore, since it represents (falsely) what you want, and it isnt
its a game for you, and you waste peoples time because you dont actually desire a resolutoin or a point, you just want to wear the opposition down by an endless series of oppositions where no matter what action is taken its wrong.
at about that point, you become a chatty cathy doll.
First I did not talking to so I do not like to hear your “chatty cathy doll” talks.
In same talkn if its history them Islam and what set to be also history whatever ” its not to change anything or improve anything, since critical theory and alinsky says, just complain, never suggest solutions…” isn’t same story our “chatty cathy doll”.
if you chose to be blind looking in one eye that your problem,
look’s you are in the train of you either with us or against us our doll?