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Professor ZZZ asks: “Trump is not Stalin but in the history of national (federal) political figures in this country, I’m wondering … where [would] you put Trump? … Having a POTUS so publicly awful along those lines lowers the horrible bar so dramatically that we will pay for years to come. Not being Stalin but being Roy Cohn is a hell of a legacy.”
Tillman responded:
[. . .]
Trump is ahead of Woodrow Wilson: World War I, and! his resegregation of the federal civil service. I grant you that being ahead of Wilson is not saying much…but then, the nation survived Wilson, and no one today thinks of Wilson as having lowered the bar vis-a-vis future presidents. Professor ZZZ seems to be worried about this. He wrote: “Having a POTUS so publicly awful along those lines lowers the horrible bar so dramatically that we will pay for years to come.” Really?—Will we pay for it in years to come, or is this just a shabby slippery slope-type argument?
I cannot say I see much sense in Professor ZZZ’s references to Roy Cohn. Roy Cohn’s permanent claim to fame is his association with McCarthy and aggressive anticommunism. Trump, by contrast, has been criticized for being too close to Putin. It is not exactly the same; actually, the two are not alike at all.
If words and pretty speeches are the measure of a president, then Trump comes up short. The question is whether that is the correct standard for measuring presidents in a dangerous world.
Seth’s last line is a good summary of the general flaw with many anti-Trump arguments. However, Seth doesn’t go far enough with specific examples:
-Trump didn’t withdraw US forces precipitately from an overseas conflict, leaving the worst of our enemies to fill the resulting power vacuum as Obama did in Iraq.
-Trump didn’t reverse longstanding US policy, deprecating alliances with pro-American countries, in a foolish and futile effort to buy the love of the Iranian mullahs as Obama did.
-Trump didn’t let himself get played by the North Korean dictatorship as Clinton, both Bushes and Obama did.
-Trump didn’t use the IRS to harass his political opponents – as Nixon threatened to do, as the Clintons did to right-wing activist organizations, and as Obama did to organizations and individuals who were active in the Tea Party movement.
-Trump didn’t use the FBI and CIA to spy on his Democratic rivals’ election campaigns as Obama seems to have done to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
I can think of numerous other examples of unwise or malicious actions taken by previous presidents that Trump hasn’t done. Feel free to add additional examples in the comments.
The Russia hoax was aimed at Michael Flynn and his role as a Trump advisor.
It was all about General Flynn. I think it began on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, when Flynn changed the way we did intelligence against the likes of Zarqawi, bin Laden, the Taliban, and their allies.
General Flynn saw that our battlefield intelligence was too slow. We collected information from the Middle East and sent it back to Washington, where men with stars on their shoulders and others at the civilian intel agencies chewed it over, decided what to do, and sent instructions back to the war zone. By the time all that happened, the battlefield had changed. Flynn short-circuited this cumbersome bureaucratic procedure and moved the whole enterprise to the war itself. The new methods were light years faster. Intel went to local analysts, new actions were ordered from men on the battlefield (Flynn famously didn’t care about rank or status) and the war shifted in our favor.
I read Dakota Meyer’s book. He was denied permission to accompany his Civil Affairs unit into an Afghan village because he was being punished for shooting at Taliban tribesmen firing mortar rounds into his base camp. The reason ? They were “not in uniform.” The ROE of the Obama administration saved his life as the unit he should have been with was ambushed and killed. He made attempts to rescue them, resulting in his award the Medal of Honor.
On 8 September 2009, near the village of Ganjgal, Meyer learned that three Marines and a Navy Corpsman, who were members of Meyer’s squad and his friends, were missing after being ambushed by a group of insurgents. Under enemy fire, Meyer entered an area known to be inhabited by insurgents and eventually found the four missing servicemen dead and stripped of their weapons, body armor and radios. There he saw a Taliban fighter trying to take the bodies. The fighter tackled Meyer, and after a brief scuffle, Meyer grabbed a baseball-sized rock and beat the fighter to death.[8] With the help of Afghan soldiers, he moved the bodies to a safer area where they could be extracted.[9] During his search, Meyer “personally evacuated 12 friendly wounded and provided cover for another 24 Marines and soldiers to escape likely death at the hands of a numerically superior and determined foe.”
In his account of the battle in his book, he relates how it took hours to get permission for artillery to respond to the ambush.
Posted by Trent Telenko on 10th March 2019 (All posts by Trent Telenko)
This blog post on “The June 1944 Normandy Invasion and the Bane of Technologically Illiterate Officers in the Luftwaffe” marks the second in a series of posts departing from past history columns I’ve written for Chicagoboyz in that it is exploring a theme I refer to as “The Bane of Technologically Illiterate Military Leaders.”[1] .
The issue with ‘Technologically Illiterate Military Leaders‘ I’ll be exploring in this and future articles is that such leaders tend to make the same classes of mistakes over and over again. And when those military leaders reach flag rank on the bones of theories and doctrines that fail the test of combat through their technological illiteracy. They then bury the real reasons why those doctrines failed behind walls of jargon and classification to avoid accountability for those failures.
In this particular case, the mistake is how the otherwise technically competent Luftwaffe Funkaufklärungsdienst (Roughly translated — Electronic Intelligence Early Warning Service) managed to miss a completely unambiguous invasion warning for the Normandy Invasion— D-Day, June 6th 1944 — the night before the invasion.
This happened because the German officers over the Luftwaffe technicians were technologically illiterate regards both the Allied identification friend or foe (IFF) and Allied radio navigation systems they were monitoring, as well as the radar techniques their own Luftnachrichten Dienat (Air Surveillance Service) were using to track RAF Bomber Command night bomber streams through chaff.
RAF 100 Group Electronic Warfare Techniques 1944-45, showing a combination of radar reflecting chaff and several forms of active jamming. The Funkaufklärungsdienst was created by the Luftwaffe in the spring of 1944 to deal with these techniques. Source: Steve Blank’s “Hidden in Plain Sight:The Secret History of Silicon Valley,” http://steveblank.com/secret-history
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Electronic warfare is much like mine sweeping/hunting at sea, or combat engineers breaching a minefield on land, in that it is a thankless job when it is done right and “hard” on military officers careers in exercises/planning. Thus it tends to be avoided, even when it is central to recorded military history. Case in point — When Stephen L. McFarland wrote “Conquering the Night: Army Air Forces Night Fighters at War” in the late 1990’s (pub date 1998) as a part of “AIR FORCE HISTORY AND MUSEUMS PROGRAM.” He completely left out the fact that German bomber tail warning radars were picking up Allied night fighter IFF challenges. This was a fact that Alfred Price had published fourteen years earlier in 1984!
Posted by Trent Telenko on 26th February 2019 (All posts by Trent Telenko)
Today marks the 75th Anniversary of the completion of Operation Argument otherwise known as BIG WEEK. The strategic goals of the operation were to destroy German fighter production and inflict a “wastage” rate of the German fighter force such that it was losing fighter planes faster than it was producing them. In measurements of this objective. In the initial assessments of the BIG WEEK bombing, 8th Air Force thought they had done that. Actually, this was as wildly optimistic as the claims of air to air kills by the heavy bomber crew machine gunners.
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Despite destroying 70% of the German fighter aircraft assembly buildings targeted. The USAAF high command had grossly underestimated damage done to electric motor powered machine tools within those buildings and the UK’s Ministry of Economic Warfare that the USAAF relied upon for intelligence of German industry had underestimated German fighter production by a factor of 2 & 1/2 times.
Assessment of American “Big Week” Combat Results (Slide 1) from “Coming of Aerial Armageddon” by Dr. John Curatola
The 8th Air Force lost 565 heavy bombers shot down or scrapped from combat damage so bad it was not worth the effort to repair them. 8th and 9th Air Force fighters escorting the bombers suffered 28 planes shot down. The over all loss rate per raid averaged 6%…but the American total force losses were 2,600 air crew killed, wounded or captured. This was 1/5th of 8th Air Force.
Posted by Trent Telenko on 25th February 2019 (All posts by Trent Telenko)
Today marks the 75th Anniversary of the sixth and final day of Operation Argument otherwise known as BIG WEEK. On Friday, February 25, 1944 the 8th Air Force returns to Messerschmitt factories in Regensburg preceded by 15th Air Force there. Other Messerschmitt fighter plants at Augsberg and Furth are also hit by 8th Air Force. These raids mark the conclusion of the first major operation in the final battle for air superiority before the Normandy invasion scheduled for June 1944.
Day Six of “Big Week” Combat Results (Slide 1) from “Coming of Aerial Armageddon” by Dr. John Curatola
Day Six of “Big Week” Combat Results (Slide 2) from “Coming of Aerial Armageddon” by Dr. John Curatola
ETO Strategic Operations
Mission 235: In the final “Big Week” mission, 4 targets in Germany are hit; 31 bombers and 3 fighters are lost.
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268 B-17s are dispatched to aviation industry targets at Augsburg and the industrial area at Stuttgart; 196 hit Augsburg and targets of opportunity and 50 hit Stuttgart; they claim 8-4-4 Luftwaffe aircraft; 13 B-17s are lost and 172 damaged; casualties are 12 WIA and 130 MIA.
267 of 290 B-17s hit aviation industry targets at Regensburg and targets of opportunity; they claim 13-1-7 Luftwaffe aircraft; 12 B-17s are lost, 1 damaged beyond repair and 82 damaged; casualties are 4 KIA, 12 WIA and 110 MIA.
172 of 196 B-24s hit aviation industry targets at Furth and targets of opportunity; they claim 2-2-2 Luftwaffe aircraft; 6 B-24s are lost, 2 damaged beyond repair and 44 damaged; casualties are 2 WIA and 61 MIA.
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Escort is provided by 73 P-38s, 687 Eighth and Ninth Air Force P-47s and 139 Eighth and Ninth Air Force P-51s; the P-38s claim 1-2-0 Luftwaffe aircraft, 1 P-38 is damaged beyond repair; the P-47s claim 13-2-10 Luftwaffe aircraft, 1 P-47 is lost and 6 damaged, 1 pilot is MIA; the P-51s claim 12-0-3 Luftwaffe aircraft, 2 P-51s are lost and 1 damaged beyond repair, 2 pilots are MIA.
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Mission 236: 5 of 5 B-17s drop 250 bundles of leaflets on Grenoble, Toulouse, Chartres, Caen and Raismes, France at 2129–2335 hours without loss
MTO Strategic Operations
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Continuing coordinated attacks with the Eighth Air Force on European targets, B-17s with fighter escorts pound Regensburg aircraft factory; enemy fighter opposition is heavy. Other B-17s hit the air depot at Klagenfurt, Austria and the dock area at Pola, Italy. B-24s attack Fiume, Italy marshaling yard and port and hit Zell-am-See, Austria railroad and Graz airfield and the port area at Zara, Yugoslavia; 30+ US aircraft are lost; they claim 90+ fighters shot down.
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For extensive background, see this Wikipedia article, where the passage above came from:
From Pickle Barrel’s to Radar Pattern Bombing of Cities
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In evaluating the WW2 Combined Bomber Campaign in Europe there is far more propaganda about “precision bombing” than actual accurate and precise bombing. When using the Norden bombsite in test conditions, on a clear and still day, with an absolutely distinct against back ground target, with a picked high skill aircrew, from less than 10,000 feet altitude, you could get within a few hundred feet of the target.
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Things were far less then perfect in combat over Europe. Bombing altitudes exceeded 20,000 feet and the number of days where cloud cover measured less than 4/10ths were few and concentrated in the summer.
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“Big Week” was fought in European winter. Too fight then, the USAAF had to resort to the use of both British provided “H2S” 10 cm and hand built American “H2X” 3 cm wavelength radars carried on pathfinder bombers leading the USAAF bomber streams.
B-17 Pathfinder in Big Week with a hand built “H2X” Radar provided by the British Branch of MIT’s Radiation Laboratory Source: http://www.482nd.org/h2x-mickey
Posted by Trent Telenko on 24th February 2019 (All posts by Trent Telenko)
Today marks the 75th Anniversary of the fifth day of Operation Argument otherwise known as BIG WEEK. On Thursday, February 24, 1944 the 8th Air Force returned to major operations in the battle for air superiority before the Normandy invasion scheduled for June 1944. The 8th Air Force’s emphasis includes revisiting Schweinfurt.
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The 15th Air Force attacks Steyer again this day.
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The RAF Bomber Command flies an area bombing raid on Schweinfurt with indifferent results.
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Day Five of “Big Week” Combat Results (Slide 1) from “Coming of Aerial Armageddon” by Dr. John Curatola
Day Five of “Big Week” Combat Results (Slide 2) from “Coming of Aerial Armageddon” by Dr. John Curatola
Other ETO Strategic Operations
Missions 237, 238 and 239 are flown against targets in France; 7 B-17s are lost. Heavy clouds cause over half the bombers dispatched to return without bombing.
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Mission 237: 49 of 81 B-24s hit the Ecalles sur Buchy V-weapon sites; 1 B-24 is damaged. Escort is provided by 61 P-47s
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Mission 238: 258 B-17s are dispatched against V-weapon sites in the Pas de Calais; 109 hit the primary target, 10 hit a road junction E of Yerville, 7 hit a rail siding SW of Abbeville and 6 hit targets of opportunity; 7 B-17s are lost and 75 damaged; casualties are 5 WIA and 63 MIA. Escort is provided by 81 P-38s, 94 P-47s and 22 P-51s; 1 P-38 is damaged beyond repair; the P-51s claim a single German aircraft on the ground.
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Mission 239: 5 of 5 B-17s drop 250 bundles of leaflets[clarification needed] on Amiens, Rennes, Paris, Rouen and Le Mans, France at 2023–2055 hours without loss.
RAF Bomber Command in Operation Argument
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Bomber Command directly contributed to the attacks on the aircraft industry in Schweinfurt. Some 734 bombers were dispatched on the night of 24/25 February, and 695 struck the target.[1] Of the bombs dropped, 298 hit within three miles and 22 hit inside the target area. Little damage was done.
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For extensive background, see this Wikipedia article, where the passage above came from:
The 56th Fighter Group’s Private War with the USAAF Bomber Generals
The highest scoring 8th Air Force Fighter Group in World War 2, in terms of strictly air-to-air kills, was the P-47 armed 56th Fighter Group. Led by Colonel Hubert “Hub” Zemke (March 14, 1914 – August 30, 1994) it fought a war with the Bomber Generals running 8th Air Force as well as the the Luftwaffe.
In July, when a bomber group took over Horsham Saint Faith, Zemke’s men relocated to a half-built base at Halesworth Suffolk. Upset with the second-rate treatment his command seemed to be experiencing, Zemke joined a group of Eighth Air Force bomber commanders in a gripe session. The 4th Bomb Wing’s Colonel Curtis LeMay (chief of the postwar Strategic Air Command) complained that the only fighters he had seen so far ‘all had black and white crosses on them,’ but declared his bombers would carry on ‘with or without fighter escort.’
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Later, in the officers’ club, another bomber general stated he ‘wouldn’t pay a dime a dozen for any fighter pilots.’ Zemke hurled his pocket change at the man’s feet:
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‘Here, General, this is all I have handy at the moment,’ he responded. ‘Any time you have a couple dozen fighter pilots handy send them my way. We can sure use them.’ Then he jumped in his Jug and buzzed the place.
Posted by Trent Telenko on 23rd February 2019 (All posts by Trent Telenko)
Today marks the 75th Anniversary of the fourth day of Operation Argument otherwise known as BIG WEEK. On Wednesday, February 23, 1944 the 15th Air Force went after the Luftwaffe in the skies over Germany — with the 8th Air Force operations grounded by fog — in the battle for air superiority before the Normandy invasion scheduled for June 1944.
Like the previous day, the 15th Air Force lacked fighter escorts.
Day Four of “Big Week” Combat Results from “Coming of Aerial Armageddon” by Dr. John Curatola
ETO Strategic Operations
Mission 232: 5 of 5 B-17s drop 250 bundles of leaflets on Rennes, Le Mans, Chartres, Lille and Orleans, France at 21:36–22:32 hours without loss.
MTO Strategic Operations
B-24s bomb the industrial complex at Steyr, Austria. Other heavy bombers are forced to abort because of bad weather; the bombers and escorting fighters claim 30+ aircraft shot down.
For extensive background, see this Wikipedia article, where the passage above came from:
From the Pre-War “Conveyor-Protector” to Long Range Escort Fighters
One of the most troubling parts of the US Army Air Force “P-51 Narrative” that the “Bomber Generals” pushed after “Big Week” was that the USAAF had learned nothing from the 1940 “Battle of Britain” about the need for fighter escorts.
It turns out that the US Army Air Corps had not missed that obvious point at all. They utterly got that point. In fact, tab #4 for the AAF’s first Air War Plan (AWPD-1) written in August 1941 called for specialized escort fighters. See this link from Ryan Crierie’s web site —
What they did with that insight was utterly squandered by the factional politics of the “Bomber Mafia” between 1940 and the failure of the second Schweinfurt raid on 14 October 1943.
The need to avoid accountability for that failure — like hiding the real range of the P-47D with 150 gallon drop tanks after “Big Week” — was why this institutional lie was told. The motive being to preserve the reputations of General H. H, “Hap” Arnold and a lot of Bomber Generals who founded the independent US Air Force.
And like any other claims of conspiracy in high places, great claims require great big heaping piles of evidence that they are true. In July 2017 my research partner found the official memorandum chain that constitutes that great big heaping piles of evidence. (See appendices one thru four at the end of this post)
This is how Ryan described this official memorandum chain to me:
I found a memorandum chain in a folder today at NARA titled unconventional escort fighters“, which was full of stuff like the XP-85 Goblin parasite, and a few gems like early consideration of the Northrop XP-79 as a parasite fighter, but at the end of the folder was some stuff circa September 1941 on Long Range Bomber Escort.
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Basically, blah blah, European war experience shows the need for longer range fighters; and it suggested a bunch of studies be done on various heavy bombardment aircraft to turn them into convoy escorts — the beginning of the XB-40/XB-41 program — and they suggested that the B-29 and B-32 be studied as convoy escorts.
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They also suggested studying aircraft like the XP-67, XP-58, and XA-26 with an interest towards making a fighter with extreme range.
You all can go read the memo chain below, but a short form is as follows —
Posted by Trent Telenko on 22nd February 2019 (All posts by Trent Telenko)
Today marks the 75th Anniversary of the third day of Operation Argument otherwise known as BIG WEEK. On Tuesday, February 22, 1944 the 15th Air Force went after the Luftwaffe in the skies over Germany — with the 8th Air Force operations being heavily disrupted by fog — in the battle for air superiority before the Normandy invasion scheduled for June 1944.
The idea for Operation Argument was to force the Luftwaffe fighter force to fight by attacking targets they had to defend — the German aircraft industry — with fighter escorted bombers.
The 15th Air Force attacked without fighter escorts.
Oops.
These were the results of the 3rd day of combat —
Day Three of “Big Week” combat results from “Coming of Aerial Armageddon” by Dr. John Curatola
ETO Strategic Operations
Mission 230: “Big Week” continues with 799 aircraft dispatched against German aviation and Luftwaffe airfields; 41 bombers and 11 fighters are lost.
289 B-17s are dispatched against aviation industry targets at Aschersleben (34 bomb), Bernburg (47 bomb) and Halberstadt (18 bomb) in conjunction with a Fifteenth Air Force raid on Regensburg, Germany; 32 hit Bünde, 19 hit Wernigerode, 15 hit Magdeburg, 9 hit Marburg and 7 hit other targets of opportunity; they claim 32-18-17 Luftwaffe aircraft; 38 B-17s are lost, 4 damaged beyond repair and 141 damaged; casualties are 35 KIA, 30 WIA and 367 MIA.
333 B-17s are dispatched to Schweinfurt but severe weather prevents aircraft from forming properly and they are forced to abandon the mission prior to crossing the enemy coast; 2 B-17s are damaged.
177 B-24s are dispatched but they are recalled when 100 miles (160 km) inland; since they were over Germany, they sought targets of opportunity but strong winds drove the bombers over The Netherlands and their bombs hit Enschede, Arnhem, Nijmegen and Deventer; they claim 2-0-0 Luftwaffe aircraft; 3 B-24s are lost and 3 damaged; casualties are 30 MIA. About 900 civilians were killed, mainly in the bombing of Nijmegen. In 1984, the book De Fatale Aanval (“The Fatal Attack”), was written about this by eyewitness Alphons Brinkhuis, who was a 10-year-old boy at Enschede when it happened.
These missions are escorted by 67 P-38s, 535 Eighth and Ninth Air Force P-47s, and 57 Eighth and Ninth Air Force P-51s; the P-38s claim 1 Luftwaffe aircraft destroyed, 1 P-38 is damaged beyond repair and 6 are damaged; the P-47s claim 39-6-15[clarification needed] Luftwaffe aircraft, 8 P-47s are lost and 12 damaged, 8 pilots are MIA; the P-51s claim 19-1-10 Luftwaffe aircraft, 3 P-51s are lost and 3 damaged, 3 pilots are MIA.
MTO Strategic Operations
B-17s attack Petershausen marshaling yard and Regensburg aircraft factory in Germany and the air depot at Zagreb, Yugoslavia; a large force of B-24s hits Regensburg aircraft plants about the same time as the B-17 attack; other B-24s pound the town of Sibenik and the harbor at Zara, Yugoslavia; they claim 40 Luftwaffe aircraft destroyed; 13 bombers are lost.
For extensive background, see this Wikipedia article, where the passage above came from:
Exposing the Bomber General Lies in the “P-51 Narrative”
For all the good that the P-47 Thunderbolt did in Europe’s strategic bombing offensive, it has been written out of the victory narrative for a lot of political reasons. Political reasons starting with answering for the 26,000 men who died in the 8th Air Force in WW2 because of the flawed doctrines of the the USAAF Bomber Generals. A number of combat deaths that is larger than the entire US Marine Corps in World War 2 from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima.
I’ve written expansively on how these flawed doctrines affected the development of auxiliary drop tank technology, the escort fighters that used them and the bomber escort doctrine that knit them together over the years on Chicagoboyz, See these posts:
Right now I’m going to show you how Generals Arnold, Spaatz, Anderson and the rest of the “Bomber General Mafia” put the bad mouth on the P-47’s role in obtaining air superiority over Europe.
Posted by Trent Telenko on 20th February 2019 (All posts by Trent Telenko)
Today marks the 75th Anniversary of Operation Argument otherwise known as BIG WEEK. When on Sunday, February 20, 1944 the 8th Air Force went after the Luftwaffe in the skies over Germany to take air superiority for the Normandy invasion in June 1944.
These were the results of the 1st day of combat —
Day One “Big Week” combat results from “Coming of Aerial Armageddon” by Dr. John Curatola
Mission 226: The Eighth Air Force begins “Big Week” attacks on German aircraft plants and airfields. For the first time, over 1,000 bombers are dispatched; 21 bombers and 4 fighters are lost hitting three areas in Germany:
417 B-17s are dispatched to Leipzig-Mockau Airfield, and aviation industry targets at Heiterblick and Abtnaundorf; 239 hit the primary targets, 37 hit Bernburg (Junkers), 44 hit Oschersleben (AGO, prime Fw 190A subcontractor) and 20 hit other targets of opportunity; they claim 14-5-6 Luftwaffe aircraft; seven B-17s are lost, one damaged beyond repair and 161 damaged; casualties are 7 KIA, 17 WIA and 72 MIA.
314 B-17s are dispatched to the Tutow Airfield; 105 hit the primary and immediate area, 76 hit Rostock (Heinkel) and 115 hit other targets of opportunity; they claim 15-15-10 Luftwaffe aircraft; 6 B-17s are lost, 1 damaged beyond repair and 37 damaged; casualties are 3 KIA and 60 MIA.
272 B-24s are dispatched to aviation industry targets at Brunswick, Wilhelmtor and Neupetritor; 76 hit the primary, 87 hit Gotha, 13 hit Oschersleben, 58 hit Helmstedt and 10 hit other targets of opportunity; they claim 36-13-13 Luftwaffe aircraft; 8 B-24s are lost, 3 damaged beyond repair and 37 damaged; casualties are 10 KIA, 10 WIA and 77 MIA.
Missions one and three above are escorted by 94 P-38 Lightnings, 668 Eighth and Ninth Air Force P-47 Thunderbolts and 73 Eighth and Ninth Air Force P-51 Mustangs; they claim 61-7-37 Luftwaffe aircraft; one P-38 Lightning, two P-47 Thunderbolts and one P-51 Mustang are lost, two P-47 Thunderbolts are damaged beyond repair and 4 other aircraft are damaged; casualties are 4 MIA. German losses amount to 10 Messerschmitt Bf 110s destroyed and three damaged with 10 killed and seven wounded. Total losses included 74 Bf 110s, Fw 190s and Bf 109s and a further 29 damaged.[11]
For extensive background, see this Wikipedia article, where the passage above came from:
Despite Obama’s and Clinton’s recurring lies to the contrary, the deadly attacks of September 11, 2012, on U.S. diplomatic and intelligence facilities in Benghazi, Libya, had no connection with political protests. In director Michael Bay’s political-action thriller, which Paramount Pictures calls “a true story,” these two outposts get slammed ferociously by growing waves of well-armed jihadists who know exactly what they are doing. As if mocking Obama’s and Clinton’s lies, they do not drop their picket signs and then suddenly grab grenades, rocket launchers, and mortar shells. Instead, these killers skip the placards and head straight for the firepower.
We actually know quite a bit about how that event came to pass.
We know Operation Zero Footprint was the covert transfer of weapons from the U.S to the Libyan “rebels”. We also know the operation avoided the concerns with congressional funding, and potential for public scrutiny, through financing by the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
We also know that officials within the government of Qatar served as the intermediaries for the actual transfer of the weapons, thereby removing the footprint of the U.S. intervention.
We know the entire operation was coordinated and controlled by the State Department and CIA. We also know (from the Senate Foreign Relations Benghazi hearings) that “Zero Footprint” was unknown to the 2011 Pentagon and/or DoD commanders who would have been tasked with any military response to the 9/11/12 attack – namely AFRICOM General Carter Ham.
However, it would be implausible to think that then Defense Secretary Bob Gates or Joint Chiefs Chair Admiral McMullen were completely unaware of the operation. Even today, despite the numerous hearings and reports, this aspect remains murky. Read the rest of this entry »
I should think that Omarosa Manigault Newman must be weeping bitter tears and sticking little pins into a voodoo doll of John Brennan all this weekend, for he has stolen just about all of her publicity thunder in the end-of-week headlines and newscast coverage. A good few things are now obvious about her to that apparently small portion of the public (including myself) who didn’t watch reality TV series. One of those things is that she is a back-biting, vicious witch who blithely assumed that playing one for the cameras on a TV reality show would of course translate perfectly into a job at the White House, and another that taping conversations right and left to produce a tell-all inside book on the Trump administration would be just like secretly taping conversations for a tell-all book on the behind the scenes maneuvering on The Apprentice. Why on earth was she hired in the first place? Read the rest of this entry »
On August 14th in 1945 Imperial Japan accepted the terms of the Potsdam Declaration and averted Operation Downfall, the two stage invasion of Japan. On Sept 2, 1945 the surrender was signed on the USS Missouri in Tokyo bay, This invasion would have resulted in at least a million American casualties and up to 20 millions of Japanese dead from direct effects of the invasion plus the mass starvation that would have been sure to occur in its aftermath.
Since August 2010, it has become an nine years and counting tradition (See link list at the end of this post) for the Chicagoboyz web site to commemorate the major events closing out World War II in the Pacific and address the leftist agitprop surrounding those events. Where the worst recorded war in human history became a nuclear war via the August 6th and 9th 1945 A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, followed by the Imperial Japanese acceptance of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, and the Sept 2, 1945 formal surrender on the battleship USS Missouri.
This years year’s Chicagoboyz commemoration will focus on how the Imperial Japanese Military’s two nuclear weapons programs — one each for the Army and Navy — helped to obtain a surrender in an irrational polity bent on suicidal martial glory. And how their existence has been erased from the narrative of Japanese surrender by the identity issue academics in the diplomatic history community.
Color Photo of the Sept 2, 1945 surrender ceremony marking the conclusion of WW2 on the Battleship USS Missouri.
The Imperial Japanese Military’ s atomic bomb or “Genzai Bakuden” program had a two separate Army and Navy projects; the Army’s Ni-Go program and the Navy’s F-Go. [1] Neither of these programs produced a working device, despite 1946 rumors about a test near Hungnam, Korea that were later incorporated into the 1985 book Japan’s Secret War: Japan’s Race Against Time to Build Its Own Atomic Bomb. [2]
The bottom line is that if Imperial Japan of the summer of 1945 had a prototype atomic device. It’s first test would have been on a ship or aircraft kamikaze aimed where they thought it would hurt the American war effort the most.
Posted by Trent Telenko on 20th May 2018 (All posts by Trent Telenko)
In case you all had not noticed, a -LOT- of what is going on in the news between the Deep State and Pres. Trump here in the USA is a intra-Deep State factional Civil War over Iran.
In short — It’s Iran, STUPID!
This can be shown via the fact that the Obama “Iran Nuclear Deal” faction used the full powers of the FISA counter-intelligence to ram the Iran deal through Congress in 2015. (See the text immediately below and the Tablet on-line magazine link to their April 2017 article on the subject)
In a December 29, 2015 article, The Wall Street Journal described how the Obama administration had conducted surveillance on Israeli officials to understand how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials, like Ambassador Ron Dermer, intended to fight the Iran Deal. The Journal reported that the targeting “also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups.”
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and
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The reason the prior abuse of the foreign-intelligence surveillance apparatus is clear only now is because the Russia campaign has illuminated it. As The New York Times reported last month, the administration distributed the intelligence gathered on the Trump transition team widely throughout government agencies, after it had changed the rules on distributing intercepted communications. The point of distributing the information so widely was to “preserve it,” the administration and its friends in the press explained—“preserve” being a euphemism for “leak.” The Obama team seems not to have understood that in proliferating that material they have exposed themselves to risk, by creating a potential criminal trail that may expose systematic abuse of foreign-intelligence collection.
It turned out the illegal FISA surveillance by the Obama Administration got enough dirt on Congressional leaders to prevent that from happening.
The Deep State’s Iran Deal factional plans might have worked if Trump had lost…but he didn’t.
Everything regards the spying on the Trump campaign and attempted coup d’etat by special council/lawfare/impeachment against President Trump is about hiding the facts of that Iran Nuclear Deal from the American people and law enforcement.
But while the Obama/Iran Nuclear Deal faction was the largest and strongest Deep State faction…it wasn’t the only one.
Pres. Trump has the anti-Iran Deep State faction on his side as well — which is mainly uniformed US military intelligence, see Gen Flynn and Adm Mike Rogers formally head at NSA — with a foreign intervention in the form of Saudi Arabia, the Israeli Mossad and Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu on Trump’s side of the ledger.
Some in the the ‘coup supporting media’ would argue that this gets into fine shades of “what is treason” regards President Trump.
This sort of argument ignores the fact that the Obama/Iran Nuclear Deal Deep State faction — the DoJ, FBI, CIA, the State Department and a small faction in the senior civil service at the Defense Department — had the support of the EU political and IC elites as well as Iran’s Mullah’s & the Moslem Brotherhood in ramming home the Iran deal. And that they
IMO, the bottom line up front here is that the Trump faction was and remains “constitutional” in its actions — his faction won an election and is following legal procedure.
The legal terms of art for “Iran Nuclear Deal” Deep State faction efforts engaged in to date are an on–going seditious conspiracy to violate both the Trump Campaign and Trump Administration’s civil rights “Under color of Law” in order to overturn the results of the 2016 election.
The short form for that is the Iran Nuclear Deal faction the Deep State are attempting a Coup d’etat.
It gets worse.
Whether or not President Trump finally wins over the Obama faction and takes down the Iranian Mullah’s. The Obama’s Deep State Faction has done deep, lasting and permanent “Gramscian damage” (See link: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260 for an explanation of the term) to the American Republic, because they attempted a Coup De Etat against the tradition of peaceful succession of executive political power.
We can no longer take for granted peaceful opposing political party transitions of power in the American political system.
June 2016: FISA request. The Obama administration files a request with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to monitor communications involving Donald Trump and several advisers. The request, uncharacteristically, is denied.
October 2016: FISA request. The Obama administration submits a new, narrow request to the FISA court, now focused on a computer server in Trump Tower suspected of links to Russian banks. No evidence is found — but the wiretaps continue, ostensibly for national security reasons, Andrew McCarthy at National Review later notes. The Obama administration is now monitoring an opposing presidential campaign using the high-tech surveillance powers of the federal intelligence services.
On Tuesday November 8th, 2016 the election was held. Results announced Wednesday November 9th, 2016.
On Thursday November 17th, 2016, NSA Director Mike Rogers traveled to New York and met with President-Elect Donald Trump.
Trump moved his transition team to his private golf course immediately.
In 2013, she filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) complaint against her FBI supervisors alleging sexual discrimination and hostile work environment. In 2014, she amended her complaint by averring that she suffered “a hostile [work] environment, defamation of character through continued targeting by Andrew McCabe.”
The FBI’s response claimed that she had become “underperforming, tardy to work, insubordinate, possibly mentally ill…”
She was forced out.
In May 2014, Flynn provided a letter on Pentagon stationery which stated that Gritz “was well-known, liked and respected in the military counter-terrorism community for her energy, commitment and professional capacity, and over the years worked in several interagency groups on counter-terrorism targeting initiatives.” He added, “Her work consistently produced outstanding results in the most challenging environments.”
That is the back story of why the FBI went after General Flynn. Plus, of course, he had resisted Obama’s out reach to Muslims.
Despite his underlings’ concerns, McCabe’s plan of retaliation against Flynn proceeded apace. According to Joseph diGenova, the newest member of President Trump’s legal team, McCabe set up Flynn for the interview that led to the general’s indictment for lying to the FBI. One of the agents who was tasked with this maneuver sought private legal advice.
NB: precisely because I regard Taleb as a national treasure and have considerable respect for his work, I am not going to pull punches here. I get to do this because I have … skin in the game, and not only in Haiti[1] (where I wrote this post over the past ten days, thus the Kreyòl Ayisyen title), but in a couple-three moderately hair-raising situations back in KC, which I will relate when appropriate. Which might be never; see Matthew 6:1-4 (cited by Taleb on page 186).
Getting this out of the way—buy this book, read it, and recommend it to others. I say this very much irrespective of what might be called the Manifold-Taleb delta, which is not altogether trivial, as I will explain in some detail—again, as a sign of respect—below. Immediately below, in fact.
Posted by Trent Telenko on 13th March 2018 (All posts by Trent Telenko)
There was no single reason for the Sec of State Tillerson Firing…there was a laundry list.
According to various sources, Tillerson was pretty much against implementing President Trump’s foreign policy, trade and immigration agenda for Trump’s 2nd year as President and chaffed Pres. Trump over Russia besides:
1. Tillerson was working with the EU to stop the President from tearing up the Iran deal.
2. Tillerson wanted to remain in the TPP, TAP, & NAFTA.
3. Tillerson was against NK talks.
4. Tillerson was against China Tariffs.
5. Tillerson wanted to remain in the Paris Climate accord.
6. Tillerson did not support making Jerusalem the home of our embassy.
7. Tillerson wanted to keep open borders/high refugee resettlement.
8. Tillerson was talking that Russia affected our election results just before the Nunes Committee put a bullet in the head of the “Muh-Russia Collusion Delusion.”
Working behind Pres. Trump’s back with the EU over maintaining Pres Obama’s Iran nuclear deal — which Pres. Trump wants eliminated and the abandoned sanctions reinstated — was the last straw for Tillerson.
Scott has hit another metaphorical grand slam with this one, a worthily disconcerting follow-on to his earlier work. I have previously read (in order of publication, rather than the order in which I encountered them) The Moral Economy of the Peasant, Seeing Like a State, and Two Cheers for Anarchism, and found them congenial. Scott is particularly good at encouraging a non-elite viewpoint deeply skeptical of State power, and in Against the Grain he applies this to the earliest civilizations. Turns out they loom large in our imagination due to the a posteriori distribution of monumental ruins and written records—structures that were often built by slaves and records created almost entirely to facilitate heavy taxation and conscription. Outside of “civilization” were the “barbarians,” who turn out to have simply been those who evaded control by the North Koreas and Venezuelas of their time, rather than the untutored and truculent caricatures of the “civilized” histories.
By these criteria, the United States of America is predominately a barbarian nation. In the order given above:
Posted by Trent Telenko on 29th October 2017 (All posts by Trent Telenko)
The Okinawa campaign in WW2 has often been described as marking the end old style total war. Where “cork screw and blow torch” close combat to the death between American attackers who fought to live and Japanese defenders who died in order to fight played out its last dance.
Upon closer examination, as this first article in a series planned to run through August 2018 will demonstrate, the Imperial Japanese were a fell World War 2 high tech foe, punching in a weight class above the Soviet Union. In high tech warfare, as in everything else, the Samurai clan dominated Japanese military was smart, driven, capable, and deadly. Their culture was obsessive about doing everything their own way, partly copying, but always obsessive about the Japanese originality of the design. Whether we are looking at the Mitsubishi A6M “Zero” fighter, the 72,000 ton and 18-inch gun armed Yamato Class battleships or the I-8 and I-400 class submarine aircraft carriers. These innate skills as high tech warriors meantOkinawa was in many ways far better described as a high tech war for the electromagnetic spectrum between peer competitors.
Point in fact, Okinawa was a “secret radar war” where two opposing command, control, communications and intelligence (C3I) sensor networks were directing land, sea and air forces in a series of moves and counter moves. And while the less technologically advanced, and organizationally deficient, Japanese military lost Okinawa proper. It still took advantage of US Navy institutional biases, American inter service rivalries, political weaknesses, US Naval high command unwillingness to learn from “non-approved” sources and most especially its operational security failures to defeat the US Navy’s original plan to overrun the Ryukyu’s. Denying the American military the Northern Ryukyu air bases it originally sought to cover the proposed Operation Olympic landings.
The first block in that Japanese Pyrrhic electronic warfare victory at Okinawa was laid at Bombay Shoal, off Palawan in the Philippines. Where the USS Darter sank Japanese Admiral Kurita’s flagship the heavy cruiser IJNS Atago during the greatest naval victory in America’s History, the Battle of Leyte Gulf. And Japan had its biggest windfall of captured American secret radar documents in World War 2 — and second biggest secret document windfall over all — from Atago’s killer.
Figure 1: USS Darter (SS-227) grounded on Bombay Shoal off Palawan, the Philippines on 4th patrol, 24 October 1944. The shell holes from a Japanese destroyer, several US Navy submarines, and a Japanese air attack. This included 55 point-blank hits from the 6-inch deck gun of the Nautilus (SS-168) on 31st October 1944. Unfortunately, Darter was boarded prior to that shelling by an away team from a Japanese destroyer and the entire unburned contents off her classified technical library were seized for analysis by Imperial Japanese Naval Intelligence. Visible on the top of the conning tower are the undamaged radar, radio and identification friend or foe antenna’s. Photo credit — Navsource.org
For years, Imran Awan had access to the secret data and correspondence of many House committees, including foreign affairs. What did he do with it? As I said, that’s the worst case scenario (I guess).
He refers to a possible link to the Pakistani ISI. The ISI has a very controversial history. Some of it concerns the Afghanistan Taliban.
In documents leaked in April 2011 on the Wikileaks website, US authorities described the ISI as a “terrorist” organisation on a par with al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
In the same month the US military’s top officer, Adm Mike Mullen, also accused the ISI of having links with the Taliban.
He said it had a “long-standing relationship” with a militant group run by Afghan insurgent Jalaluddin Haqqani, which targets US troops in Afghanistan.
DWS: It’s a simple yes or no answer. If a member loses equipment and it is found by your staff and identified as that member’s equipment and the member is not associated with any case, it is supposed to be returned. Yes or no.
Chief Verderosa: It depends on the circumstances.
DWS: I don’t understand how that is possible. Members’ equipment is members’ equipment. My understanding is the the Capitol Police is not able to confiscate members’ equipment when the member is not under investigation. It is their equipment and it is supposed to be returned.
Chief Verderosa: I think there are extenuating circumstances in this case, and working through my counsel and the necessary personnel, if that in fact is the case, and with the permission of through the investigation, then we’ll return the equipment. But until that happens we can’t return the equipment.
DWS: I think you’re violating the rules when you conduct your business that way and you should expect that there will be consequences.
What “consequences?”
Here are some thoughts about this:
1. Why did Debbie Wasserman Schultz keep this man in her employ right up until he was arrested Tuesday night when he has been under suspicion for months. Does he have something on her or other people?
2. Why did Nancy Pelosi lie when she said she never heard of Awan? Email revealed by Wikileaks says Awan had access to Pelosi’s iPad. (Wiklileaks has never been shown to be inaccurate.)
3. What is on the smashed hard drives Awan is trying to retrieve from the FBI? (Oh, those Democrats and their hard drives.)
4. Why is Awan suddenly being legally represented at the highest level by Clinton ultra-loyalist Chris Gowan — a fact-checker for Bill Clinton’s memoir of all things? (They are already using the same right-wing conspiracy baloney they used in the Lewinski case.) Does this make sense if Awan’s just a low-life fraudster? Why not let him dangle?
5. Just what is the relationship, if any, between the Awan case and the unsolved Seth Rich murder? Is it entirely an accident that Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s brother Steven is accused of blocking the investigation? Denials from Debbie aren’t worth much anymore.
6. Where did the Wikileaks come from anyway? Was it really Russia?
Key among the findings of the independent forensic investigations is the conclusion that the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack. Of equal importance, the forensics show that the copying and doctoring were performed on the East coast of the U.S. Thus far, mainstream media have ignored the findings of these independent studies [see here and here].
The same poll revealed that over half of all British Muslims think homosexuality, the very act of gay sex, should be illegal in Britain. Another 23% want to tear down British common law and replace it with Islamic Sharia. Moreover, 39% believe that wives should always, without exception, obey the commands of their husbands; 31% of Muslim also believed that men (not women of course) should be legally permitted to practice polygamy and marry more than one wife.
That doesn’t sound like assimilation. How about America ?
‘Is it right to kill someone who insults the prophet?’
“Yes,” said the bearded man with the animated personality. “Because when you, every day you face frustration. And you know, every day you have, uh, you’re mad, or somebody says that, and you feel hate your soul. You could do anything you wanted. If you committed suicide, you don’t care, because your heart, your heart is telling you, ‘I don’t want to live no more,’ because you couldn’t take that much hate. Or you, you kill someone.”
The Center for Security Policy released a poll Tuesday that should give all Americans pause. The results show that a startling number of American Muslims, our fellow citizens, agree that violence is a legitimate response to those who insult Islam. A full majority of 51% “agreed that “Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to shariah.”
According to the just-released survey of Muslims, a majority (51%) agreed that “Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to shariah.” When that question was put to the broader U.S. population, the overwhelming majority held that shariah should not displace the U.S. Constitution (86% to 2%). …
Even more troubling, is the fact that nearly a quarter of the Muslims polled believed that, “It is legitimate to use violence to punish those who give offense to Islam by, for example, portraying the prophet Mohammed.”
A full 25% of those polled agreed that “violence against Americans here in the United States can be justified as part of the global jihad.”
Sherman and Sheridan suppressed sniping at Union soldiers by Confederate civilians by burning the towns (just the towns, not the townsfolk) that sheltered them. In other words, they forced collective responsibility upon a hostile population, a doctrine that in peacetime is entirely repugnant, but that in wartime becomes unavoidable.
I have read a lot about Sherman and his way of dealing with a hostile population was hang snipers and burn the villages that supported them.
Collective punishment has gotten a bad reputation from the Germans in World War I and World War II. They would round up innocent civilians and execute them to punish guerilla attacks in the area. I am not advocating anything like that.
“The police are going deeply into the Arab neighborhoods [in Jerusalem], which has not been done in the past,” he said. “We will demolish terrorists’ homes. We are allowing our forces to take strong action against those who throw rocks and firebombs. This is necessary in order to safeguard the security of Israeli citizens on the roads and everywhere.”
Palestinians may consider children expendable but houses are more precious. How would we implement such a policy ?
Many mosques have been used to store weapons and plan attacks.
The 38-page report includes photographic evidence of weapons being stored under pulpits and elsewhere in mosques during December and January’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. It notes that Israeli troops fighting Hizballah in Lebanon, U.S. troops fighting terrorists in Iraq and even Palestinian Authority officials in the West Bank have encountered similar practices.
Firm figures are elusive, but estimates are that the Saudis fund up to 80% of American mosques, at least in part. And their goal is the same here as it is elsewhere in the world where Islam must compete with other religions: to prevent Muslims from integrating into the host society.
If a terrorist is shown to have attended a mosque, that mosque should be closed.
The terrorists are also winning a psychological war in Europe. They identify police informants and force them to become suicide bombers. That is why so many are “Known Wolves.”
These attacks, in other words, are designed to impress the Muslim public as much as they are intended to horrify the western public. In so many words, the terrorists tell Muslims that western police agencies cannot protect them. If they cooperate with the police they will be found out and punished. The West fears the power of Islam: it evinces such fear by praising Islam as a religion of peace, by squelching dissent in the name of fighting supposed Islamophobia, and by offering concessions and apologies to Muslims.
Demolishing or closing some homes and a few mosques might signal more resolution than speeches by politicians. Deporting a few families would also be salutary.
Posted by Trent Telenko on 7th April 2017 (All posts by Trent Telenko)
In the aftermath of Pres. Trump’s cruise missile strike on a Syrian air field used to deliver chemical weapons of mass destruction on Islamist Syrian rebels, it is both a useful and needful thing to revisit my Sept 9, 2013 post on the policy choices Pres. Obama faced then.
Choices that Pres. Trump must now address in convincing a cynical and war weary American people that Syria is indeed a massive threat to American security — and especially individual freedom — at home.
This blog post made the argument that America had the military means to overthrow the Assad regime with an air-sea military campaign using air-laid sea and land mines, but that “Bush Derangement syndrome” on weapons of mass destruction made it impossible for American political elites in 2013 to take action.
The following is the close from that blog post that outlined the choices Pres. Obama flinched from in 2013 and Pres. Trump now faces with the American public:
The choice that the Obama Administration faces is that nothing America does or doesn’t do will change Syria from being a terrorist supporting, failed, 3rd World state. The choice at hand is what kind of terrorist supporting state our inaction or intervention will create, and the wider consequences of that choice, especially for American freedom at home.
Doing nothing means we will have a Iranian/Russian/Chinese supported WMD using Syrian terror state that harbors Iranian Nuclear, Chemical and Bioweapons production facilities.
Acting to depose Assad means we will have an ethnic cleansing, al-Qaeda supporting, economically & politically irrational terrorist state that hates Iran and the Syrian Alawites who staffed Iran’s WMD facilities.
The first is an existential threat to American freedom, the second is a manageable local problem for Israel and the Turks.
A wide ranging break-out of WMD across the world means they will be much more readily available to terrorist organizations. The tighter surveillance and security steps the American state will need to implement in order to address that threat at home will reduce the economic vitality of the American people as the national security state crowds out more and more freedom as the cost of “security.” Leaving us all very much where Benjamin Franklin predicted…neither having or deserving either.
It will take principled and competent American political leadership to persuade the American people to face these facts.
I don’t expect it to happen.
Our current American political elites won’t cross the “BDS Red Line” that American public elected Pres. Obama for anytime soon. Obama’s election and actions since were in accordance with the expressed will of the American people. Only horrible events, like British Prime Minister Nevile Chamberlain’s “Peace in our time” conference selling out Czechoslovakia swiftly followed by Hitler’s repudiation of it, will let the American people hear and see reality on the other side of the “Red Line.”
However, the first step down the road of invoking competent & principled American leadership is laying down a rhetorical marker against the day that WMD proliferation forces the American public to listen
This is the marker:
“It’s American Freedom at Home, STUPID!”
‘Nuff said.
The best place to fight WMD using terrorists is overseas with the military, not at home with emergency first responders in chemical warfare slime suits cleaning up the bodies after a WMD strike.
The Bush administration refused for numerous reasons to defend its policy choices or provide known intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, allowing Senate Democratic leaders Reid, Pelosi and eventually Pres. Obama to destroy all federal government credibility on the subject.
Pres. Obama when faced with the same issue flinched from crossing his self-made WMD “RED LINE.
We will now see if President Trump is better at communicating with the American people past the “Bush Derangement Syndrome” based WMD RED LINE than Pres. Obama was.
Obama’s goal, according to a close family friend, is to oust Trump from the presidency either by forcing his resignation or through his impeachment.
And Obama is being aided in his political crusade by his longtime consigliere, Valerie Jarrett, who has moved into the 8,200-square-foot, $5.3-million Kaloroma mansion with the former president and Michelle Obama, long time best friends.
Jarrett played a vital – if at times low-key – role in the Obama presidency. She lived in the White House, dined with the Obamas, and help shape his domestic and foreign policies.
She was also born in Iran and speaks Farsi. I wonder at her role in the Iran deal.
There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power.
History suggests that this low-intensity conflict within the ruling Elite is generally a healthy characteristic of leadership in good times. As times grow more troubled, however, the unity of the ruling Elite fractures into irreconcilable political disunity, which becomes a proximate cause of the dissolution of the Empire if it continues.
I recently proposed the idea that Wall Street now poses a strategic threat to national security and thus to the Deep State itself: Who Gets Thrown Under the Bus in the Next Financial Crisis? (March 3, 2014)
Posted by Trent Telenko on 7th December 2016 (All posts by Trent Telenko)
Today is the 75th anniversary of the December 7th, 1941 Imperial Japanese Navy’s (IJN) surprise aerial attack on the American Pacific Fleet’s “Battleship Row” at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. With this air attack, and air attacks in the following weeks on Clark Field in the Philippines, and on the British fleet off Malaya — sinking the new British battleship Prince of Wales and the WW1 era battlecruiser Repulse — the Japanese established unchallenged air and naval superiority across the Pacific and ran wild for six months.
The key failure that day leading up to the attack — A final point falure in a years long list of failures starting with the US Army Air Corps purge of fighter advocate Claire Chennault for his all too successful telephone-equipped ground observer air warning network that threatened the budget of the B-17 heavy bomber — was the ignored warning from the US Army SCR-270B radar at Opana Point, Hawaii as the IJN Strike Force flew in.
Then-Captain Claire Chennault’s 1933 Ft. Knox Air Defense Observer Network. It was so successful in catching bombardment formations that Chennault was black balled by the “Bomber Mafia” of two air chiefs of staff. This telephone based surveillance network was both effective and cheap…and a threat to the B-17 heavy bomber’s development budget. Photo Source: Coast Artillery Journal Mar-Apr 1934, pg. 39
