Urban said the target was “an ISIS-K planner,” but did not say whether the person played a role in organizing or carrying out the airport attack.
I'll just do a survey:
August 28, 2021
"The unmanned airstrike occurred in the Nangahar Province of Afghanistan. Initial indications are that we killed the target. We know of no civilian casualties."
Said Navy Capt. Bill Urban, a U.S. military spokesman, quoted in "U.S. says drone strike killed ISIS-K target as embassy warns Americans to leave airport 'immediately'" (WaPo).
ADDED: My confidence in my own wording of this poll is low to non-existent. What "report" — Capt. Urban's or WaPo's? I think WaPo has built in the doubt. And so, for that matter, has Capt. Urban, because he doesn't say why the person killed was the target, only that a person was killed and that person was the target. Were non-targets also killed? He doesn't say no. He says he doesn't know. Why doesn't he know? How do you know you surgically precisely got one imprecisely identified man, but you didn't hit anyone else? Oh, but he doesn't claim we didn't hit anyone else, just that they didn't hit anyone else that they knew to be civilians.
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so why did US let Taliban leaders fly in from Quatar >>> taking them out before landing makes more sense
Why didn’t they kill these ISIS terrorists weeks ago? Why do they kill terrorists AFTER the attack?
This is the equivalent to bombing an aspirin factory. LOOK! we did something.
Pathetic.
Kill 13 of ours, injure another 18 or so, we will take out 1 of your planners.
Very expensive way of taking out the enemy. Not very proportional like everyone insists on these days. We could have gotten one of theirs with a sniper at the airport tower.
Where's the video?
My vote of low confidence is not based on Urban or WaPo, neither of which I read, but on other reports of this Clinton/Obama special tactic of shooting a drone when the U.S. intelligence capability in the country is negative-zero and Biden was looking for anyone to hit in order to look tough.
Elsewhere I've seen people making reference to aspirin factories. THAT wouldn't surprise me.
95% of everything the CIA/NSA tell us is completely made up....so saith John Le Carre in the 60's and there is zero chance this story is true.
Why not just bomb an "important" "terrorist" operation that is actually just a janitor in an aspirin factory like Clinton did during the Lewinsky "thibg"?
Maybe the report is accurate. They blew a whole in something they called a target and killed it. With the information quoted, that could be a lone goat that got isolated from the herd.
Alas, my confidence in anything statement from the Pentagon or Foggy Bottom is non-existent. They can figure out who planned attack and surgically take that person out with collateral damage what-so-ever, but they need to provide a list to the Taliban of Americans in Afghanistan that they can't find, yet those Americans are in communication with members of Congress begging for rescue?
The White House lied about how many time Major the dog bit Secret Service agents (each day fro more than a week—it took a FOIA to find out). Why would we believe them about a convenient drone strike? They knew how to target an ISIS “planner” from over the horizon, but not that someone snuck a 25lb suicide vest with enhanced shrapnel up to the airport gate?
This story reminds me of 1998, when the media celebrated the cleverness of Bill Clinton in finding a way to get the Monica Lewinsky story off the front page after he killed a lone night watchman in an aspirin factory in Sudan with 13 multi-million dollar cruise missiles. 11 other Sudanese were wounded.
Good times.
Operation Infinite Reach it was called. It also included firing between 60 and 75 cruise missiles against suspected Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. Here's what Wikipedia says about that:
The missile strikes on al-Qaeda's Afghan training camps, aimed at preempting more attacks and killing bin Laden, damaged the installations and inflicted an uncertain number of casualties; however, bin Laden was not present at the time. Following the attacks, the ruling Taliban allegedly reneged on a promise to Saudi intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal to hand over bin Laden, and the regime instead strengthened its ties with the al-Qaeda chief.
And here we are...
We don't know who's left behind. We don't know the names of people who we've taken out. We don't know if we've escorted lifelong terrorists out of Afghanistan and sent them on their way to Reston, VA. We don't know any of this. But they sent a drone out to bomb a site. I guess the purpose is to act like you're fighting back?
For all we know, they just took out a young man who's job it was to bring in as many bags of Lay's potato chips as he could find before all Americans left. They don't know. Look at the people giving the press conferences. Do you think anybody knows anything up there? Maybe one thing. Just one thing we all know. One thing that is shared by everyone around the world at this moment:
Joe Biden is incapable of doing this job. His team is incapable of doing this job. America is in its most vulnerable moment in a century.
But, drone on.
Was the guy wearing a shirt that said "Baby Milk Plant"?
Narayanan said...
Question: so why did US let Taliban leaders fly in from Quatar[?]>>> taking them out before landing makes more sense
Answer: Hostages.
Why would you kill a ISIS terrorist when other ISIS terrorist can easily kill American citizens still stuck in Afghanistan?
This was not the planner of the Kabul attacks (they said that yesterday). Likely a known target that they took advantage of for the symbolism.
I hope we did this.
As to the truth value of the statement:
As our hostess points out, there are two basic levels of distrust here. Do you trust the Captain? Do you trust the WaPo? Further, does the Captain trust his superiors at this point?
If you are in DC right now you are a grifter until proven otherwise. Politicians, government employees, contractors, lobbyists, journalists-it's a giant metastasized parasitic leech. Mulder was right-trust no one.
I like the poll. Based only on what we're getting from the WaPo and the Captain, I would have:
- Very high confidence we actually killed someone
- High confidence the someone was hostile to us
- Moderate confidence he was actually IS-K
- Low to minimal confidence that We Got The Guy Who Planned the Murder of Our Servicemembers.
I am quite confident this strike represented this message to the American people: "I vowed decisive action and now I've taken it." I am less confident it will be received that way by our people, and still less so that the enemy will see it that way.
Anyone besides me remember the “scandal” in September of 2020 when it was leaked that Donald Trump had called his generals “a bunch of pussies.”
Looks like he was right. Again.
Well, I certainly feel better about the entire plan now.
[Do I really need a /sarc tag?]
If Joe Biden’s generals told him to do the withdrawal from Afghanistan like this, then he needs to fire them. If they told him to not do it like this, then he needs to resign.
If nothing else, we know that the spelling of Nangarhar Province is wrong.
>>How do you know you surgically precisely got one imprecisely identified man, but you didn't hit anyone else? Oh, but he doesn't claim we didn't hit anyone else, just that they didn't hit anyone else that they knew to be civilians.
Welcome back to Clintonian sentence parsing.
I would have walk outside to see for myself if these spokesmen told me the sky was blue or the Sun rises in the east. In short, these people are paid liars.
"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"
Biden can't even wag the dog.
The asininity on display is absolute.
The perfumed princes parade their unmatched Whack-A-Mole capabilities to distract from comprehensive failure on the tactical, operational, and strategic levels.
And their political bosses are even more pathetic.
The report I heard last night was “the target and an associate” which could be another ISIS guy, the target’s spouse or friend or child. Ambiguous wording can mean they don’t know or they know but won’t say or something less definite. But let’s consider why Biden keeps talking about “over the horizon” capability. Because droning targets is pretty much ALL we have for in-country capabilities now unless we use higher kinetic— and less discriminate— methods like cruise missiles or guided bombs.
All because Joe refused to leave the 2500-strong peace-keeping force. Does he also wanna bug out of Korea? Is this related to disarming Ukraine?
Perhaps the use of a "drone" to effect a "surgical strike" was to contrast this raid to an earlier one ...
On April 13, 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump ordered a targeted strike on ISIL-KP by use of the second largest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal at the time. The bomb was a 21,000 lb. weapon called the Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb; nicknamed the "Mother Of All Bombs" (MOAB). The intended target was ISIL militants hiding inside tunnels, most of whom came "from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Russia, India and other countries." Mohammad Radmanish, spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Defense stated: "Most militants killed in the attack were from Pakistan, India, Philippines, and Bangladesh." It was the first time the MOAB had been used in combat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nangarhar_Province
Some one was killed, somewhere, doing something that may or may not have been peripherally involved. Taliban/ISIS-k shrug and move on.
Let me guess. We got the targets from the Taliban? The Taliban confirmed the kills? Did we kill friends or enemies? Have the US forces become the air wing for the Taliban?
The timing on some things look really concerning. CIA chief meets with Taliban - reports come out US gave the a list of names we want evacuated to the Taliban - Big boom at the air port to slow the evacuation.
My Heart is Breaking for our troops there right now with their security mostly outsourced to Taliban. Are our Generals really this bad or are they afraid to speak out? Do they just fear for their pension or by being totally ruined by the system?
When lost, people tend to walk in circles.
It's a reality TV show all the way down. After not watching a news or weather channel for many months, I turned on Fox, The Weather Channel, CNN, and MSNBC briefly yesterday. It's all reality TV show. The Weather Channel Guy was damn near speaking in tongues trying to whip up the terror. Terror apparently equals ratings. It seems that every congressperson from the state of TX was either on Fox riffing or waiting in the Green Room for their turn. CNN and MSNBC are beneath parody.
On the subject of Trump taking it upon himself to be the first President to communicate and negotiate directly with the Taliban...
Just some amazing, blathering, almost completely unintelligible jibberish from Trump, in being fed open softball questions by Hugh Hewitt. As always, a transcript is the best way to examine carefully how Trump’s florid, emotional language wins with his cultist fans, and how it is totally nonsensical to any of Trump’s serious-minded critics.
CNN supplies the transcription:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/28/politics/donald-trump-hugh-hewitt/index.html
All I want from the near term political future in America is to see Trump under oath and under cross examination. On the record. To see all of the nonsensical garbage that Trump spews, that Althouse sees as emotional political genius, deconstructed line by line and bit by bit.
I don't want to believe that the people running the show are this cynical because it seems almost psychopathic if they are, deliberately precipitating a chaotic and dangerous end to the Afghanistan mission, confidently predicting that there may well be a terrorist attack at the airport as a result and then after the expected attack happens, killing more soldiers and Marines than have died in Afghanistan in years as well as dozens of civilians, responding with a random drone strike on somebody that they can't possibly know was involved or even exists since they've abandoned all in country resources that would allow them to to know who's who and where they are and what they're doing.
This reeks of Clinton bombing an aspirin factory and killing the night watchman so he could distract from the little blue dress with the stain on it.
“As our hostess points out, there are two basic levels of distrust here. Do you trust the Captain? Do you trust the WaPo?”
Two levels? Many, many, more than that. Distrust of an account of a specific narrative is informed by a lifetime of watching the Establishment lie their asses off. I’m surprised Althouse even brought this one up. I understand the point is some lawyerly parsing but, Jesus, we’re long past the place where even a shred of credibility can be taken as given.
Remember Pat Tillman? He left the NFL, left his million dollar salary, left the soft life in the US, and enlisted in the Army. He was killed in Afghanistan by friendly fire in 2004. The Army repeatedly lied about exactly what happened. They wanted a hero, not someone whose death would be an embarrassment. In 2008, after a lengthy investigation, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform stated that, "Its investigation of the matter was frustrated by a near universal lack of recall among senior officials at the White House and the military." There are still questions about Tillman’s death. Yes, the Army lied because it served their purposes. Would the Army lie about killing someone labeled The Planner? Yes.
Based on Vietnam-Afghanistan history of slogs, the reports are likely bullshit
Let me provide a bit of context so you all can be a little more informed.
Typically what happens is we have a list of targets. Usually a tree of sorts because most military organizations like "ISIS-K" and the Taliban are generally vertical hierarchies.
We gather general patterns of life on these individuals. We take all of their texts and calls for a period of time and translate them. We translate all of their stupid cookie recipes and funeral parties and other obvious code talk and get a general idea of what they are doing. They are really quite boring people.
Then we somewhat randomly scan for them. I will skip some details. But if you see a plane or a drone flying in a lazy circle then someone at the center of that circle is likely having a grid pulled on them. The Taliban and other enemies learned to put little sticker lights on their phones that lit up when RF signals were going in/out. If you aren't in a phone call and that sticker lights up someone is putting you in a phone call. Our modern phones are constantly sending bullshit out and spying on us. The next step is listening to tapes of recent calls on that phone and voice matching to make sure you didn't give your phone to someone else.
Then once you have a 100-200 meter grid on that device they start looking around with a camera and counting people/vehicles/compounds. Fun fact. They like cars on roads because if there is a device moving along a road and if you are the only car for half a mile they know who is in that vehicle. My job was actually finding the device inside a compound/city.
Then there is a bunch of officer nonsense. Listening to this was bad 10 years ago. I guarantee it is worse now.
Then they send in some sort of missile or bomb and blow things up once they determine they wont get fired for doing it.
Then they determine how many people they killed. They would send a unit like ours in to clean up and identify all of the mostly dead burned corpses. In lieu of that they look at the camera feeds and translate everyone's phone calls and texts to determine who they killed.
Note: they don't need translators in the US.
Coming to a Trump voting district near you. It is pretty clear they view us with much more hatred than the Taliban.
Well the Pentagon spokesperson now claims that the drone strike killed two people and injured a third and that "no civilians were injured".
Let's translate that. Two people--could be high level ISIS guys or could be two farmers on their way to a goat buying festival--were in a car on a road. Somebody at Nellis AFB in Nevada or maybe a forward drone control base in the Mideast put a Hellfire missile into the car. I mean sticking a Hellfire missile in a target's ear is the usual way of doing these things.
Did they get the right guys? Who knows-- there's nobody around to police up body parts or identification after a drone strike. Was either one of the two driving the vehicle? If not, I doubt the driver survived.
What we have here is a way of making Biden look butch. If a couple of innocent Afghans have to be sacrificed, well that's okay. But maybe they got the right guys--but then again maybe not. The one ISIS guy that we know is dead was the suicide bomber at the Kabul airport. Otherwise, not so much.
Igv is correct. One bad guy taken out by expensive weaponry: Not Cost Effective.
My take is they definitely killed some people. It is really not that hard to find them and kill them or capture them.
The hard part is to get permission to do so.
It will have 0 effect on whatever "ISIS-K" actually is or their operational capability. They would have to kill in the range of 100 or so "planners" to degrade capabilities to any noticeable degree.
It is interesting to see that most of the Haqqani's are still alive. Is it weird to recognize their names? Not really interesting more infuriating. But whatevs.
The cynical part of me thinks they have confirmed the suicide bomber is now dead. And the US had a part in his death. Medals for everyone.
It is standard procedure for the US to claim all those we kill in foreign lands are enemy combatants, VC, guerilla terrorists, etc. such that, by definition, no one we kill is (or can be) civilian casualties.
The truth is the US has killed and maimed far more innocent civilians in other lands in the past 20 years than the 9/11 terrorists killed here on 9/11. (And 9/11 itself was blowback, a violent response by actors angry at US military presence in their holy lands.)
Biden's military is not letting "the big guy" deliver the good news.
My confidence level in the military is low - it's not related to Biden.* Look at the USS Fitz and the USS John McCain, the findings that our military is unprepared but can ace the pronoun test. The entire leadership needs to resign - I'm talking all flag officers and most senior NCOs. We need to start anew.
*I have no confidence in Biden either.
"Joe Biden is incapable of doing this job. His team is incapable of doing this job. America is in its most vulnerable moment in a century."
He and his team are no more incapable than any of the presidents (and their teams) who preceded him in the past 20 years. In other words, they were all lying incompetents prosecuting criminal, futile wars we were bound to lose.
It is our reckless, heedless, bullying and violent foreign policy for the past half-century that has rendered us so vulnerable. The American Empire is its our "Fall of the Roman Empire" phase.
Proportional response leads inevitably to one of two results -- perpetual war or defeat of the side practicing proportional warfare.
Could have kept them in prison at Bagram and handed them over to our allies, the Taliban, to keep an eye on. But "Biden empties jails of terrorists and angry that they went back to terrorism, martyrs a couple of people and tells us they were the guilty parties," is not the kind of headline our state press would write, unless, of course, it had been Trump who had authored the disaster, rather than Biden.
Our government is led by by a man, who on his best day was a foolish corrupt blowhard with truth issues and now is suffering from obvious dementia. His second in command is an incompetent woman who literally slept her way to the top, is extremely unpopular even in her own party, and seems to answer all questions with a nervous cackle. Our military brass are filled with incompetents who completely mismanaged what has become one of the greatest mistakes in the country's history, quite possibly because they are far more interested in diversity and wokeness than actually doing their jobs. Our intelligence services have repeatedly shown their inability to provide good intelligence and seem to be surprised by everything. Our media in general and the Washington Post in particular have dropped the mask and are now blatant partisan hacks whose reporting is solely driven by narratives to produce the desired results of their staff and paymasters, whomever that happens to be at the time. It is all bad actors, incompetents, and grifters all the way down.
Well, golly, if you can't trust that who can you trust?
I wonder how this plays internationally? US uses drone to assassinate Afghani claiming without evidence that the target was associated with ISIS-K in effort to improve Presidential approval ratings. I'm sure glad the grown ups are back to improve the US image abroad.
BillieBob Thorton said...
This is the equivalent to bombing an aspirin factory. LOOK! we did something.
Pathetic
Formatting and punishment is wrong, Billy.
S/b "LOOK! we did something pathetic."
President Biden, congratulations. Just a few questions :
1. Why does it seem we are always in a reactionary posture and never proactive?
2. Why did we not deploy a drone strike three days ago? Was the intelligence we had yesterday better than the intelligence that was available before the bombings at the Afghan airbase?
3. Would an airstrike three days earlier have prevented the bombing or was the ISIS plan already implemented?
4, Will the killing of two ISIS leaders prevent future bombing, or was the motive only revenge (it's fine with me if it was, but I would like to know).
5. You say this is the most dangerous period of the Afgan withdrawal. Are there any other ISIS terrorist leaders who need eliminate with extreme prejudice? If so, are we going to wait until after the next attack to do it?
Thank you for the update. I voted "low" because we have little intelligence on the ground to verify the target's identification and trying to do that from the air is difficult at best.
"People in authority lie."
Ted Kennedy
So, the US military has binders full of names and locations of ISIS planners who can be targeted whenever an ISIS attack kills US soldiers or marines. I guess it's too much to expect that these folks would've been targeted and killed over the last 20 years. No, gotta carefully save them for Joe Biden to look decisive whenever his chickens come home to roost.
An expected conclusion from the Trump followers on board here that the reported act of killing an ISIS-K planner was a Biden administration lie. This result was predictable and required no Althouse poll to know how the vote would go among the Leader of the Laundromat's gang who believe every Trump word ever spoken, including the Big Lie about Trump winning the election and his irrational foaming at the mouth that brought about the January 6 insurrection.
This brings to mind another conclusion that became accepted history that Osama bin Laden planned, financed and executed the 9/11 attack using hijacked aircraft. All this bin Laden leadership was believed by the 9/11 Commission simply because the real plot leader, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad (KSM), told investigators that our generally ineffective Saudi and his mujahideen guerrilla fighters did the deed.
Compelling FBI evidence appears to trace the bulk of the 9/11 funding directly back to Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, but according to the unquestionable word of KSM, bin Laden provided 85 - 95 percent of the funds for the plot from his personal wealth, with the remainder coming from general al Qaeda funds. But if KSM intended to infer that bin Laden used the wealth inherited from his Saudi family or derived from any business activity (such as renting his army to the CIA), this claim is almost certainly wrong - because bin Laden was not known to personally finance his terrorism. What kind of a leader would Osama have been if he could have turned the world upside down through terrorism but then duck and hide in fear for more than ten years until he supposedly died in Abbottabad when the assassination squad arrived?
Wag the Dog:The Sequel
Pentagon briefer: "We killed a high value target". As opposed to a goat herder.
Reminds me of the MSM: "According to a Senior White House official". It's never a junior staffer or mail room intern.
I am going to put this right here- who is the commenter?
"It isn’t about the details of the pullout. We are going to get every American out; we will get tens of thousands of Afghan allies out. Probably without any American casualties. I hope so. And think so. And when we do, what the fuck is left for TrumpWorld to bitch about?"
Talk about a comment not aging well. This commenter should probably be leading the Joint Chiefs.
Robert Cook writes, "The American Empire is its our "Fall of the Roman Empire" phase." [sic]
To construct an historical analogy that might favorably impress someone more sophisticated than a San Mateo Community College ceramic arts freshman one must begin with a knowledge of said history more detailed than the My Weekly Reader version.
An expected conclusion from the Trump followers on board here that the reported act of killing an ISIS-K planner was a Biden administration lie. This result was predictable and required no Althouse poll to know how the vote would go among the Leader of the Laundromat's gang who believe every Trump word ever spoken, including the Big Lie about Trump winning the election and his irrational foaming at the mouth that brought about the January 6 insurrection.
This brings to mind the conclusion that became accepted history that Osama bin Laden planned, financed and executed the 9/11 attack using hijacked aircraft. All this bin Laden leadership was believed by the 9/11 Commission simply because the real plot leader, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad (KSM), told investigators that our generally ineffective Saudi and his mujahideen guerrilla fighters did the deed.
Compelling FBI evidence appears to trace the bulk of the 9/11 funding directly back to Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, but according to the unquestionable word of KSM, bin Laden provided 85 - 95 percent of the funds for the plot from his personal wealth, with the remainder coming from general al Qaeda funds. But if KSM intended to infer that bin Laden used the wealth inherited from his Saudi family or derived from any business activity (such as renting his army to the CIA), this claim is almost certainly wrong - because bin Laden was not known to personally finance his terrorism. What kind of a leader would Osama have been if he could have turned the world upside down through terrorism but then duck and hide in fear for more than ten years until he supposedly died in Abbottabad when the assassination squad arrived?
Our Top People suck at Thunderdome.
I am Laslo.
Sometimes, you just have to feel sorry for li'l gadfly.
After all, he tries so very hard and he's so very earnest.
Unfortunately, given that he is a wild conspiracy whackjob (still believes Putin installed Trump in 2016 by changing vote totals, still believes Trump laundered billions for the russkis, still believes Trump communicated with Putin via Alpha Bank/Trump Tower servers, and hundreds more just like that), he is never going to rise above hs status as a standard lefty troll...and not a particularly bright on at that.
On the plus side: he's not steve uhr!
Leland: "I wonder how this plays internationally? US uses drone to assassinate Afghani claiming without evidence that the target was associated with ISIS-K in effort to improve Presidential approval ratings. I'm sure glad the grown ups are back to improve the US image abroad."
Its not playing well globally because, unlike gadfly, they arent as easily misled sheep as he/she/xe is.
Pro-marxist LLR Chuck: "All I want from the near term political future in America is to see Trump under oath and under cross examination. On the record. To see all of the nonsensical garbage that Trump spews, that Althouse sees as emotional political genius, deconstructed line by line and bit by bit"
....whistling sotly while backing up slowly with no sudden movements.
For the sake of charity toward our thoroughly exposed far left lunatic FakeCon Chuck, I am going to assume thats the multiple pitchers of gin and tonics talking....
Gadfly,
We longer trust we are being told the truth. The reason for this is all the lies they have told up to this point, plus all the fucking mistakes these same people have made along the way. We are done taking at face value the words of liars and imcompetents.
He and his team are no more incapable than any of the presidents (and their teams) who preceded him in the past 20 years.
The golden words of that world-renown military genius and political scientist deluxe, Grand Admiral Cookie.
I'm probably not the only member of the commentariat to notice that the defenders of Bugout Biden, having realized the futility of every other artful dodge, mission accomplished, blame Trump, or failure-was-inevitable tactic tried over the last week, each of them about as fragrant as a platter of 9-day-old sashimi, have shifted to heaping equal measures of condemnation on Biden and his predecessors in office. It's akin to blaming the disappearance of MH370 on the Wright Brothers -- if Man was meant to fly, he'd have wings, glodurnit! -- you know the drill.
The purpose, of course, is to dilute Biden's culpability in a sea of general presidential corruption, the depths of which would include abuses by the sainted Nobel laureate, Lord Zero Himself, which the purveyors of this transparent lie hope we will not notice, convinced as they hope we are that George W. Bush served four consecutive terms in the White House. Thus, if Atilla the Bush merited those 16 years behind the Big Desk, then Wanderin' Joe certain deserves an 8-year shot, right? The argument, if it can be dignified as such, amounts to this: Biden is no worse than average. Next week it will be "only Biden can save us from Cackles Kamala".
Cookie,
While I do appreciate your cynicism, setting the dial to 11 obscures all reasoning and the ability to differentiate.
Don't be so cynical. There is no reason to lie. Nobody is getting fired anyway.
Was the guy wearing a shirt that said "Baby Milk Plant"?
You are confused, Humperdink.
Disinformation will do that to ya.
I have noticed that whenever LLR Chuck or his Mini-me gadfly are completely out of their depth on a topic (98.6% of the time), their lefty cut and pastes (offered in lieu of insight and/or personal experience), their word counts and corresponding unearned smugness increase exponentially.
There is probably a term in modern psychology that captures that tendency.
An expected conclusion from the Trump followers on board here that the reported act of killing an ISIS-K planner was a Biden administration lie.
@gadfly, not quite right. Obviously I cannot speak for every Trump supporter, but my own position is that the Biden administration would say that their drone strike killed an ISIS-K planner whether the person killed really was an ISIS-K planner or a random civilian just trying to provide for his family with a war going on around him. In fact, I believe that this administration would claim that their drone strike killed an ISIS-K planner, even if there was no drone strike whatsoever. Really, how many times can we be lied to before we start being skeptical?
"Unmanned" has gone through a redefinition, but it's fair to say that our leaders are unmanned in the old sense.
As for the US empire, just as there is a lot of ruin in a country, there's a lot of decline in an empire.
All the same, black swans happen and there's no guarantee of a smooth ride for any of us.
"gang who believe every Trump word ever spoken"
That wouldn't be me. I assumed Trump was either lying or exaggerating on most topics he cared to talk about. That said, my doubt of Trump's veracity doesn't mean I take what the current administration as the solid truth either. Governments lie when it suits their purposes and they believe they can get away with it.
In this instance, the strike is rather convenient, and the details are rather sketchy. I don't doubt the recently departed was ISIS, and thus deserved his fate. My guess is though, that he was very low level and not worth the $100,000 middle it took to send him on his way. The tell is them not releasing the name. ISIS certainly knows who he is, so should we.
I voted "low" on the story we killed one ISIS-K member but now it seems we killed two. And couple days ago I read that ISIS-K exploded two bombs but now it seems it was only one. Can the Army generals count? Can the intelligence services count? Zero confidence from now on.
The only thing we can be sure of as had been demonstrated by the events from January of this year going forward that Trump was spot on right about the swamp. But he either underestimated or lied about how deep and how fast the swamp is. Indeed throughout the entire Trump presidency we could see the incompetence and malignancy of the swamp but most presumed this was a wilful intention to undermine Trump and not an intentional demonstration of grift, arrogant mendacity, unbridled resentment and entitlement and real stupidity and incompetence. Stunningly the swamp really is profoundly deep and large and everything most presumed was an act to discredit Trump. It doesn't seem likely the rot will ever be excised.
the leftists have succeeded. they gave the enemy the names of people to kill. and now, like the leftists on this blog, they are shocked. blaming it on trump is all they have to say now.
The NY Post reported on Taliban’s hunt for those to helped the U.S. and Western allies:
The Taliban has mobilized a special unit, called Al Isha, to hunt down Afghans who helped US and allied forces — and it’s using US equipment and data to do it.
Nawazuddin Haqqani, one of the brigade commanders over the Al Isha unit, bragged in an interview with Zenger News that his unit is using US-made hand-held scanners to tap into a massive US-built biometric database and positively identify any person who helped the NATO allies or worked with Indian intelligence. Afghans who try to deny or minimize their role will find themselves contradicted by the detailed computer records that the US left behind in its frenzied withdrawal. (…)
WSJ reports ...
The missile used by the U.S. in the airstrike, called an R9X, is inert. Instead of exploding, the weapon ejects a halo of six large blades stowed inside the skin of the missile, which deploy at the last minute to shred the target of the strike, allowing military commanders to pinpoint their target and reduce the possibility for civilian casualties.
[ ... ]
At the strike site in Nangarhar, Rahamunullah, a neighbor said three people were killed and four others wounded, including a woman, contradicting the Pentagon’s assessment.
The strike appeared to cause limited damage to a house. Video from the scene viewed by The Wall Street Journal showed a small blast hole outside the home next to a fire-charred auto rickshaw. The walls were pockmarked with shrapnel, and the windows of the building had been blown out. Clothes, sandals and furniture were tossed around the rooms.
Staff Sgt. Darin T. Hoover, 31, of Salt Lake City, Utah; Sgt. Johanny Rosariopichardo, 25, of Lawrence, Massachusetts; Sgt. Nicole L. Gee, 23, of Sacramento, California; Cpl. Hunter Lopez, 22, of Indio, California; Cpl. Daegan W. Page, 23, of Omaha, Nebraska; Cpl. Humberto A. Sanchez, 22, of Logansport, Indiana; Lance Cpl. David L. Espinoza, 20, of Rio Bravo, Texas; Lance Cpl. Jared M. Schmitz, 20, of St. Charles, Missouri; Lance Cpl. Rylee J. McCollum, 20, of Jackson, Wyoming; Lance Cpl. Dylan R. Merola, 20, of Rancho Cucamonga, California; and Lance Cpl. Kareem M. Nikoui, 20, of Norco, California.
The deceased also include Navy Hospitalman Maxton W. Soviak, 22, of Berlin Heights, Ohio, and Army Staff Sgt. Ryan C. Knauss, 23, of Corryton, Tennessee.
Their deaths are the result of Biden's hubris. Just so he could stand in front of the cameras on 9/11 and tell the world he finally got us out of Afghanistan. There is a special place in hell for this piece of shit and everyone who voted for him.
TWWren said...
President Biden, congratulations. Just a few questions :
1. Why does it seem we are always in a reactionary posture and never proactive?
Because they don't actually want to finish off our enemies. We could have done that at any point. It was catch and release and thumb twiddles for years.
2. Why did we not deploy a drone strike three days ago? Was the intelligence we had yesterday better than the intelligence that was available before the bombings at the Afghan airbase?
It is all theater. They could wipe out ISIS/Taliban at any point.
3. Would an airstrike three days earlier have prevented the bombing or was the ISIS plan already implemented?
That airstrike No. About 500 airstrikes and some good faith would have though.
4, Will the killing of two ISIS leaders prevent future bombing, or was the motive only revenge (it's fine with me if it was, but I would like to know).
The motive wasn't even revenge. I would not doubt they picked a couple scrubs ISIS wont miss. This action was completely irrelevant.
5. You say this is the most dangerous period of the Afgan withdrawal. Are there any other ISIS terrorist leaders who need eliminate with extreme prejudice? If so, are we going to wait until after the next attack to do it?
It is all theater. They are a bunch of scrubs walking around in medieval huts. They don't have a bunch of first world bullshit weakness like a lot of Americans on one hand, but most of them can't read on the other.
Per Yancey whose only fault is that he is wrong when evaluating truth:
"We longer trust we are being told the truth. The reason for this is all the lies they have told up to this point, plus all the fucking mistakes these same people have made along the way. We are done taking at face value the words of liars and imcompetents."
But buying ivermectin deworming meds from crooked doctors and pharmacists online for outrageous prices to treat, prevent or even cure Covid-19 is a perfectly ethical because getting rich from the weak-minded is somehow magically not against the law.
Politicians are always willing to lie to make a buck and that has always been the case with Trump - but you always take his words at his "horse paste" values. As for mistakes, we have endured four years of Trumpian screwups accompanied by personal attacks, one of which was his recent surrender to our enemy that named a get-out-of-town date without consulting Congress.
But buying ivermectin deworming meds from crooked doctors and pharmacists online for outrageous prices to treat, prevent or even cure Covid-19 is a [sic] perfectly ethical…
@gadfly, India uses Ivermectin and has — or so I understand — a near-zero death rate from Coronavirus. Japan is considering following suit, and may have already decided to go to Ivermectin as I write this. Are they stupid? Or do the American “experts” have tunnel vision over vaccination?
Politicians are always willing to lie to make a buck and that has always been the case with Trump
True for most politicians, including all Democrats. As regards Trump, asserted without evidence, one notes.
"1. Why does it seem we are always in a reactionary posture and never proactive?"
Oh? 20 years of US troops carrying out military actions in a land we invaded--not because Afghanistan had made a strike at us, as they had not, but (purportedly) to capture bin Laden, who escaped, terminating our (purported) purpose for being there--is a "a reactionary posture"? That's as aggressive--excuse me--as "proactive" as fuck!
Always a laugh when gadfly tries to evaluate the truth of things. Still believes the Russians put Trump in office, don't you, gadfly?
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