haha this is baddddassssssss.
McChrystal's 'Team America'
In the Rolling Stone article that kiboshed Gen. Stanley McChrystal's career, writer Michael Hastings notes that longtime confidants of McChrystal who were with him in Afghanistan under the NATO/ISAF force referred to themselves as "Team America," an homage to South Park's balls-out parody of special forces. (The SOF guys love South Park.)
read the rest at the atlantic
looks like the love child of the terminator and an arrow.
Taranis: The £143million unmanned stealth jet that will hit targets in another continent
Defence firm BAE Systems today officially unveiled its first ever high-tech unmanned stealth jet.
The Taranis, named after the Celtic god of thunder, is about the same size as a Hawk jet and is equipped with stealth equipment and an 'autonomous' artificial intelligence system.
The plane will test the possibility of developing the first ever autonomous stealthy Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV) that would ultimately be capable of precisely striking targets at long range, even in another continent.
via daily mail
Say what you will about Bush, he always knew to listen to his Generals.
Furious President Obama summons Gen. Stanley McChrystal to D.C.
The face to face comes as pundits are already calling for McChrystal to resign for insubordination.
The article, titled "The Runaway General", appears in the magazine later this week. It contains a number of jabs by McChrystal and his staff aimed not only at the president but also at Vice President Joe Biden, special envoy Richard Holbrooke, Karl Eikenberry, the ambassador to Afghanistan, and others.
McChrystal described his first meeting with Obama as disappointing and said that Obama was unprepared for the meeting.
National Security Adviser Jim Jones is described by a McChrystal aide as a “clown” stuck in 1985.
via politico
the one thing gadaffi got right..
Gadaffi’s army of all-female, all-virgin bodyguards
Libyan leader Muammar al-Gadaffi is a one of a kind dictator. The Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya is guarded by an elite corps of beautiful female bodyguards.
The bodyguards, who allegedly number over 200, are all trained in firearms and the martial arts. Gaddafi also claims that the bodyguards are all virgins. We can’t verify the veracity of that one, unfortunately. But it does make for some killer PR. In fact, a documentary was even made about them back in 2004.
see more videos and the rest of the story here
I'm not one for conspiracies, but i don't put anything past the Russians. I was skeptical when this video came out of shots being fired at the crash scene. I was still skeptical when the guy who shot that film was stabbed to death mysteriously, because why would any of this benefit the Russians? Well, it has now been discovered that Russians obtained hundreds of NATO and Polish military secrets (including the identities of Allied spies) from the crash, and clearly had something to gain.
NATO code compromise
The recent crash of a Polish military transport that killed most of Warsaw's senior civilian and military leaders was not only a human catastrophe for a key U.S. ally. NATO sources said that, in addition to the loss of nearly 100 pro-U.S. Polish leaders, the crash provided Moscow with a windfall of secrets.
The crash killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski in western Russia on April 10 and decapitated Poland's military, killing two service chiefs, key military aides and several national security officials, many of whom were carrying computers and pocket memory sticks that contained sensitive NATO data.
The compromise of the codes is considered what electronic spies call a "break" for Moscow code-breakers. New NATO codes almost certainly were issued to allied militaries immediately after the crash.
But if the Russian electronic intelligence service, known as the Federal Agency of Government Communications and Information, was able to recover and use the communication key code from the wreckage, electronic spies will be able to decode months' or perhaps years' worth of scrambled communications that are routinely gathered electronically for just such an occasion.
The coded communications, if decrypted, would reveal some of NATO's most intimate secrets, such as plans for defenses and even the identities of agents or allied eavesdropping sources.
full story via the washington times
i hope these assholes die a slow, painful death. if that was my son/father/brother i'd gladly spend the rest of my life in prison just to remove that plague from existence.
Marine's dad ordered to pay protesters' court fees
BALTIMORE - The father of a Marine killed in Iraq and whose funeral was picketed by anti-gay protesters from Kansas was ordered to pay the protesters' appeal costs, his lawyers said Monday.
On Friday, Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ordered Snyder to pay $16,510 to Fred Phelps. Phelps is the leader of Topeka's Westboro Baptist Church, which conducted protests at Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder's funeral in 2006.
Attorneys also said Snyder is struggling to come up with fees associated with filing a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court.
via
*just as a disclaimer, mindsize does not advocate nor encourage the use of terrorism against any peoples or for any means*
i've never heard of this group until today. this all female terrorist group is comprised of widows of men who were casualties in the russian/chechnya conflict, and want revenge.
Hunt for 'Black Widow' terror gang after female suicide bombers kill at least 38 in bomb attacks on Moscow trains
Police in Moscow were tonight searching for female accomplices of two women suicide bombers who killed at least 37 people and injured 65.
Analysis of CCTV footage inside the Red Arrow underground trains of the two suicide bombers has revealed they were accompanied by two other women.
Their faces were not destroyed in the explosion, increasing the chance of successfully identifying them, and video from other cameras in Moscow Metro stations has also helped identify the faces of the two women who accompanied them and a man.
President Dmitry Medvedev declared Russia would act 'without compromise' to root out terrorists as he ordered airports to be put on alert and security to be stepped up throughout the country.
But suspicion has fallen on Muslim militants from the North Caucasus, where the Kremlin is fighting a growing Islamist insurgency spreading from Chechnya to neighbouring Dagestan and Ingushetia.
Alexander Bortnikov, head of Russia's Federal Security Service, said the terrorists were likely to have been 'black widows', Muslim women radicalised by the situation in the North Caucasus.
Analysts said the involvement of women was similar to the 'black widows' in Checnya - women who had lost brothers or husbands to Russian forces in the Chechen conflict.
Final destination Iran?
Published on 14 Mar 2010
Hundreds of powerful US “bunker-buster” bombs are being shipped from California to the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in preparation for a possible attack on Iran.
The Sunday Herald can reveal that the US government signed a contract in January to transport 10 ammunition containers to the island. According to a cargo manifest from the US navy, this included 387 “Blu” bombs used for blasting hardened or underground structures.
Experts say that they are being put in place for an assault on Iran’s controversial nuclear facilities. There has long been speculation that the US military is preparing for such an attack, should diplomacy fail to persuade Iran not to make nuclear weapons.
Although Diego Garcia is part of the British Indian Ocean Territory, it is used by the US as a military base under an agreement made in 1971.
The Sunday Herald reported in 2007 that stealth bomber hangers on the island were being equipped to take bunker-buster bombs.
full story via herald
the federal government is supposed to do 2 things: deliver the mail and protect our borders. obama needs to keep that in mind or he's going to lose a lot more than the vote on healthcare.
this should have been shot down before it got anywhere near the rio grande.
Mexican military copter over U.S. neighborhood
BROWNSVILLE — The Zapata County sheriff Thursday was questioning why a Mexican military helicopter was hovering over homes on the Texas side of the Rio Grande.
It was one of the more jarring incidents of the fourth week of border tensions sparked by drug killings, and rumors of such killings, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.
Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez said he'd reviewed photos of the chopper flown by armed personnel Tuesday over a residential area known as Falcon Heights-Falcon Village near the binational Falcon Lake, just south of the Starr-Zapata county line. He said the helicopter appeared to have the insignia of the Mexican navy.
“My understanding is the U.S. military were informed,” he said. “I don't know what action was taken, if any.”
via my san antonio news
i wonder if this will include more photo-shopped images of their arsenal.
i knew the canucks were good for something.
Canada’s Ambassador to Tehran Was a CIA Spy
Jan. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Canada’s ambassador to Tehran from 1977 to 1980, Ken Taylor, who helped hide U.S. embassy personnel during the Iranian revolution, was a spy for the Central Intelligence Agency, the Globe and Mail reported.
Taylor won widespread U.S. gratitude and became the “de facto CIA station chief” in Tehran after Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in 1979, taking 63 people hostage, the Globe said, citing an interview with the former ambassador.
Had his spying been discovered Taylor told the Globe “the Iranians wouldn’t have tolerated it and the consequences may have been severe."
it's sad to think that we've gone from citizen soldiers in WWII, to this...
Report: A Problem Finding Quality Recruits
More than 670,000 young Virginians could not join today's military because of educational, legal or physical problems, including the need to lose weight.
And that's the good news. The nation as a whole is doing worse.
Across the country, 75 percent of Americans ages 17 to 24 are unable to enlist because they failed to graduate from high school, have a criminal record or are physically unfit, according to the report.
The military is meeting its recruiting goals for now, but the poor economy is helping by not creating many private-sector jobs.
BAD NUMBERS
26 million: Raw number representing the 75 percent of Americans ages 17 to 24 who are ineligible for military service.
27 percent: Number of young Americans who are too overweight to join the military.
32 percent: That's nearly a third who have problems other than weight that would prevent them from joining.
One in 10: Number of young adults who cannot join the military due to a conviction for a felony or serious misdemeanor.
this is appalling, regardless of mental condition these men and women died while in service to their country.
Why Obama Doesn't Write Families of Soldiers Who Commit Suicide
Wednesday's Wall Street Journal reports on a longstanding White House policy that Presidents do not send condolence letters to families of U.S. soldiers who commit suicide.
Military suicides are "almost sure to top last year's grim totals," the Associated Press reported earlier this month, while noting that "a recent decline in the pace of such incidents could mean the Army is starting to make progress in stemming them."
The Journal reports that the family of 25-year-old Army specialist Chancellor Keesling, who killed himself in Baghdad this summer, is "mounting a lobbying effort" to get the White House to overturn its policy, and that "a bipartisan array of lawmakers from their home state of Indiana" has joined their efforts.
A White House spokesman said a review of the policy has begun.
this is pretty cool, read the full story after the jump:
Lest he forget: Ex-soldier has all 232 names of troops killed in Afghanistan tattooed on his body
His bare back is still red raw from their freshly-inked names. But former soldier Shaun Clark had promised to have the name of every troop killed in Afghanistan tattooed on his body in honour of their sacrifice.
Mr Clark, 43, spent more than four hours in the tattooist's chair today as each of the 232 names were etched in ink over his chest and back.
via
