Ollie North: Good News, Bad News and Just News

[unhappycamper]

Good News, Bad News and Just News
By convicted felon Oliver North | January 15, 2010

There is no doubt that the terrible earthquake in Haiti -- the worst disaster in the history of the Western Hemisphere -- is a tragedy of profound proportions. The good news is that the "first responders" on-scene were wearing American uniforms. The U.S. Coast Guard -- motto: "Semper Paratus" -- Latin for "Always Ready" -- was "firstest with the mostest" -- and began providing emergency assistance within hours of the Tuesday night quake.

The White House quickly ordered reinforcements. A veritable armada of U.S. Navy ships and aircraft, USAF cargo and aero-medical flights, a brigade of the 82nd Airborne and the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit were all dispatched for rescue, relief and security operations. In an era where the so-called mainstream media makes much of how our Armed Forces are "overstretched" by commitments in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Aden -- the U.S. military's rapid reaction to the catastrophe in Haiti is a lesson for the potentates of the press -- and tin-horn despots like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez.

~snip~

Now for the bad news. Yemen is a much bigger problem than anyone ever believed before Christmas Day when Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab tried to bring down Northwest Airlines flight 253 with a bomb in his underwear.

Since then we have learned that the young Nigerian was not a "lone wolf" or an "isolated case" -- as we were initially told by the Obama administration. We now know that there are in fact many more al Qaeda-trained terrorists in Yemen preparing for attacks on Americans -- there, elsewhere around the world and here at home. We have also learned that the O-Team -- so quick in sending much needed help to Haiti -- is slow off the mark when it comes to dealing with this threat.

That Yemen is a hotbed for radical Islamists should not be a surprise to anyone. This is, after all, the place where al Qaeda terrorists blew a hole in the USS Cole, killing seventeen American sailors and wounding more than 30 others on October 12, 2000. Yemen is where convicted terrorist John Walker Lindh -- captured in Afghanistan in 2001 was "radicalized." It was after visiting Yemen that Carlos Leon Bledsoe -- aka, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad -- decided to shoot up a U.S. Army Recruiting Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, killing one soldier and critically wounding another.


Rest of article at: http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,209129,00.html?wh=news



unhappycamper comment: I did not realize that 'Mericuns were the first on-scene.

[PCIntern]

1. Yeah, I've gotten the fake Ollie North e-mail again...

about 4 times in the last week or so...you know the one...about how there was guy testifying about bin Laden way way back and all the Dem Senators effed everything up on the Iran-contra Committee...wotta hero! :sarcasm:

All I know is that this guy laimed that he saved 25000 dollars by throwing his spare change into a box...

[unhappycamper]

2. He made a shitload of money in the Iran/Contra 'action'. n/t

[Lasher]

3. Some good 'reply to all' responses to that tired old chain email:

Snopes article
FactCheck.org article
TruthOrFiction article
About.com Urban Legends article

Edit: I can't believe North has the guts to invoke that dog whistle about the USS Cole. The Cole bombing occurred one month before the 2000 presidential election, so even under the best of circumstances it was unlikely that the investigation could have been completed before the end of President Clinton's term of office three months later.

Snopes article

Once the investigation was completed, then-President Bush was told by the CIA that bin Laden was behind the attack. Why didn't Junior retaliate? According to Condi Rice, The Decider was tired of "swatting flies", even though he hadn't swatted any. But a more revealing answer was provided by testimony before the 911 Commission by Richard Clarke and Condi Rice:

Why didn't Bush respond to the USS Cole bombing?

CLARKE: I suggested, beginning in January of 2001, that ... there was an open issue which should be decided about whether or not the Bush administration should retaliate for the Cole attack .

Unfortunately, there was no interest, no acceptance of that proposition. And I was told on a couple of occasions, "Well, you know, that happened on the Clinton administration's watch."

I didn't think it made any difference. I thought the Bush administration, now that it had the CIA saying it was al Qaeda, should have responded.

RICE: I do not believe to this day that it would have been a good thing to respond to the Cole, given the kinds of options that we were going to have. ... We really thought that the Cole incident was passed, that you didn't want to respond tit-for-tat. ...

Just responding to another attack in an insufficient way we thought would actually probably embolden the terrorists -- they had been emboldened by everything else that had been done to them -- and that the best course was to look ahead to a more aggressive strategy against them.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/08/clarke.rice/index.html

You see, Junior didn't retaliate because that was an attack against Clinton's America, not Bush's America.

[classysassy]

4. They refuse to go away

The Reagan rogues just keep on spewing old rehashed bullshit.