A SOLDIER'S PERSPECTIVE
THE WEB'S LEADING MILITARY BLOG SINCE 2004
The Marine Corps Hymn starts with the line “From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli,” which recalls battles in Mexico and with Barbary Pirates in the early 1800′s. This year, piracy on the high seas has jumped at an astounding rate culminating with the capture of the Maersk Alabama at the beginning of the month. I really think it is time for the Marine Corps to remember our true roots of fighting at sea and put an end to this threat before more Americans are captured.
Everyone knows of my support for the Global War on Terrorism and the Marine Corps’ role in it, however I think as modern warfare has moved away from the sea onto land in Vietnam, the Gulf War, Operation Enduring Freedom, and Operation Iraqi Freedom, we have forgotten the Marine Corps’ true calling; fighting at sea and amphibious landings. By remembering our roots in the water, the Corps stands a very good chance in ridding the oceans of a threat not only to America, but other nations that operate off the coast of Somalia.
The Marines have the perfect forces to help combat piracy in the various FAST companies that belong to Marine Corps Security Forces. Sending destroyers loaded with FAST Marines and SEALs would quickly show the pirates America is not going to allow our citizens be taken hostage. However, I highly doubt the current administration would have the backbone to do this. It would be a show of force that doesn’t line up with the utopia they are building in their minds.
Yes, President Obama did authorize the rescue mission, but only if there was grave danger to Captain Phillip’s life. What we need isn’t a grave danger clause, but an open order to hunt down pirates and dispatch them upon sight. This threat is growing and will become unmanageable if swift, deadly action is not taken soon. We’ve ignored the pirates long enough, and we can’t afford to ignore them further. The Marines are the perfect men for the mission.
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Lisa: I also met him on Are You Interested... and got the poems :-) If
MissBirdlegs in AL
You’re right in that someone should take them out before it gets any worse. I’m truly sick of this “lawyerly” way of conducting war – any war!
Ray Hamilton USN from Boston, Mass
Tripolitan War was declared because our national flag was cut down on at an embassy. Why is it not conisdered an act of war when our american vessel fully displaying our colors is envaded?? It was sactioned piracy acts and American hostage taking and acts of ransoming that brought about the Naval Armament Act of 1794, which is the birth of the United States Navy’s legendary six frigates. It also gave way to our heroic and most valuable deployable asset to ensuring free commerce, (in my opinion) the unwavering and unstoppable force, the United States Marine Corps. They made the first amphibous deployable assault team to attempt to tackle Tripoli from the shore side. Tripolitan War gave us our what could be considered the first seal team, when 70+ volunteers (officers & enlisted) boarded the captured USS Philiadelphia and against over numbering odds burned it so that our enemies couldnt use her against us. This is our history. This is our heritage. This is why we are here and train. I believe the guantlet has been drawn and now is the time we should draw the sword to ensure no more innocents who are unarmed are placed in harms way. It is this duty that we all serve for.
Bob the Liberal
I agree with you there, Marcus. I most certainly agree.
Although you have to admit, those had to be three great shots.
Marcus
I can’t tell you how I wish I was there to see those SEALs get ready for the shot. I can see them reciting little diddies to relax themselves and wait for the natural pause in their breathing to take the shot. Ah, good times.
Doc Hal
The problem is, and excuse me for being so blunt, is that our present president is a pussy! Not to mention a Socialist!
Doc
Thomas Patrick Folan
Good post Marcus and
let us call this exactly what it is …
A WAR ON PIRATES & TERRORISTS
This is from Investors’ Business Daily:
Inexcusable Lapse
War On Terror: Imagine a president of the United States, within his first hundred days, revealing secrets that help terrorists kill. The secret memos on enhanced interrogation, now made public, do exactly that.
We are told by President Obama’s senior adviser David Axelrod that the president agonized for four weeks over the “weighty decision” to make public memoranda detailing the specifics of the CIA’s tough interrogation of high-value terrorist detainees such as 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad.
For most other presidents, it would have taken maybe four minutes, required little soul-searching and resulted in the opposite choice.
What on earth could the president have been thinking in revealing the nuts and bolts of how we extract information from al-Qaida operatives to prevent the success of their terrorist operations?
What could have possessed him to make public the steps our interrogators go through, the limits of pain and discomfort they (but not the prisoners) know they will not exceed, and the analytical classification and specific purpose of each of the various techniques?
These top secrets will arm Islamist jihadists with knowledge that will be invaluable to them. Future terrorist detainees will now know, for instance, that their interrogations are under continual video surveillance to make sure no lasting medical or psychological consequences result from the techniques used. Will they now teach themselves to fake such ill effects?
Terrorists will know that when they are placed in a tiny container in “cramped confinement” it will last only “up to two hours,” as a declassified memo from the Justice Department to the CIA noted. They will know that “stress positions” are used “only to induce temporary muscle fatigue” not “severe physical pain.”
They will now know that when subjected to “water dousing” they need not have the slightest fear of hypothermia, because every precaution is taken to keep the temperature of both the room and the water itself far above freezing.
They will know sleep deprivation inflicted by the interrogators seldom exceeds 96 hours, and they’ll know the specifics and purposes behind the relatively mild technique of “dietary manipulation.”
What the president has given to our enemies is a treasure chest of defensive weapons. Within the caves of the mountainous Pakistan/Afghanistan border, Islamofascist plotters must wonder how self-destructively corrupt their American adversaries have to be to allow such materials to land in their hands.
The piece of information that may be of most value to terrorists is the government’s assessment that waterboarding was “the most traumatic of the enhanced interrogation techniques” and implicitly the most effective.Terrorist groups around the world will now know that waterboarding was “authorized for, at most, one 30-day period, during which the technique can actually be applied on no more than five days” with “no more than two sessions in any 24-hour period.”Each session lasted no more than two hours, consisting of, at most, six applications of water for 10 seconds each time, for a total of no longer than 12 minutes per each 24-hour period. Presumably the issue is academic since the Obama administration has officially prohibited waterboarding.
There is no more valuable tool for subjects of interrogation than to know what they will be subjected to. How in good conscience could our president have given this gift to those trying to destroy us?
More Risky To ‘Sort Of’ Be At War Than To Not Fight Enemies At All
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
President Obama proclaims no more of George Bush’s “war on terror,” even as he silently keeps most of it in place. The result is as confusing as it soon will be dangerous.
In these first 100 days of his presidency, Barack Obama has promised that the Guantanamo Bay detention facility will be closed within a year. He has assured us wiretapping and overseas rendition are under re-examination.
The Obama administration has also been busy tweaking terminology in an effort to put a kinder, gentler face to the war. There is no longer a “global war on terror.” It has been replaced by “overseas contingency operation.”
Nor are there any longer “unlawful enemy combatants” in Guantanamo Bay. Apparently, the terrorists there are now merely “detainees.”
According to Janet Napolitano, the new secretary of Homeland Security, there is not even “terrorism” but “man-caused disasters.” At least that’s the term she used in recent testimony before Congress.
By removing words like “war,” “enemy” and “terror” from official usage, perhaps Americans will be convinced there are no such unpleasant realities.
President Obama has also made an effort to apologize to key allies, rivals and enemies. He has told receptive Europeans that we have been arrogant and dismissive. The Turks were encouraged to hear that America “still struggles with the legacy of our past treatment of Native Americans.” The Russians were assured that we were pushing a “reset” button in our foreign policy.
The president has also sent envoys to reach out to a hostile Syria and a video expressing past American culpability in hopes of starting afresh with Iran.
At various times in interviews and lectures, Obama has reminded the world that the United States alone has dropped an atomic bomb, that it has been unnecessarily provocative to Muslims, that it has a shameful record of slavery and racial discrimination, and that almost everything George Bush did was wrong.
There is a problem with all this. While our well-meaning president is apologizing, employing euphemisms and promising not to be George Bush, his government is still also blowing apart suspected jihadists in Pakistan.
We are sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan in efforts to destroy Taliban insurgents. The Obama administration has dropped the earlier rhetoric of a quick, unilateral withdrawal from Iraq. Instead, he has embraced Gen. David Petraeus’ plan of leaving slowly as events on the ground dictate.
In other words, our new “overseas contingent operations” seem similar to Bush’s old “war on terror.” Guantanamo Bay will still be open for at least a year.
The Obama administration cannot find a country that wants back its expatriate terrorists — nor a legal solution to try terrorists caught without uniform on the battlefield who may not be fully protected under the Geneva Conventions.
Thomas Patrick Folan
ONE LAST THING MARCUS:
It is amazing that this great country may now be prosecuting some members of the C.I.A.. These CI.A. people saved lives with their interrogations. This is from Investors’
Business Daily:
Enhanced Protection
National Security: The establishment media are obsessed with the newly revealed details of our enhanced terrorist interrogation techniques. Their most important detail is the many American lives they saved.
There’s nothing like a big number in a top-of-the-fold headline to sell newspapers — and seal misconceptions. The supposedly big news of the weekend regarding disclosure of declassified memos specifying the methods used by the CIA to question captured terrorists was that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his fellow al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah were waterboarded a combined 266 times.
That number certainly is big if you think about what most media and leading Democrats have been telling us about use of the water board. They claim it constitutes torture, that no one can resist such a pseudo-medieval practice for more than a few seconds — yet at the same time it doesn’t really work.
But the number itself refutes those accusations. If KSM was forced to undergo such a drowning sensation 183 times in the course of one month about a year after the 2001 attacks, and Zubaydah 83 times in the course of a month the summer before KSM’s sessions, it suggests the interrogators were getting places.The released paper makes that clear. The May 30, 2005, memo from the Justice Department to the CIA, for instance, noted that “no technique is used on a detainee unless use of that technique at that time appears necessary to obtaining the intelligence.”
Khalid and Zubaydah were two of only three detainees on whom waterboarding, “the most traumatic of the enhanced interrogation techniques,” was used. Yet the number of sessions employed makes it clear that as harsh as the method is, it clearly can be resisted, especially if a terrorist has been conditioned to do so. Otherwise, so many repeated sessions would be unnecessary.
As the guidelines of the CIA’s Office of Medical Services stated, “The general goal of these techniques is a psychological impact, and not some physical effect.” The OMS described the “specific goal” as being to “dislocate” the terrorist’s “expectations regarding the treatment he believes he will receive.”Unfortunately, by making the details public and thus available for al-Qaida and other terrorist groups to study, that “dislocation of expectations” becomes impossible for future terrorist detainees.
This is an incalculable blow to U.S. national security.
As former CIA Director Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey pointed out last week, half of the U.S. government’s knowledge of al-Qaida’s structure and activities is the fruit of enhanced interrogation.That information let the U.S. and other governments foil numerous 9/11-style operations, saving hundreds if not thousands of innocent lives.
We understand that people have legitimate concerns about the U.S. being involved in torture. But enhanced interrogation — a reasonable (but now rescinded) response to the deadliest of threats to our homeland — should be seen for what it is: a tough, but effective, way to save lives.
And those devoted U.S. government personnel who took part, who saved so many, deserve
James Everitt
We should always protect United States citizens, at all times any where in the world. President Obama needs to be proactive, instead of being reactive to any and all threats concerning American interest. As we did in Tripoli, we should do again to the pirates off the African coast. If other countries want to join us great, if we have to go it alone so be it! Like Clint Eastwood when the bad guys didn’t surrender, his reply was “Make My Day!” It’s time to end the days of the pirates and any terrorist that threatens America!