Posted on 10/12/2005 8:55:25 AM PDT by cgk
***scroll down for updates***
Today is the fifth anniversary of the U.S.S. Cole bombing. Please take a moment to note the event on your blogs today if you have a chance. Stars and Stripes pays tribute to the 17 sailors killed in the terrorist attack, the dozens wounded, the survivors, and the families affected. Command Master Chief James Parlier will never forget the decision he was forced to make in leaving a mortally wounded sailor to die:
“That’s the first time in my Navy career that I had to let someone die, so I did,” Parlier said. “I made the call. I said last rites. I said a prayer and then we put him on the side somewhere so he wouldn’t be in a position where he was dying in front of the crew and demoralizing the crew.”What did demoralize the crew was Yemenis celebrating the attack in view of Cole crewmembers for a couple of nights following the attack, Parlier said. They felt the Cole was their trophy, he said.
“Boy, that sticks [with me], seeing all these guys in white outfits jumping up and down, partying music blaring,” he said.
For the Cole’s sailors, it was tough not to retaliate, he said.
The Cole incident was one of a series of terrorist attacks in the 1990s that were not adequately answered by the United States, said Marc Genest, an associate professor of strategy and policy at the Naval War College.
“Measured responses against terrorist organizations are seen as a sign of weakness, not strength,” he said.
Genest said the overall lesson from the Cole is that not responding to terrorists’ attacks only emboldens them.
“The time to attack terrorists is at the very beginning of their strategy,” he said.
on Chief Petty Officer Richard Costelow, who died in the Cole bombing, and his surviving wife and sons. The Costelow family memorial page is here.
My column today notes the Cole anniversary and the MSM's failure to live and work like there's a war going on. An excerpt:
Oct. 12 marks the fifth anniversary of the bombing of the USS Cole. Seventeen American sailors were murdered in the attack. They were casualties of a war with radical Islamic terror that America hadn't yet declared and which the mainstream media still refuses to acknowledge today.Too many of us were blind in 2000 — unable or unwilling or simply too uninterested to connect such blood-stained dots as al Qaeda's 1993 World Trade Center bombing attack, the 1996 Khobar Tower bombings, the 1998 African embassy bombings, and the attack on the Cole. After Sept. 11, 2001, all of our eyes should have been pried wide open to the evils of Muslim extremism that exist among us in both organized and freelance form.
The watchdogs in the national press, however, insist on clouding our vision.
Since 9/11, I've reported on the media's reluctance to highlight the convicted Washington, D.C.-area snipers' Islamist proclivities and journalists' refusal to call Egyptian gunman Hesham Hadayet's acts of murder at the Israeli airline counter at Los Angeles International Airport on July 4, 2002, "terrorism."
Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes noted how quickly the media sought to whitewash the bloody bus-hijacking by Croatian illegal alien Damir Igric a month after 9/11. Although the incident "echoed similar attacks by Palestinians on Israeli buses," Pipes observed, the "media attributed the violence to post-traumatic stress syndrome."
National Guardsman Ryan Anderson (a.k.a. Amir Talhah), a Muslim convert who allegedly attempted to pass sensitive military information to al Qaeda over the Internet, rated barely a blip on the media radar screen.
Similarly, press accounts have downplayed the disruption of terrorist cells on American soil: The Lackawanna Six were just nice Muslim boys led astray. The Virginia Jihad Network was just a group of weekend paintball enthusiasts. Those indicted imams in Lodi, Calif., are just misunderstood "moderates." Terror suspects deported on immigration charges are just victims of discrimination.
Now, many of my readers wonder why the MSM won't touch the strange and troubling story of the University of Oklahoma bomber, Joel Henry Hinrichs III...
Mark Davis also writes about MSM neglect today in the Dallas Morning News.
Jack Kelly of Irish Pennants has an excellent column on the subject as well:
The media is remarkably incurious about terrorism coincidences.
(See also Daveed Gartenstein-Ross on what we know and don't know about the OU bomber.)
The right side of the blogosphere has been divided over the Miers nomination. But I hope and believe we still stand together as stalwart supporters of the war on Islamic terror at home and abroad. The MSM and the Left have failed miserably to learn the lesson of the Cole. Do what you can to make sure those American sailors murdered by al Qaeda did not die in vain.
***
Others blogging...
This related post by Bob Parks, "War without end," is excellent.
Milblogger Juliette Ochieng remembers and links to Alan Gray's tribute.
Smash: "We didn't start this war, but by God, we're going to finish it."
Sisyphus remembers.
Andrew Cochran at the ever-vigilant Counterterrorism Blog: "Maybe, just maybe, if we had pursued the perpetrators of the USS Cole bombing vigorously and without hindrance (don't get me started on that one), we might have been able to stop Mohammed Atta and his gang."
More milblogger memorials: Blackfive, Laughing Wolf
***
Background:
The DoD's USS Cole Commission report
CRS report on the Cole attack
The BBC remembers
Related news:
Yemen said linked to guns in Saudi attack
President Bush's war on radical Islam speech at the National Endowment for Democracy.
Daniel Pipes analyzes the new era in the war on terror and what's next.
***
More:
Rick Moran, as always, has a thoughtful essay on living between panic and ennui. What Rick says in defense of NYC officials also goes for law enforcement officials at Georgia Tech, who treated the discovery of bomb devices on campus seriously. A very dumb freshman has now been arrested in the case. The hindsight hounds will criticize the cops for overreacting. No. They were doing their job.
We should have leveled Aden.....
We should have leveled Aden.....
Remember the Cole. AMEN!
FYI
Attack on USS Cole exposes a fundamental failure (USA Today)
After several days of finger-pointing and a flurry of technical questions
about vessel security, the larger question about why 17 sailors died in a
terrorist attack on the USS Cole last week is getting shortchanged: Should
the destroyer even have been in the terrorist-rife Yemeni port of Aden last
Thursday?
Navy vessels have visited Yemen since 1998, as part of an effort to build
diplomatic bridges with that traditionally unfriendly Arab state. The former
commander for military operations in the Mideast, Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni,
set up the refueling stop and other military ties, arguing that engagement
with such countries deters terrorism.
In the aftermath of Thursday's attack, the execution of that policy, if not
the policy itself, is a glaring failure. Either Yemen cannot be made safe
enough to justify the risk, or the military failed to prepare adequately.
Yemen is a poor country where security forces aren't good at keeping watch on
terrorists. Officials at the U.S. Embassy have said the climate is unsafe,
and the government is far less hospitable toward the United States than are,
say, the governments of neighboring Oman or Saudi Arabia.
By contrast, other forms of engagement such as joint military exercises
between the two countries or training of Yemeni officers in the U.S., pose a
far lower terrorist risk.
National Security Adviser Sandy Berger defended the Yemen refueling Sunday,
saying that the places where naval vessels can refuel are limited. But that's
a rationalization. The Cole could have refueled in friendlier Gulf ports,
including Saudi Arabia and Oman. Alternately, U.S. warships can be refueled
at sea, by supply vessels called tenders.
And even if engagement with Yemen was worth the risk, it certainly demanded
special procedures. For instance, the U.S. could have demanded tighter
control over the Yemeni refueling operation.
Instead of focusing on those issues, some at the Pentagon and State
Department were busy trying to blame each other, just when they should be
trying to find common answers to a joint failure.
For all of the danger, the U.S. doesn't appear to have gained much from its
two years of military diplomacy: The president of Yemen reacted to the
bombing by denying there are terrorists in his country. He has since amended
his comments.
Unless tough questions are asked about the use of naval vessels for
diplomatic purposes, the right lessons won't be drawn from Thursday's tragic
bombing. The situation recalls the aftermath of the 1983 bombing that killed
241 Marines in Beirut. Then, a commission asked narrow questions, and the
broader lesson -- don't send a tiny, lightly armed force to build peace in
the middle of a conflict -- was not learned. The mistake was repeated in
Somalia in 1993.
Using port calls as a tool of diplomacy is worthwhile only if the cost and
risks are acceptable. The 17 dead and 40 wounded show the cost in Yemen was
far too high.
It is politically incorrect to remind the unwashed masses of Islamofascist atrocities committed BEFORE B2 became President.
Not sure how, but somehow this is Bush’s fault. /sarcasm
Godspeed to the Cole and her fine crew.
Kurt
bump
In July 2003 was visiting the Norfolk shipyards with my elderly folks. We took a boat ride where the guide explained all the ships in drydock. The USS Ronald Reagan was ready for commissioning and was about 3 days later. However, the huge burst of patriotism (and sadness) was seeing the repaired USS Cole and the guide explaining the history. God bless our military!
Vice Adm. Thomas Wilson, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, wrote to all DIA personnel this week to explain the protest resignation of a DIA analyst in October. The analyst, Kie Fallis, quit the day after the USS Cole was attacked by suicide bombers in Aden, Yemen. Mr. Fallis charged that a report he had written on the threat of a terrorist attack in Yemen was suppressed by senior DIA officials.Mr. Fallis also uncovered terrorist info related to 9/11:Mr. Fallis' resignation letter stated that he had "significant analytic differences" with DIA superiors over a terrorist threat assessment produced in June.
U.S. intelligence officials said there were warnings, but they arrived too late. The National Security Agency issued a report shortly after the Cole was bombed warning of attacks in the region —too late to be useful.
Adm. Wilson said he asked the Pentagon inspector general (IG) to investigate Mr. Fallis' charges. In an awkwardly worded statement, the three-star admiral said on Wednesday the IG "found no evidence to support the public perception that information warning of an attack on Cole was suppressed, ignored or even available in DIA." What about the private perception?
The admiral's statement drew smirks from several intelligence officials. It relied on a dodge often used by intelligence analysts to dismiss unwelcome information. Saying there is "no evidence" —like that presented to a court of law — is often used to mask the fact there is lots of intelligence to the contrary that spooks would rather not talk about in public.
One piece of the puzzle that Mr. Fallis uncovered was an intelligence report about a secret meeting of al Qaeda terrorists in a condominium complex in Malaysia in January 2000.Information obtained after September 11 identified two of them as Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who would be on American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon. They met with a former Malaysian army captain, Yazi Sufaat, described by Malaysian authorities as a key link in Southeast Asia for al Qaeda, who later would be tied to the bombing of the Cole.
What alarmed U.S. intelligence at the time was that Malaysian security officials traced the men to the Iranian Embassy there, where they spent the night.
See post #13...it gets worse.
As I recall Americans were advised to show restraint. Either Hillary or Madeline suggested that we should be considerate of "cultural sensitivities" in the way we responded to the blatant act of war. Unreal.
Even though the Do-Nothing Slickster would like Americans to forget he did absolute nothing in response.
Even though the Do-Nothing Slickster would like Americans to forget he did absolute nothing in response.
There were several news articles at the time that documented that there were no arms available to the watch standers-- they were locked up due to Zinni's policy of using soldiers as "diplomats".
Actually, Clinton did respond,unconstitutionally I might add, by sending a domestic federal agency -- the FBI, to investigate the bombing. By doing so, he changed, in the mind of the public, an act of war which would have suggested military retaliation, eventually to a "terrorist act" where his famous "diplomacy" could be used as a response. Mind you, Clinton diplomacy was to throw money and give creedence to corrupt leadership.
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