Yeah, or even who was in charge on 9/11!!!
The OTM (Old Tired Media) would be negligent in their seditious and treasonous jobs, if they reported the facts and truth.
The Enemy Within™ slithers on...
Grrrrr...can't these newspapers even get military stuff right???
It's CDR Lippold, not CMDR Lippold!
Gah.
And I guess the moral is if a boat load of Muslims is coming toward you, shoot first.
And for the record...no way he should be prosecuted or punished.
You learn something every day! This story says a barge, I had always thought it was a motorized inflatable boat. What an idiot I am!
The fact that Cdr. Lippold personally visited family members of those killed in the USS Cole attack speaks volumes about the kind of man he is. I for one would certainly trust this man at the pointy edge of the spear.
Gen. Zinni had the bright idea to dock the ship in Aden. Interesting eh?
Normally any unidentified boat approaching a US man of war anchored in port, is hailed to stop 100 meters out, and if failinig to hold distance, is fired upon.
Kirk Lippold would have had to violate this standing order to remedy the problem, and many say he should have done, in secret.
The deck watch on the USS Cole did not have ammo in its guns to do its job, and was correspondingly slack.
He messed up in just one way, he failed to secure a "deadly force" perimeter (and mean it) because his vessel was in a foreign port and armed as a US warship must be, therefore always a potential target of opportunity. So they gave him one last attaboy for saving the ship. But my guess is that somewhere down the line the senior chain of command said....Wait a minute, this wouldn't have happened IF........
How do I know this? Well, in 1983 a drunken civilian with a death wish tried to ram his vehicle through the gates of the Division Ammunition Supply Point (where we kept the real "GO TO WAR" ammo) and a pfc promptly put a bullet thru the guys skull at a range of about 35 meters and closing...fast. I was serving as the Division Staff Duty Officer that weekend. So I was almost the first Army officer on the scene, aside from the MP's. The pvt did it right, so did the chain of command in issuing the deadly force orders. Gave the kid a nice attaboy and a pass (IIRC) on his next rifle quals. LOL.
I learned after the first part of this story, that darlin' clintonista General Zinni who's out there rounding up former Generals against Bush was the f'up in the Cole bombing and even admitted.
Once on fast track to be captain, Kirk Lippold now works at a desk. Last in a two-part series. WASHINGTON -- For 5½ years, the Washington military and political establishment has not known quite what to do with Kirk Lippold.
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My uncle was the skipper of the USS MADDOX in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964. His next assignment was to head up NROTC at Rice University! Lippold is not the first (or last) commanding officer to be sidelined.
What rankles Lippold's supporters is that his punishment doesn't mesh with the government's timid response to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, or with the lack of accountability for faulty pre-war assessments of Iraq's weaponry and the absence of adequate war planning.
All roads lead to Abu Ghraib for the drive-by media.
"With all the issues related to de- tainee abuse, there has been an abject lack of accountability in the way the war on terror has been executed," said John Hutson, a former Navy judge advocate general and dean of the Franklin Pierce Law School in Concord, N.H.
"The CIA director who failed to prevent 9-11 also got us into Iraq on false pretenses," Hutson said. "(Defense Secretary Donald H.) Rumsfeld fired [A LIE] Shinseki (retired Gen. Erik Shinseki, former Army chief of staff) for being right about the troop strength we needed in Iraq. Rumsfeld said Abu Ghraib was about a few bad apples, and now we have a dozen cases where people in U.S. custody were tortured to death."
No mention of who was Secretary of Defense in October 2000!