New Firefight in Baghdad

Fox News | 4/13/03

[Duramaximus]

Ollie North said that friendly Iraqis called them "foreigners."

We have them here also... only we call them illegal aliens; we give them a home, food, money, etc.

[whadizit]

"So this is the real thing now?"

I heard that! And the general sorta swallowed a couple of times in disbelief!

I still think men make better anchors, or talking heads.

[whadizit]

Arnot is knowledgeable.

[Amelia]

Linda Vester & E.D. are pretty good, and some of the men are pretty bad - but Fox does seem to have several newsbabes who appear to have been hired more for their looks than their ability.

[whadizit]

Her voice drives me nuts, too! It is really an affectation.

[whadizit]

Exactly! Cheapens coverage a bit, me thinks.

[whadizit]

Too many cameras and reporters down there! They kept getting in the way!

[sheikdetailfeather]

Thanks so much for explaining this, Yankee.

[The KG9 Kid]

"... It's not a war, it's an episode of COPS."

Precisely.

Anyone caught with their shirt off is automatically guilty.

No shirt + wispy mustache + Mullet hairstyle = Fedayeen.

[American in Israel]

You forgot the +warm and smoking AK47 part

The rest just equals Iraqi, the smoking gun part makes the ID easy.

[El Gato]

Supposedly we have radar systems that can trace bullets back to withing centimeters of their origin.

Not radar. Accoustic. Basically an array of mircrophones that allow you to direction find the shot, with multiple lines of bearing from different pairs of michrophones giving you the location. Problem is that they don't work very well in an urban environment, due to multiple reflections from large buildings. They work better than one might think, but still not all that well.

AK47 is an assault rifle, firing an intermediate power catridge. The AK series are not known for their high accuracy. Even the Soviet design sniper rifle, in 7.62X54R (a catridge dating to czarist times) is not nearly as accurate as what US, UK and other western forces use. Accurate enough in most military situtations though.

[archy]

In WWII for example, such freelancers were often executed right where they were captured. They are legally classifiable as spies or clandestine agents.

As for instance, British commando and raider F.F.E. *Tommy* Yeo-Thomas, known as *the White Rabbit,* who testified on behalf of his German counterpart Otto Skorzeny after the war that he had done exactly the same thing, fighting while in civilian clothing, as a part of his ordered duties, and that if the charges against the German raiders were upheld, would be bring charges against his own commanders for conspiracy in ordering the murders committed thereby, including a Yank chap named *Eisenhower,* and another who had personally debriefed him named *Winston Churchill.*

The criminal charges against Obersturmbannfuehrer Skorzeny were reluctantly dropped. But there have been more recent examples of what you describe, which I doubt the coalition leadership hopes to see repeated.

[archy]

An AK-47 is not a good sniper weapon.

An AK-47 derived RPK squad automatic weapon with the longer 24-inch barrel is. So is the heavier caliber AK-variant SVD sniper's rifle designed by Yevgeniy Feodorovich Dragunov.

Either might be described as *an AK* either by unknowledgable news reporters who can't tell an AKM from an M16A2, or to a lesseer degree by a grunt infantryman who cares primarily that it's something that goes bang and is pointed in his general direction.

-archy-/-

[archy]

Even the Soviet design sniper rifle, in 7.62X54R (a catridge dating to czarist times) is not nearly as accurate as what US, UK and other western forces use. Accurate enough in most military situtations though.

Don't bet your life on that. While the Soviet-era SVD Dragonuv is better used in the fashion of a designated marksman's rifle to the best shot of his platoon, it can and has been used out to 1200 meters, and the cartridge is both well developed from its use in at least 5 major wars and Olympic-level target competition. And it's much lighter than most other sniper's rifles.

But Russian snipers also have other top-quality sniper's rifles in the same caliber available to them capable of even more precise and longer range work, not unlike the current Western sniper equipment chambered for the .300 Winchester Magnum or the .338 Lapua sniper's cartridge favoured by many of our NATO allies.

And either will easily outrange either the M4 carbine or M16A2 rifle in use by most of our troops, as well as most of the other weapons to be found within the infantry squad as well. Whether exported to Iraq is an open question, as is the availability of shooters with the skill and determination to use them. See the details of the 7.62mm OTs-03AS rifle, for example

-archy-/-