Just something I dug up while cleaning through notes to blog about, from Janes, last month:
The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is expected to request from the US government the sale of Lockheed Martin P-3 Orion maritime patrol aircraft (MPA), a senior company official told IHS Jane’s on 10 April.
Speaking at the LAAD Defence and Security 2013 exhibition in Rio de Janeiro, Clay Fearnow, director maritime patrol programmes, said the Vietnamese Navy was keen to buy up to six surplus P-3s to help patrol the country’s nearly 3,500 km coastline and 1,396,299 km2 Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).
“The Vietnamese Navy has expressed a lot of interest [in the P-3], and there is [US government] support to move forward,” said Fearnow.
Why is the US government supporting this?
According to Fearnow, any P-3s sold to Vietnam by the US would in the first instance be non-weaponised, being fitted exclusively with an MPA mission kit such as forward looking infrared (FLIR) sensors and other systems. However, he noted that as relations between the two countries continue to improve there could be scope for weapon systems to be provided at a later date.
Fearnow said Lockheed Martin would recommend they opt for the latter P-3C aircraft, as they are the most advanced and have the fewer airframe hours on them.
For those who’ve forgotten, the P-3 Orion featured rather prominently in the early 2000s with the Hainan Island incident, where a Chinese fighter crashed into a US P-3, which was then seized by the Chinese government.
Relations between the US and Vietnam have improved in the last few decades, but it still seems peculiar. Maybe relations have improved a lot more than they seem.
But given Obama’s early support of Honduran dictator-for-life-wannabe Zelaya and his general distaste for American allies (Mubarak, Iranian protesters, etc.) and embracing America’s enemies (Muslim brotherhood, etc.), this seems suspect.
If you have the time, much like the Fast and Furious hearings, it’s worth watching. It’s fascinating to see exactly what happens and is discovered versus what the media will report afterwards.
As in Holder’s speech, the confidential memo lays out a three-part test that would make targeted killings of American lawful: In addition to the suspect being an imminent threat, capture of the target must be “infeasible, and the strike must be conducted according to “law of war principles.” But the memo elaborates on some of these factors in ways that go beyond what the attorney general said publicly. For example, it states that U.S. officials may consider whether an attempted capture of a suspect would pose an “undue risk” to U.S. personnel involved in such an operation. If so, U.S. officials could determine that the capture operation of the targeted American would not be feasible, making it lawful for the U.S. government to order a killing instead, the memo concludes.
Upon even a cursory examination, however, these constraints are virtually meaningless. The government is not required to “have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons will take place in the immediate future.” Furthermore, the feasibility of capture can be determined by several factors, including if it would simply be too risky for U.S. personnel to conduct a capture operation, or if a capture operation would imperil a “relevant window of opportunity.” There are miles of space to maneuver within the so-called constraints.
Enough evidence for a tyrannical regime? Check. Too risky to send jack-booted thugs? Sure. Relevant window of opportunity? Check.
Attorney General Eric Holder last year said the Constitution’s guarantee of due process does not necessarily entail a “judicial process” in situations in which national security is at stake.
The state must confiscate guns for the greater good. The people who want arms are a threat to the state. They are radical insurrectionists. The state does not need “judicial process” against people who oppose national security gun confiscation objectives.
That’s just taking things to their unfortunate conclusions. Methinks the Founding Fathers would be loading their M4s right now.
1) He must be an immanent threat. By immanent, we don’t mean the threat is immediate. What we mean is that the person is involved in operations that will go forward unless he is killed. In other words, we don’t have to wait for a suicide bomber to get on the airplane before we kill him.
2) Capture is infeasible. This means that a terrorist living in France will be treated differently than a terrorist living in Mali. The major difference being that the French police are perfectly capable (assuming they have the backbone) of arresting a suspected terrorist. In the hinterlands of Mali, not so much.
3) The strike must be consistent with the laws of war. Which is just another way of saying we don’t bomb the whole city of Abotabad just because we know bin Laden is there.
I sure hope he’s correct in his interpretation, and that it is limited in scope solely to AQ operatives. The first few pages of the memo’s justification aren’t about AQ, though the last few pages get more AQ specific.
But then again, the DOJ that wrote it also intentionally armed the narcoterrorist cartels next door and killed hundreds of our Mexican neighbors and two US federal agents; and we’ve already seen the Obama administration’s hostility towards the Constitution, the rule of law, and the citizenry.
Senator Rand Paul today had opportunity to question Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the attacks in Benghazi in September 2012. Here is some video below:
Official portrait of United States Senator (R-KY). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“This week, CBS News became the first news organization besides Fox to ask President Obama ‘Who changed the Benghazi talking points?’” Leno teased.
“See, this is very dangerous to the White House if journalists should suddenly start asking real questions.”
That he made the joke speaks well of Leno, who’s willing to joke about everyone. The disturbingly Soviet part is that the mainstream leftist media is so effective at suppressing the news that many of his audience don’t get the joke, or don’t know how to react to mockery, even gentle mockery, of dear leader in public.
Confidence men know that their victim – “the mark” as he has been called – is eventually going to realize that he has been cheated. But it makes a big difference whether he realizes it immediately, and goes to the police, or realizes it after the confidence man is long gone.
So part of the confidence racket is creating a period of uncertainty, during which the victim is not yet sure of what is happening. This delaying process has been called “cooling out the mark.”
The same principle applies in politics. When the accusations that led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton first surfaced, he flatly denied them all. Then, as the months passed, the truth came out – but slowly, bit by bit. One of Clinton’s own White House aides later called it “telling the truth slowly.”
By the time the whole truth came out, it was called “old news,” and the clever phrase now was that we should “move on.”
It was a successful “cooling out” of the public, keeping them in uncertainty so long that, by the time the whole truth came out, there was no longer the same outrage as if the truth had suddenly come out all at once. Without the support of an outraged public, the impeachment of President Clinton fizzled out in the Senate.
We are currently seeing another “cooling out” process, growing out of the terrorist attack on the American consulate in Benghazi on September 11th this year.
Sowell’s column goes on to cover the lies, deceit, and coverup of the Benghazi consulate attack and how it morphed from a “spontaneous protest” which it wasn’t , into a non-issue, which it also isn’t. The real-time video of the attack, the denials by the administration, the arrest of the “inciting filmmaker” by a SWAT team complete with news media perpwalk, are all “telling the truth slowly”. Now that we know that Benghazi wasn’t a spontaneous demonstration, something noted early on… as no one goes to demonstrations with coordinated mortar fire.
Yes on Proposition 19!
But Benghazi, which Sowell elaborates on, isn’t the only case of “telling the truth slowly” from the Obama administration. The other very notable example is Operation Gunwalker/Fast and Furious.
The full testimony from retired Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson has not yet been officially released by Congress. But excerpts were obtained by the Washington Guardian as House and Senate investigators this week issued their second report into the gun-running scandal that has become an embarrassment for the administration and prompted a court fight over executive privilege.
At issue is the Obama administration’s initial account when the Fast and Furious scandal broke in February 2011 that ATF agents never knowingly let semiautomatic weapons fall into the hands of smugglers for the Mexican drug cartels. Senior officials held that position in varying forms for months as the scandal grew, but then reversed course last December in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary.
The DOJ, Eric Holder, the ATF, and every part of the Obama administration involved lied, lied, and lied again. They lied for months, then when they were proved completely to be liars, they “reversed course”. They didn’t acknowledge lies, they “told the truth slowly”.
With complicit media, it’s how the Obama adminstration has managed to keep Fast and Furious, Castaway, and the dozen or more other gunwalking operations silent, as well as hush up Benghazi until after the election.
A final point with Benghazi: as has been often noted, there are very few people in the chain of command who could deny military assets to the consulate. There’s Petraeus, Clinton, Panetta, and Obama. Petraeus and Clinton have already said they didn’t deny military assets or aid to the consulate. So the only remaining people are Panetta and Obama, or someone directly in their office. The “investigation” is a stall tactic, because the only thing that matters is the election and power.
This is all the longer the investigation has to be, with the people changed, and the question changed to “did you deny military assets?”
This isn’t quite connected with Fast and Furious or the ATF’s gunwalking, but is the same administration walking guns not under a law enforcement guise, but as foreign policy… maybe. Though it could parallel what the Sinaloa cartel member on trail in Chicago had to say about the Obama administration running guns to them. Same effect, slightly different initial reasoning, ultimate goals include not just anti-2A, but foreign policy objectives through illegal means.
Fox News has chronicled how the Al Entisar, a Libyan-flagged vessel carrying 400 tons of cargo, docked on Sept. 6 in the Turkish port of Iskenderun. It reportedly supplied both humanitarian assistance and arms — including deadly SA-7 man-portable surface-to-air missiles — apparently destined for Islamists, again including al Qaeda elements, in Syria.
What cries out for further investigation — and debate in the remaining days of this presidential election — is whether this shipment was part of a larger covert Obama effort to transfer weapons to our enemies that could make the Iran-Contra scandal, to say nothing of Operation Fast and Furious, pale by comparison.
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What we do know is that the New York Times — one of the most slavishly pro-Obama publications in the country — reported in an Oct. 14 article, “Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar Assad are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster.”
In short, it seems President Obama has been engaged in gun-walking on a massive scale. The effect has been to equip America’s enemies to wage jihad not only against regimes it once claimed were our friends, but inevitably against us and our allies as well. That would explain his administration’s desperate and now failing bid to mislead the voters through the serial deflections of Benghazigate.
This is more Iran Contra and less Fast and Furious, but it’s weird how an administration that hates US citizens owning weapons is sure willing to arm unfriendly actors in the Middle East; as well as arming cartels in Mexico.
During the presidential debates, Romney took a stance against Obama’s Apology Tour. Obama denied it, but as is expected of his administration, if it’s worth denying or covering up, it’s probably doubly true. Consider this piece from Commentary Magazine complete with quotes from top Obama advisors Samantha Power and Anne-Marie Slaughter:
Power wrote that America’s record in world affairs had been so harmful to the freedoms of people around the world that the United States could remedy the problem only through profound self-criticism and the wholesale adoption of new policies. Acknowledging that President Bush was correct in saying that “some America-bashers” hate the American people’s freedoms, Ms. Power stated that much anti-Americanism derives from the role that U.S. power “has played in denying such freedoms to others” and concluded:
U.S. foreign policy has to be rethought. It needs not tweaking but overhauling….Instituting a doctrine of mea culpa would enhance our credibility by showing that American decision-makers do not endorse the sins of their predecessors. When [then German Chancellor] Willie [sic] Brandt went down on one knee in the Warsaw ghetto, his gesture was gratifying to World War II survivors, but it was also ennobling and cathartic for Germany. Would such an approach be futile for the United States?
Thus, even at the beginning of the Bush presidency, Power saw Brandt’s apology for the Nazis’ destruction of European Jewry as the model for an American leader to seek pardon for the sins of U.S. foreign policy.
These are the advisors who went and pushed the World Apology Tour.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, of Princeton University, whom President Obama would later appoint as the State Department’s head of policy planning, likewise exhorted whomever would succeed President Bush to apologize for America’s role in the world. In a February 2008 article in Commonweal entitled “Good Reasons to be Humble,” she wrote:
[I]t will be time for a new president to show humility rather than just talk about it. The president must ask Americans to acknowledge to ourselves and to the world that we have made serious, even tragic, mistakes in the aftermath of September 11—in invading Iraq, in condoning torture and flouting international law, and in denying the very existence of global warming until a hurricane destroyed one of our most beloved cities….
[W]e should make clear that our hubris, as in the old Greek myths, has diminished us and led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
All this helps explain the remorseful tone of the Cairo speech. It also sheds light on Obama’s determination to set precedents and create institutional and legal constraints on the ability of the United States to take international action assertively, independently, and in its own particular interests. Without reference to this severely jaundiced view of American history, one cannot make any sense of the hesitation and meekness, the extreme deference to the Security Council and shyness about encouraging opponents of hostile dictators that have characterized the Obama administration’s policy toward Libya—and, for that matter, toward the anti-Assad-regime upheaval in Syria and, in 2009, toward the Green Movement anti-regime demonstrations in Iran.
Short short version: “America’s bad, m’kay.”
The blame-America first crowd has been writing American foreign policy. They soundly believe in their self-flagellating leftist egocentrism that not only does the world revolve around them, and the US, but that the US is the cause of all the world’s problems.
ShortTimer
JBH
