The Iraq thread 3

[theavonlady 2]

Question:

A while back someone linked to a movie clip about George Bush SR and the company he worked for. I need the name of that company... I tried finding it, but searching for "George Bush SR" in this forum is like looking for a needle in a stack of needles... : )

Are you referring to the Carlyle Group?

[Longinius 1]

The name rings a bell, thanks

[walker 0]

Hi

There was a thread about them.

http://www.flashpoint1985.com/cgi-bin....e+group

and this is the fiilm

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3995.htm

Kind Regards Walker

[Pipski 0]

An M1 Abrams tank was disabled in Iraq by a roadside explosion for the first time

I thought they lost one to a freak RPG hit some time ago too? Might even have been during the actual war / before the occupation. iirc the Pentagon went ballistic because they assumed that Saddam must have got hold of some toys from Russia, multi-layered HEAT warheads or the like, but it turned out that, no, it was just a VERY lucky round!

[Balschoiw 0]

Quote[/b] ]I thought they lost one to a freak RPG hit some time ago too?

Yes:

[Balschoiw 0]

Stryker with Slat armour used in Iraq:

[theavonlady 2]

http://www.webmutants.com/strategypage/solved4.jpg

Are you sure that pic wasn't taken by NASA's Mars Rover?

[theavonlady 2]

Just in a few minutes ago. Another very lethal bomb in Iraq:

Car Bomb Kills at Least 20 South of Baghdad

Quote[/b] ]Tue February 10, 2004 05:53 AM ET

ISKANDARIYA, Iraq (Reuters) - More than 20 people were killed and dozens wounded Tuesday when a car bomb ripped through a police station south of Baghdad, witnesses said.

A Reuters reporter counted at least 20 bodies outside a hospital in the small town of Iskandariya, 25 miles from the capital. A doctor at the hospital said the death toll could be closer to 50.

[Balschoiw 0]

Quote[/b] ]Are you sure that pic wasn't taken by NASA's Mars Rover?

Yes  

Anyway back on the Stryker with Slat armour. I´m really surprised that "the cage" hasn´t been used earlier for US vehicles as the russians already use it for more than 40 years.

[bn880 5]

Quote[/b] ]I thought they lost one to a freak RPG hit some time ago too?

Yes:

http://www.webmutants.com/strategypage/solved1.jpg

http://www.webmutants.com/strategypage/solved4.jpg

AFAIK they lost a couple M1A1's from fighting... (i.e. not driving off a bridge lol)

[walker 0]

Hi all

I just watched a special report of wounded US GW2 veterans on Channel Four News (A UK network)

Total US soldiers wounded in combat in GW2 now stands at 2,604 and rising.

What shocked me was how many of them said they thought the war was fought on a false prospectus. One said he used to be a firm republican party member but that he was so disgusted with what TBA and its business contacts were doing there that he was going to be working for the democrats from now on. At that point the an officer stopped the interview saying the soldier could not voice his political opinion as he was in uniform. Latter one of the group not in uniform interviewed outside said the how he felt.

In another interview one of the soldiers said their war would only have a point if Iraq was rebuilt to a stable country once again.

From the looks on the soldiers faces I dont think TBA can count on their support in the next elections.

There were nods of heads when one said he would be supporting the Decorated Vietnam Vetran John Kerry in the next election.

I guess George Bush Jnr's. lack of a proper millitary background will tell against him in the election.

Kind Regards Walker

[walker 0]

Hi all

Aparently the US spies on the UN

http://www.accuracy.org/gun/

And if you dare to blow the whistle on it you can be jailed for 2 years as with

Quote[/b] ]Katharine Gun, a British former government employee, now faces two years imprisonment in England for the "crime" of telling the truth. She is charged with leaking an embarrassing U.S. intelligence memo indicating that the U.S. was spying on U.N. delegations in early 2003 in an effort to win approval of the Iraq war resolution.

Just thought you should know if your a UN peace keeper watch your backs.

Kind Regards Walker

[denoir 0]

Ny Times

Quote[/b] ]

Making the Facts Fit the Case for War

By RICHARD GOODWIN

In 1846 President James Polk announced that Mexican troops had fired on American soldiers on American soil, and he took the country to a war that eventually gained it California, New Mexico and Arizona. Was the disputed soil ours? Probably not. Did Polk distort the information he had? Almost certainly. He wanted the territory, and he needed a war to get it.

A first-term representative warned that if you "allow the president to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion . . . you allow him to make war at pleasure." For these words, Abraham Lincoln received the usual reward of political courage: he forfeited any chance of a return to Congress and was retired to private life for more than a decade. (Although he would do quite well after that.)

Our current dispute over the intelligence that led to the invasion of Iraq seems to be yet another illustration of this eternal principle: presidents and other decision makers usually get the intelligence they want. This doesn't mean that intelligence reports should be ignored, but that they must be viewed with skepticism. And in my years in government service, I had the misfortune to see desire win out over skepticism too many times.

In 1961, when I was 28 and fresh to the Kennedy White House from the campaign trail, I climbed to the upper reaches of the State Department for a high-level meeting to discuss the planned invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Almost every top official involved in the operation, except for the president, was there. Richard Bissell, a legendary figure of cold war intelligence, the man responsible for the U-2 spy plane, assured us that once the American-backed rebels had established themselves, the Cuban people would rise up against Castro. Rather tentatively, I asked Bissell how we had reached this conclusion. He calmly turned to the general sitting beside him and said, rather casually, "We have an N.I.E. on that, don't we?" referring to a classified National Intelligence Estimate. The general nodded.

In fact, no such intelligence estimate existed. But Bissell's primary interest in intelligence data was that it help him get presidential approval of an operation to which he had devoted so much energy. Perhaps, having received so many assurances from Cuban exiles, he truly believed the claim. But he was wrong and John F. Kennedy was wrong to trust him ? and the disaster that unfolded on the Cuban shore in April was the result.

To his credit, President Kennedy learned from the debacle. He reorganized his intelligence apparatus and brought advisers whose instincts and moral compasses he trusted ? including his brother Bobby ? into the inner circle of foreign policy deliberation. Most important, the lesson that intelligence and military advisers had to be thoroughly challenged guided Kennedy as he later steered the country through the Cuban missile crisis.

Unfortunately, this lesson was largely lost on the next administration. In 1965, the duly elected but deposed president of the Dominican Republic, Juan Bosch, was leading a revolution against the military cabal that had displaced him. A panicky telegram from our ambassador detailing (largely imaginary) horrors in Santo Domingo's streets led Lyndon B. Johnson to send in the Marines.

With our troops already in the air, Johnson called a White House meeting to explain the decision he had already made. Gathered in the Cabinet Room, we were told by William Raborn, the incoming head of the C.I.A., that Communists had infiltrated, perhaps even dominated, the Bosch insurgency. That belief, not any supposed bloodshed, was of course the real reason for Johnson's intervention.

After the meeting, Bill Moyers, also a Johnson aide, and I met privately with some C.I.A. staff members. "Who were these Communists," we asked, "and how do we know?" We were given incredibly flimsy evidence, such as that one Bosch confederate had been seen in an apartment building suspected of housing a Communist cell. It proved nothing. Yet 20,000 marines had been sent to forestall this enemy whose very existence was suspect.

The crisis ended relatively peacefully, but not before a storm of criticism ? from the public, the press and Congress ? descended on the president, bringing his "honeymoon" to an abrupt end. Unlike Kennedy, Johnson made no change to the intelligence system that had misled us.

After I resigned from the White House, in 1967, I was asked by the Pentagon to attend a meeting to assess our Vietnam intelligence. The group consisted of several Nobel laureate scientists and a few others including the political scientist Richard Neustadt and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith. What concerned us were the military's "body count" figures of how many we had killed and also the "infiltration rate" statistics on the flow of men and supplies from North Vietnam to the South. When we looked behind the comforting figures, it was clear that the method of calculating them was prone to enormous error. The same bodies were counted by different units, and often just guessed at. The infiltration rate was based on the observations of spies along the Ho Chi Minh trail, who often concealed themselves in the nearby jungle to evade death or capture, and therefore had no idea what was contained in the covered trucks rolling by.

We concluded that the figures the government triumphantly publicized to justify its claims of success could have been off by 10 percent or by 300 percent because "the data is so soft that we cannot state with confidence whether we have been doing better or worse militarily over the past year." These conclusions were ignored. The generals and the president wanted higher body counts and lower infiltration numbers. And that's what they got.

Those now trying to figure out what went wrong before the war in Iraq should bear in mind a simple truth: we are more likely to "know" what we want to know than what we don't want to know. That human flaw is built into the very process of making intelligence estimates. Perhaps the only way to counter it is if those who make the final decision beware taking a large risk on what is, inevitably, speculation. As Kennedy told the National Security Council in the days after the Bay of Pigs, "we're not going to have any search for scapegoats . . . the final responsibilities of any failure is mine, and mine alone."

Richard Goodwin was a White House assistant to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

[Balschoiw 0]

Quote[/b] ]Just thought you should know if your a UN peace keeper watch your backs.

I always do

Rule 1:

Never trust foreign intel.

[MSpencer 0]

That M1A2 up there, that isn't a "Freak RPG hit". That's a small caliber hole in the side of the skirt. Something hit it, and the Army is a little scared... for good reason. I think it could be a DU 9mm "bullet" or something, it's got enough velocity to punch through, and it's hard enough, so it might have been something launched from a rigged tube.

[denoir 0]

Yeah, there have been extensive discussions about what the hell that was. It certainly isn't your average HEAT RPG.

You can see from the impact marks on the tank that it was a tandem warhead, but beyond that it's difficult to say. DU or another KE warhead can probably be ruled out, as they need a lot more velocity than you can get from a RPG.

IIRC the general concensus on that one was that the Iraqis had got their hands on a newer Russian version of the RPG-22.

[ralphwiggum 6]

3 words.

Made in USA.

I concurr that it could be one of those new weapons, and someone may have fired it to test it. nothing is more comforting than your weapon actually working the way it is supposed to.

[theavonlady 2]

This is besides the 50+ Iraqis killed yesterday:

Suicide Bomber Kills 24 Iraqi Army Recruits in Baghdad

Quote[/b] ]24 minutes ago

By Bryson Hull

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A suicide car bomb exploded at an Iraqi army recruitment center in Baghdad Wednesday, killing 24 recruits, in the second deadly attack against Iraqis working with U.S. occupation forces in 24 hours.

"It was a suicide attack by a single male," U.S. Colonel Ralph Baker told Reuters at the scene. He said 24 recruits were killed and 10 to 15 people were badly wounded.

"It was aimed strictly at Iraqis," he said.

[denoir 0]

Hmmm. Yesterday it was police recruits, this time military. It's probably a smart strategy targeting them as an Iraqi police and military is basically the only way of restoring order. The US is undermanned by at least a factor ten, so they need the locals.

I think that the list of volunteers for police/military duty will be exceptionally short.

[ralphwiggum 6]

pretty good idea, until US pulls out. then it becomes Iraq's problem, and maybe that of UN.

[ralphwiggum 6]

This is besides the 50+ Iraqis killed yesterday:

Suicide Bomber Kills 24 Iraqi Army Recruits in Baghdad

Quote[/b] ]24 minutes ago

By Bryson Hull

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A suicide car bomb exploded at an Iraqi army recruitment center in Baghdad Wednesday, killing 24 recruits, in the second deadly attack against Iraqis working with U.S. occupation forces in 24 hours.

"It was a suicide attack by a single male," U.S. Colonel Ralph Baker told Reuters at the scene. He said 24 recruits were killed and 10 to 15 people were badly wounded.

"It was aimed strictly at Iraqis," he said.

 

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/02/11/sprj.nirq.main/index.html

death toll now at 36.

[Balschoiw 0]

It was a RPG PG7VR that penetrated M1 composite armour.

You can´t see entry hole on hull as it is covered with a sheet of paper for intel reasons.

Quote[/b] ]1988 the Soviet Union weapons organization "Bazalt" was the first in the world to develop a antitank grenade launcher round capable of penetrating composite armor, as well as screened armor and explosive reactive armor. This was done with a tandem warhead for the RPG launchers. The new warhead, the PG-7VR, has been widely used, but until the recent incident in Iraq, was not known to have actually penetrated composite armor in combat.

PG-7VR

[miles teg 1]

I agree that this was certainly an RPG. Look at the pictures and you see a very distinctive "splash" pattern of an RPG hit.

I've seen plenty of pictures of BMP's and T-55's knocked out in Afghanistan by RPG's. What is typical of these pictures is a small hole. This is caused by two things. The first is the narrowly focused jet of explosives that is focused due to the nature of shape-charged explosives. The second reason for the hole is because in even regular RPG-7 rounds, a metal slug in the warhead serves as a type of dual penetrator. If I remember correctly the slug is made of copper or something like that. But I may be mistaken.

In the new RPG-7 tandem warheads this I believe contains a dedicated armor piercing projectile in it so that if the HEAT part of the warhead does not penetrate, the armor piercing slug will penetrate.

Of coarse I may be wrong on this and perhaps an RPG expert on can correct me if I am.

But nevertheless the splash pattern on the tank does indeed indicate a HEAT type round exploding on the tank. You can even see the marks from shrapnel scarring the tank.

While most of the blast from a HEAT round is focused on a narrow area, still some of the explosive explodes outward for a secondary anti-personel effect. This outward blast is what makes that "splash" pattern.

Also keep in mind that the minimization of dammage inside the M1 is in large part due to the excellent anti-spalling liner inside the M1 tank. This reduces the amount of shrapnel that bounces around inside the tank and thus minimizes crew deaths and injuries from such penetrations.

There are interior pics of the dammage from this round to the m1 in those pictures but they are difficult to find on the internet.

Chris G.

aka-Miles Teg<GD>

[EiZei 0]

Early signs of senility?

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm....0221018

Quote[/b] ]

Rumsfeld doesn't remember Blair's "45 minute" claim in Iraq dossier

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he did not recall British Prime Minister Tony Blair's pre-war claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction ready to be deployed in 45 minutes.

"I don't remember the statement being made, to be perfectly honest," Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news conference.

General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he didn't remember the statement either.

The claim made headlines around the world after Blair leveled it in a 55-page "white paper" presented to the House of Commons in September 2002.

[Balschoiw 0]

Quote[/b] ]WASHINGTON (AFP) - US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he did not recall British Prime Minister Tony Blair's pre-war claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction ready to be deployed in 45 minutes.

But he knows there is war in Iraq, does he ?

It´s funny. No it´s not. People die. No fun.

I am curiouse at wich point TBA will have total amnesia. Bush has amnesia, so has Rice, so has Powell and now Rumsfeld.

Anyway it will be hard to be researched and investigated as all papers are locked up as a result of presidential decret order.

Put them to Guantanamo, lock them up in the cages and wait till the first confesses. Of course no lawyer and telephone calls.Maybe a bit torturing (according to their doctrine) will do the trick. Isn´t it criminal to send people to death ? So why are they not treated like criminals and punished according to that. Throw these warmongers out of the White House now. No reason to wait for elections.

TBA does not only pose a threat to the world and it´s own country but already has broken it´s promise to protect their country and willingly sent soldiers who serve the country to death by lying. That´s it.

The harm done to the USA is growing on a daily rate. No foreigners involved. It´s the TBA. You have the enemy right in the White House. No need to send 130.000 soldiers abroad. The enemy is in Washington. And Iraq is the lamb led to slaughter.