moonbuggy

How do you dispose of 20,000 pounds of war surplus sodium metal?

Looks like a fun job. 🙂

(10.3meg Google video)
see it here »

‘An Afghan army soldier is trying to demonstrate a very very old Russian RPG.’

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`The House lawmaker in charge of defense spending said Friday that he intends to force the closure of the Guantánamo Bay military prison and curb U.S. engagement in Iraq, and that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “absolutely” supports his efforts. [..]

He said the best way to control what course the war takes is for Congress to attach conditions to war-spending bills, because Bush is unlikely to veto a bill that provides money to keep fighting.

The Guant�namo military prison, where prisoners have been held without charges and abused, need to be closed to restore U.S. credibility, Murtha said.’

`Within minutes of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s arrival on Capitol Hill yesterday, it became apparent that the Bush administration had, after four divisive years, finally succeeded in uniting Congress on the war in Iraq.

Unfortunately for Rice, the lawmakers were unified in opposition to President Bush’s new policy.

“I have to say, Madam Secretary,” a seething Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) told Rice, “that I think this speech given last night by this president represents the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.”

“Madam Secretary,” added Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida, a moderate Democrat, “I have supported you and the administration on the war, and I cannot continue to support the administration’s position. . . . I have not been told the truth over and over again.”‘

`A US soldier has been sentenced to 18 years in prison after pleading guilty to murdering three prisoners during a raid on a suspected al-Qaeda compound in Iraq last year.

The case is one of two involving soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division accused of killing Iraqis during a deployment to Iraq that ended in September.

Specialist William Hunsaker, 24, pleaded guilty to murder, attempted murder and obstruction of justice during a hearing at Fort Campbell in Kentucky.’

`There were many acid tests happening in the 1950s and 1960s. Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters dosed sometimes-unsuspecting proto-hippies. The CIA was dosing unsuspecting mainstreamers. Leary dosed fully cognizant artists, therapists and students. But meanwhile, over at Army Chemical Center at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, psychiatrist James S. Ketchum was testing LSD, BZ and other psychedelic and deliriant compounds on fully informed volunteers for the U.S. military. [..]

Now, Dr. Ketchum has released his fascinating self-published memoir, Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten, primarily detailing his times at Edgewood. The book boasts charts, graphs and experimental reports – a veritable goldmine of information for those who are interested in psychedelics, deliriants, or chemical warfare. It’s also a funny, observant, and reflective personal memoir, casting a light not only on Ketchum and his work, but on a decade that saw 60s counterculture and the military share an oddly intersecting obsession with mind-altering drugs.’

`You saw the stories that dominated the headlines in 2006: the war in Iraq, North Korea’s nuclear tests, and the U.S. midterm elections. But what about the news that remained under the radar? From the Bush administration’s post-Katrina power grab to a growing arms race in Latin America to the new hackable passports, FP delivers the Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2006.’

`Helicopter gunships attacked suspected al Qaeda fighters in the south Tuesday after U.S. forces staged airstrikes in the first offensive in the African country since 18 American soldiers were killed there in 1993, witnesses said.

Witnesses said 31 civilians, including two newlyweds, died in the assault by two helicopters near Afmadow, a town in an area of forested hills close to the Kenyan border 220 miles southwest of Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu. The report could not be independently verified.

A Somali Defense Ministry official described the helicopters as American, but the local witnesses told The Associated Press they could not make out identification markings on the craft. Washington officials had no comment.’

`Iraq’s massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.

The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.’

That’s a surprise. It never even occurred to me that the US government might have some interest in Iraqi oil fields.

She sounded so reasonable at first. 🙂

see it here »

‘The Army said Friday it would apologize to the families of about 275 officers killed or wounded in action who were mistakenly sent letters urging them to return to active duty.

The letters were sent a few days after Christmas to more than 5,100 Army officers who had recently left the service. Included were letters to about 75 officers killed in action and about 200 wounded in action.’

Update: now with a video.

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`Israel has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons.

Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear “bunker-busters”, according to several Israeli military sources.

The attack would be the first with nuclear weapons since 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Israeli weapons would each have a force equivalent to one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb.’

`Self-cleaning fabrics could revolutionize the sport apparel industry. The technology, created by scientists working for the U.S. Air Force, has already been used to create t-shirts and underwear that can be worn hygenically for weeks without washing.

The new technology attaches nanoparticles to clothing fibers using microwaves. Then, chemicals that can repel water, oil and bacteria are directly bound to the nanoparticles. These two elements combine to create a protective coating on the fibers of the material.

This coating both kills bacteria, and forces liquids to bead and run off.’

`On New Year’s Eve, the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq passed 3,000. By Tuesday, the death toll had reached 3,004 — 31 more than died in the Sep. 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

But the number of injured has far outstripped the dead, with the Veterans Administration reporting that more than 150,000 veterans of the Iraq war are receiving disability benefits.

Advances in military technology are keeping the death rate much lower than during the Vietnam War and World War Two, Dr. Col. Vito Imbascini, an urologist and state surgeon with the California Army National Guard, told IPS, but soldiers who survive attacks are often severely disabled for life.’

`1. UKRAINIAN PARTISANS

From 1945 to 1952, the CIA trained and aerially supplied Ukrainian partisan units which had originally been organised by the Germans to fight the Soviets during WWII. For seven years, the partisans, operating in the Carpathian Mountains, made sporadic attacks. Finally, in 1952, a massive Soviet military force wiped them out.

2. CHINESE BRIGADE IN BURMA

After the Communist victory in China, Nationalist Chinese soldiers fled into northern Burma. During the early 1950s, the CIA used these soldiers to create a 12,000-man brigade which made raids into Red China. However, the Nationalist soldiers found it more profitable to monopolise the local opium trade.’

`The Defence Department is investigating why a rocket launcher was found by a man at a rubbish tip in central Queensland.

James Maloney said he bought the rocket launcher for $2 at the recycling centre for the tip at Yeppoon, near Rockhampton.

“I work in the local theatre restaurant and wanted to use it as a stage prop,” Mr Maloney said.

“But I read in the local paper about the army misplacing rocket launchers and they were worried about them getting in the hands of terrorists, so I thought it might be a good idea I gave it back to the authorities.’

`A military nurse who cared for Saddam Hussein in jail said the deposed dictator saved bread crusts to feed birds and seldom complained to his captors, except when he had legitimate gripes.

Master Sgt. Robert Ellis cared for the former Iraqi dictator from January 2004 until August 2005 at Camp Cropper, the compound near Baghdad where Saddam and other “high value detainees” were held. [..]

Saddam told Ellis that cigars and coffee kept his blood pressure down, and it seemed to work. Saddam would insist that Ellis smoke with him.

Ellis said Saddam did not complain much, and, when he did, his complaint was usually legitimate. “He had very good coping skills,” Ellis said.’

`Pledging revenge, hundreds of mourners flocked to Saddam Hussein’s tomb in northern Iraq yesterday, as America mourned the 3000th American soldier to die in the conflict.

Saddam’s hanging on Saturday, shown in a video that swept the internet, has polarised an Iraqi society already on the brink of civil war.

His fellow Sunni Arabs flocked to Awja, near Tikrit, to see his grave and vent their fury at Shiite officials who taunted him on the gallows.

In an outpouring of grief and anger mourners knelt and prayed by his tomb, over which the Iraqi flag had been draped.’

‘From the awesome BBC doco “Hiroshima”. See CGI effects bring this disaster to horrifying life.’

(20.1meg Flash video)

see it here »

`BRITISH forces have killed seven gunmen and blown up the headquarters of the police serious crimes unit in southern Basra in a raid to rescue prisoners who were about to be killed, the British military said.

Calling the police station a centre of “criminal enterprise” and a symbol of oppression for the city’s residents, the military said the building was demolished with explosives after a pre-dawn assault by around 1000 troops backed by tanks. [..]

British military spokesman Captain Tane Dunlop said the unit had been taking the law into its own hands.

“Crimes unit? That’s pretty much what it does, rather than prevent,” he said.’

`A documentary says French special forces had Osama bin Laden in their sights twice about three years ago but their U.S. superiors never ordered them to fire.

The French military, however, said that the incidents never happened and the report was “erroneous information.”

The documentary, due to air next year and seen by Reuters on Tuesday, says the troops could have killed the al Qaeda leader in
Afghanistan but the order to shoot never came, possibly because it took too long to request it.

“In 2003 and 2004 we had bin Laden in our sights. The sniper said ‘I have bin Laden’,” an anonymous French soldier is quoted as saying.’

`Over the past six months, Baghdad has been all but isolated electrically, Iraqi officials say, as insurgents have effectively won their battle to bring down critical high-voltage lines and cut off the capital from the major power plants to the north, south and west.

The battle has been waged in the remotest parts of the open desert, where the great towers that support thousands of miles of exposed lines are frequently felled with explosive charges in increasingly determined and sophisticated attacks, generally at night. Crews that arrive to repair the damage are often attacked and sometimes killed, ensuring that the government falls further and further behind as it attempts to repair the lines. [..]

“Now Baghdad is almost isolated,” Karim Wahid, the Iraqi electricity minister, said in an interview last week. “We almost don’t have any power coming from outside.”’

`A strang sight greeted investigators when they arrived at HMAS Creswell naval base during their inquiry into harassment in the defence force.

Women trainees on the sports field were wearing the same singlets as the men, complete with gaping arm holes. This posed awkward problems as the women tried to train and cover their breasts at the same time.

In the base’s toilet block – which commanders insisted on being unisex, because that is how life on a ship works – only one cubicle had a sanitary disposal unit.

The investigators came away believing the Australian Defence Force had – in the words of one investigator, the former Public Service Commissioner Andrew Podger – “some way to go on the appreciation of women”.’

`After World War II, there was little money for defense spending while the nations of Europe rebuilt their industry and society. When there was some cash to spend, one had to be creative to stretch it as far as possible. The French probably accomplished the most astounding example of that with the ACMA Troupes Aeról Portées Mle. 56. Deployed with their airborne forces, this was essentially a militarized Vespa scooter outfitted with a 75mm recoilless rifle.’

`”In Hitler’s Germany it was almost a capital offence to send gold out of the country. Since the names of the laureates were engraved on the medals, their discovery by the invading forces would have had very serious consequences,” explains the Nobel Foundation. Yet, when `the Nazis occupied Bohr’s Institute and searched it very carefully’ they found nothing. [..]

“While the invading forces marched in the streets of Copenhagen, I was busy dissolving von Laue’s and also Franck’s medals,” [Niels Bohr] wrote in `Adventures in Radioisotope Research’, published in 1962.

Dissolving the medals was not easy, he would recount. For, gold is “exceedingly unreactive and difficult to dissolve.” Thus, the solution was, literally, a solution. “The medals quietly waited out the war in a solution of aqua regia.” After the war, the gold was recovered from the solution and the Foundation presented von Laue and Frank with the `recoined’ Nobel medals.’

`There is very little that sums up the record of the U.S. Congress in the Bush years better than a half-mad boy-addict put in charge of a federal commission on child exploitation. After all, if a hairy-necked, raincoat-clad freak like Rep. Mark Foley can get himself named co-chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, one can only wonder: What the hell else is going on in the corridors of Capitol Hill these days?

These past six years were more than just the most shameful, corrupt and incompetent period in the history of the American legislative branch. These were the years when the U.S. parliament became a historical punch line, a political obscenity on par with the court of Nero or Caligula — a stable of thieves and perverts who committed crimes rolling out of bed in the morning and did their very best to turn the mighty American empire into a debt-laden, despotic backwater, a Burkina Faso with cable.’

`Bihari: most officially dead person

Lal Bihari (born 1961) is a farmer from Uttar Pradesh, India who was officially dead from 1976 to 1994. He founded Mritak Sangh or the Association of the Dead in Uttar Pradesh, India. He fought Indian government bureaucracy for 18 years to prove that he is alive. [..]

Bawden: the self-elected Pope Michael I, from Kansas

[..] Sedevacantists argue that if the College of Cardinals will not or cannot elect a valid pope, ordinary Catholics can do so, under the principle of “Epikeia” (Equity). Acting on the basis of this, David Bawden was elected Pope by six people on 1990 (including himself and his parents). He is still on the job to this day.’

`For the past several months, I’ve been wrapping up lengthy interviews with Washington counterterrorism officials with a fundamental question: “Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?”

A “gotcha” question? Perhaps. But if knowing your enemy is the most basic rule of war, I don’t think it’s out of bounds. And as I quickly explain to my subjects, I’m not looking for theological explanations, just the basics: Who’s on what side today, and what does each want? [..]

But so far, most American officials I’ve interviewed don’t have a clue. That includes not just intelligence and law enforcement officials, but also members of Congress who have important roles overseeing our spy agencies. How can they do their jobs without knowing the basics?’

`On Aug. 27, 1979, two parallel lines of 11 men formed on a field of dry dirt in Sanandaj, Iran. One group wore blindfolds. The other held rifles. The command came in Farsi to fire: “Atesh!” Behind the soldier farthest to the right, a 12th man also shot, his Nikon camera and Kodak film preserving in black and white a mass execution.

Within hours, the photo ran across six columns in Ettela’at, the oldest newspaper in Iran. Within days, it appeared on front pages around the world. Within weeks, the new Iranian government annexed the offending paper. Within months, the photo won the Pulitzer Prize.’

see it here »