06.27.12
Remembering recent al Qaeda funny books
Earlier this year, on the publication of al Qaeda’s magazine, Inspire:
Inspire magazine, while not meant to be an al Qaeda joke, has always been easy to brush off. Its been an example of how al Qaeda has had a serious problem with recruitment filled as it is with wishful thinkers and fantasies on terror that will never come true. Al Qaeda, for practical purposes, is operationally dead. As far as the 99 percent and middle class America is concerned, it poses no serious threat.
Al Qaeda has been whittled down by American might over a decade of war. The US employs more money and manpower hunting it than it needs to destroy a handful of medium-sized nations …
The al Qaeda men writing for Inspire have obviously never actually been to the United States.
They just wishfully think it would be good, and really terrorizing, if someone could like, uh, start a couple fires in wait for it Montana!
Inspire only shows two things that al Qaeda is virtually destroyed and that US war-on-terror reporters are crap.
The men who launched al Qaeda’s English-language magazine may have died in a U.S. missile strike last fall, but “Inspire” magazine lives on without them — and continues to promote jihadi attacks on Western targets, offering detailed advice on how to start huge forest fires in America with timed explosives …
Readers know — not a single William L. Shirer in the entire press army covering the war on terror.
Today:
WOODLAND PARK, Colo. – A stubborn and towering wildfire jumped firefighters’ perimeter lines and doubled in size in the hills overlooking Colorado Springs, forcing frantic mandatory evacuation notices for more than 9,000 residents, destroying an unknown number of homes and partially closing the grounds of the sprawling U.S. Air Force Academy.
Heavy smoke and ash billowed from the mountain foothills west of the city. Bright yellow and orange flames flared in the night, often signaling another home lost to the Waldo Canyon Fire, the No. 1 priority for the nation’s firefighters.
Interstate 25, which runs through Colorado Springs, was briefly closed to southbound traffic Tuesday. All told, officials said, evacuation orders affected as many as 32,000 residents …
Throughout the interior West, firefighters have toiled for days in searing, record-setting heat against fires fueled by prolonged drought. Most, if not all, of Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana were under red flag warnings, meaning extreme fire danger.
In central Utah, authorities found one woman dead Tuesday when they returned to an evacuated area, marking the first casualty in a blaze that consumed at least two dozen homes. Sanpete County sheriff’s officials said they hadn’t identified the victim, whose remains were found during a damage assessment of the 60-square-mile Wood Hollow Fire near Indianola.
The nation is experiencing “a super-heated spike on top of a decades-long warming trend,” said Derek Arndt, head of climate monitoring at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
Massive wildfires are a fact of life in the mid-west and west. Global warming has made them worse but they’ve always been part of the landscape. Sparks from cars, guns, lightning, arsonists, careless campers — many things touch them off.
Southern California has its red flag days every year. There is probably not anyone who lives here who hasn’t seen a helicopter dropping dyed fire retardant or been close to, if not too close, to a big wildfire.
A wildfire crawled through the south side of the San Gabriel mountains the first year I was here. The smoke plume from it dropped ash like a light snow on Pasadena for days. Coals set palms and rooftops on fire.
A smoke cloud from a wildfire near Venture turned the highway into Santa Barbara on a Sunday afternoon into what seemed like midnight to me and a friend a couple years ago.
Massive wildfires destroy lots of property. Casualties always remain low, hardest hit being the firefighters. People usually have time to get out of the way. Terrorizing is a poor way to describe them.
Firestorms that incinerate cities have been caused by massive strategic bomber raids. They were the property of the old US Army Air Force, Curtis LeMay and Bomber Harris of the United Kingdom during World War II.
The ineffective Japanese fire balloon campaign was more effective than Inspire.
The US had a small project to develop incendiary bats to be dropped over Japanese cities in World War II. A most excellent, authoritative and amusing book on the affair, which I have, is here.
The bats were kitted with white phosphorus encapsulated in a decaying gel strapped to a foot, put on racks, and packed into a bomb
which opened in mid-air. The only test resulted in a building burned down at the project site after an experimental bomb was released over a target. The bats flew out, declined to go where they were supposed to, flew back to roost at the base — their home, and set a fire.
The bat bomb’s scientist, and the bats, had roots in Pasadena.
“Fletch grinned when faced with my mastiff,” it reads. (The greater mastiff bat is the largest bat in the US.)
Continuing, from Bat Bomb:
(Fletch) had never seen a bat that large. “Man,” he said appreciatively. “Just think what Doc could do with a plane load of those puppies. Where’d you get ‘im from, Africa?”
“Pasadena,” I said. “Ain’t he just a dilly!”
On March 9 and 10, 1945, Curtis LeMay hit Tokyo with incendiary raids.
Deaths went over 100,000. More than a million were made homeless.
What’s left of al Qaeda and the US war on terror press corps — all of them, douchebags.
Major Variola said,
July 15, 2012 at 8:04 am
You ignore Dresden.
WWII was the starting point for modern asymm. war: target civilians, cities.
They make ball bearings; they trade stocks. Doesn’t matter. All’s fair, now. Even assasination is legal.
(And the terrorist yankees never did wear red uniforms and line up like proper soldiers!)
George Smith said,
July 15, 2012 at 9:31 am
Funny, I was just going to put Dresden in a post today, due to some New York Times things where an ex-CIA man -tries- to make a point that sounds good for laymen but which is kinda specious in terms of national threat assessment. Maybe we read the same piece.