Posts Tagged ‘Murder’
2009
“Published reports today say the Pentagon is rattling swords in the direction of North Korea and Iran by speeding the development a 20-foot, 30,000lb bomb known as Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) meant to annihilate underground bunkers and other hardened (re: long range missile) sites.
The Defense Threat Reduction Agency which has overseen the development of this monster since 2007, says it is designed to be carried aboard B-2 and B-52 bombers and deployed at high altitudes where it would strike the ground at speeds well beyond 2X the speed of sound to penetrate the below ground target.
The Boeing-built MOP won’t be the heaviest conventional bomb ever made. The US military built the T-12, which weighed about 44,000lbs, in the 1940s. Meanwhile the 21,700-lb Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb, better known as the ‘Mother Of All Bombs’ is still in the US arsenal. The MOAB was developed to replace the 15,000lb ‘Daisy Cutters’ from the Vietnam Ware era. The Soviets claimed a “Father of all Bombs” in 2007 but some experts think the bomb was a hoax or stunt and questioned its true power…”
source: networkworld.com
“Britain may need to send more troops to Afghanistan despite the success of Operation Panther’s Claw, military chiefs admit.
The scale of the challenge was revealed yesterday as it emerged that British soldiers have faced nearly 1,000 roadside bombs in the past three months. Although 3,000 troops managed to drive out about 500 Taleban during the five-week offensive, they will be fully deployed holding an area in Helmand province about the size of the Isle of Wight, their commanding officer admitted.
Brigadier Tim Radford, commander of Task Force Helmand, said that the existing troops could not be expected to mount further significant operations without reinforcements. Gordon Brown hailed the offensive as an ‘heroic’ military success, saying it had made Britain safer and ‘pushed back the Taleban’. David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, however, called for renewed efforts to engage the Taleban politically…”
source timesonline.co.uk
“These files include formally highly classified US government communications about the Dasht-e-Leili massacre in Afghanistan. The massacre killed thousands of Taliban prisoners of war. The files were released earlier on two websites maintained by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) but are of significant historical importance.
PHR has asked that WikiLeaks house the documents to assure the widest journalistic and public access to the documents. WikiLeaks reaches an audience different than PHR’s and having the documents on WikiLeaks’ servers helps to ensure that the documents’ availability does not depend solely on PHR’s web infrastructure.
On July 10 there was a front page New York Times story detailing new allegations that the Bush Administration impeded at least three federal investigations into the Dasht-e-Leili massacre. President Obama has responded to the news on a nationally aired CNN interview with Anderson Cooper. There continue to be new developments in the story to which the FOIA documents continue to add relevant context and information…”
via wikileaks.org
“Just a few years ago, the Army was so down on the Land Warrior high-tech soldier get-up that it officially canceled the project. Now, Land Warrior is back from the dead — and considered so valuable that even the Army’s commando elite want the wearable electronics suites.
According to InsideDefense.com, an Army Special Forces battalion will start training with an upgraded version of Land Warrior in 2010, before it deploys to Iraq later in the year.”
via wired.com