By Jim Kouri

A terrorist’s use of a radiological dispersal device or improvised nuclear device – a/k/a ‘dirty bombs’ – to release radioactive materials into the environment could have devastating consequences.

The timely cleanup of contaminated areas, however, could speed the restoration of normal operations, thus reducing the adverse consequences from an incident. At the request of the U.S. Congress, the Government Accountability Office examined the extent to which federal agencies are planning to fulfill their responsibilities to assist cities and their states in cleaning up areas contaminated with radioactive materials from RDD and IND incidents.

GAO analysts also examined what is known about the federal government’s capability to effectively cleanup areas contaminated with radioactive materials from RDD and IND incidents, and the analysts looked at suggestions from government emergency management officials on ways to improve federal preparedness to provide assistance to recover from RDD and IND incidents.

Analysts also discussed recovery activities in the United Kingdom with that nation’s experts.
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Washington Times Editorial Board

The recent battle in Marjah in Afghanistan’s Helmand province was a key test case for new rules of engagement that emphasized protecting civilians rather than killing insurgents. The town was taken, but whether that was because of the new rules or despite them remains to be seen.

The rules of engagement are probably the most restrictive ever seen for a war of this nature. NATO forces cannot fire on suspected Taliban fighters unless they are clearly visible, armed and posing a direct threat. Buildings suspected of containing insurgents cannot be targeted unless it is certain that civilians are not also present. Air strikes and night raids are limited, and prisoners have to be released or transferred within four days, making for a 96-hour catch-and-release program.

In Marjah, the enemy quickly adapted to the rules, which led to bizarre circumstances such as Taliban fighters throwing down their weapons when they were out of ammunition and taunting coalition troops with impunity or walking in plain view with women behind them carrying their weapons like caddies. If World War II had been fought with similar rules, the battles would still be raging. Paradoxically, America’s most successful post-conflict reconstructions were in Germany and Japan, where enemy-occupied towns like Marjah were flattened without a second thought.
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BY Steven F. Hayward

The Weekly Standard

Also posted at The Gold Coast Chronicle

It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago – changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more.

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing calls for a serious shakeup. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the self-serving coalition of environmentalists and big business hoping to create a carbon cartel, is falling apart in the wake of the collapse of any prospect of enacting cap and trade in Congress.

Meanwhile, the climate campaign’s fallback plan to have the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the cumbersome Clean Air Act is generating bipartisan opposition. The British media – even the left-leaning, climate alarmists of the Guardian and BBC – are turning on the climate campaign with a vengeance. The somnolent American media, which have done as poor a job reporting about climate change as they did on John Edwards, have largely averted their gaze from the inconvenient meltdown of the climate campaign, but the rock solid edifice in the newsrooms is cracking.

Al Gore was conspicuously missing in action before surfacing with a long article in the New York Times on February 28, reiterating his familiar parade of horribles: The sea level will rise! Monster storms! Climate refugees in the hundreds of millions! Political chaos the world over! It was the rhetorical equivalent of stamping his feet and saying “It is too so!” In a sign of how dramatic the reversal of fortune has been for the climate campaign, it is now James Inhofe, the leading climate skeptic in the Senate, who is eager to have Gore testify before Congress.
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By Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Washington Examiner

Our Declaration of Independence observes:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

“Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This is boilerplate American history, and something that Americans – and, in particular, America’s political class – have long taken for granted.

But now things are looking a bit dicey. According to a recent Rasmussen Poll , only 21 percent of American voters believe that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed. On the other hand, Rasmussen notes, a full 63 percent of the “political class” believe that the government enjoys the consent of the governed.
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By Andy McCarthy

National Review Online

Detained terrorists received more legal help than American prisoners do. Why?

This is not that hard. The salient issue in the controversy over Justice Department attorneys who formerly represented our terrorist enemies detained at Guantanamo Bay is this: They were volunteers.

The lawyers and their lefty legions expect you to overlook that. Lawyers presume that they have an elite status in our litigious society and that their superior knowledge of the law will intimidate critics into silence. Since they are trained advocates, they figure that if they feign enough indignation over somebody’s “questioning their patriotism,” then Americans will shrink from asking, “How is it patriotic to go out of your way to help America’s enemies in wartime?”

Often, that line of defense works. In 2007, these same lawyers managed to get a Defense Department official run out of town. His hanging offense? He observed that many American corporations might prefer to find a new law firm rather than continue retaining one that used clients’ legal fees to subsidize its representation of terrorists who murder Americans. The observation, of course, was common sense. If you found out a restaurant you patronized was using the profits from serving you to provide free meals for al-Qaeda, would you keep going there, or would you find another restaurant? But when The Profession shrieked, our politically-correct-on-steroids Defense Department cried “uncle” in about a nanosecond. The al-Qaeda Bar and its cheerleaders calculate that this sorry episode will make the rest of us pipe down if we know what’s good for us.

Not all of us.
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by Patrick Seale

General Stanley McChrystal’s campaign to boot the Taliban out of southern Afghanistan is not going well. Marred by civilian casualties and stubborn Taliban resistance, his assault on the small town of Marjah has been slowed to a snail’s pace. Kandahar, the Taliban’s ‘capital’, remains far out of his reach.

Operation Moshtarak, which mobilised 15,000 allied and Afghan troops, was initially expected to last a few weeks. It was thought that the few hundred Taliban fighters defending Marjah would melt away into the mountains. Instead they are fighting back and have planted thousands of mines to check the American advance. The latest estimate is that the campaign might take twelve to eighteen months to reach its goal—if indeed it is ever reached.

The stakes are high. If McChrystal’s campaign fails – or simply gets bogged down in endless bloody skirmishes – then the whole strategy, which he persuaded President Barack Obama to adopt, will collapse.

McChrystal asked Obama for 40,000 men, in addition to the more than 65,000 U.S. troops already in the country. He got 30,000, as well as a few thousand more to add to the roughly 40,000 troops from 43 countries, mostly from America’s reluctant NATO allies. In all, he asked for – and will get – a total of close to 150,000 troops by the summer.
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Mortimer Zuckerman is the Editor in Chief of the U S News and World Report and was a supporter of Barack Obama during his run for the Presidency. This is a staggering appraisal of the President’s first year in office- coming from someone who supported President Obama.

In a January 20, 2010 editorial, the Editor in Chief of U.S. News & World Report, Mortimer Zuckerman, had this to say:

“Obama’s ability to connect with voters is what launched him. But what has surprised me is how he has failed to connect with the voters since he’s been in office.

He’s had so much overexposure. You have to be selective. He was doing five Sunday shows. How many press conferences? And now people stop listening to him… He’s lost his audience. He has not rallied public opinion. He has plunged in the polls more than any other public figure since we’ve been using polls. He’s done everything wrong. Well, not everything, but the major things… I don’t consider it a triumph. I consider it a disaster.” And that’s what his friends are saying about him.

As the boy president occupied the White House on January 20, 2009 it was predictable that his presidency would last a year, at most, because the things he promised and the things he stood for were so uniquely un-American. Looking back over his year in office, any reasonably precocious fourth grader could make a cogent argument in opposition to nearly everything he’s done.

In fact, his policies have been so extreme and so far outside the mainstream that he was destined to achieve the most spectacular fall from grace of any American president in history. It was easy to see him serving out the final three years of his term as a virtual exile in the White House… afraid to venture out among any but the most rabid partisans.

Seeing his most ambitious initiative, healthcare reform, die in the flames of the Massachusetts Massacre, Obama made a hastily-planned “sortie” to Ohio for yet another Bush-bashing, self-aggrandizing stump speech on job creation. It was vintage Obama… full of left wing hyperbole and planted questions from the Kool- Ade drinkers in the hand-picked audience… but there were just two things wrong with it: 1) Almost everything he said was either wrong or an outright lie, and 2) He is so overexposed that no one in the television audience really wanted to see him.
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By Paul E. Vallely MG, US Army (Ret) Chairman Stand Up America US

Also Posted at The Gold Coast Chronicle

In war, military strategy is tailored to meet the enemy’s threat, to persuade those who might fight not to fight, and when necessary, to win and achieve Victory in the shortest possible time. In the War against Global Jihad and its network of enablers, America’s top leadership appears to be achieving the opposite outcome. American soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines are rightly lauded by the American public for their courage and sacrifice in the fight for United States national security, but the high quality of American soldiers and Marines at battalion level and below cannot compensate for inadequate senior leadership at the highest levels in war.

Today, the senior leadership of the U.S. armed forces is overly bureaucratic and process oriented risk averse to some degree in a prevailing strategy. Competent Generals and Admirals must communicate to their civilian superiors the truth of what is really happening and what actions and resources are required for success and Victory. War has no place for political correctness.

President Abraham Lincoln struggled with some incompetents in the Civil War until he found someone who won battles. The man was Ulysses S. Grant, an officer no one in the Army’s command hierarchy wanted. Long before America entered World War II, Gen. George C. Marshall, an officer who had waited 36 years for promotion to flag rank, ended his first year in office as Army chief of staff in 1940 by retiring 54 generals.

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Marshall continued to replace hundreds of generals and colonels, elevating men like James Gavin, a captain in 1942, to brigadier general and division commander in 1944. When Gen. Matthew Ridgway assumed command of the Eighth Army in Korea, he was no less ruthless than Marshall had been with commanders in the field who did not measure up.
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