Coast Guard admits Sept. 11 training exercise was a bad idea

For anyone who still thinks it impossible that the U.S. military was caught napping on the fateful day that terrorists crashed jumbo jets into the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001 comes news of an internal U.S. Coast Guard investigation that found that scheduling a training exercise on the Potomac River on the anniversary of that attack was a mistake. Gee, you think? False reports of gunfire near the Pentagon, where President Barack Obama was attending a memorial ceremony, prompted FBI agents to rush the scene and caused the grounding of 17 flights at nearby Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, the New York Times said, citing a report yesterday by the Associated Press. CNN and Fox News reported the shots on television after hearing about them on a police radio, even though no shots were actually fired, the Times said. Instead, the exercise raised unnecessary fears that Washington had again come under attack on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, the report found. The Coast Guard said it did not know that Obama was in the vicinity and would not have conducted the drill if it had known, and promised to use more-secure communications in the future. Of course, the biggest question has to be why the Coast Guard didn't figure any of this out before. Like the incident in April when an airplane painted to look like Air Force One caused panic in New York City when it flew dangerously close to skyscrapers in a publicity exercise without notifying local authorities, federal authorities display stupidity at best or contempt for the citizenry at worst when they pull such stunts. If it's only stupidity, it certainly seems a likely explanation for what happened, or failed to happen, on the real Sept. 11.

Obstructionism as an art form

Today's comment by Sen. John Kyl of Arizona threatening a filibuster of whomever U.S. President Barak Obama nominates for the open seat on the U.S. Supreme Court is another low for the foundering Republican Party in a decade of lows. Believe it or not, the second most-powerful GOP senator said today that he would try to hold up confirmation of any court nominee who displays the quality of empathy, according to the Associated Press. Kyl told the conservative Federalist Society that such a judge could not be trusted to be objective so such a nomination should be blocked. "I was distinguishing between a person who is just liberal — and undoubtedly this nominee will be liberal — and one who decides cases not based upon the law or the merits but, rather, upon his or her emotions, or feelings or preconceived ideas," Kyl said. "That would be a circumstance in which I could not support the nominee." Do these guys even listen to what they're saying? Kyl's remarks were in response to comments to a C-Span interview broadcast Saturday in which Obama said he wanted to nominate a judge with "understanding and identifying with people's hopes and struggles" in deciding cases. "You have to have not only the intellect to be able to effectively apply the law to cases before you," Obama said. "But you have to be able to stand in somebody else's shoes and see through their eyes and get a sense of how the law might work or not work in practical day-to-day living." Who could argue with that? Well, apparently, at least Kyl has figured out how to, even though he should well know that George W. Bush, Obama's predecessor, appointed doctrinaire conservatives to the court. "We will distinguish between a liberal judge on one side and one who doesn't decide cases on the merits but, rather, on the basis of his or her preconceived ideas," Kyl said, according to AP. Obama is expected to announce his nomination this week, possibly as early as Tuesday. The nominee should be confirmed with little problem, because the Democrats hold a 59-40 majority in the U.S. Senate. People known to be under consideration include federal appeals court judges Diane Wood and Sonia Sotomayor, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and California Supreme Court Justice Carlos Moreno, the AP said.

Sri Lanka government about to defeat decades-long insurgency

Reports from Sri Lanka say the government is in control of the entire coastline and has cornered the Tamil Tigers in what could be the end of the 25-year insurgency. Sri Lanka President Mahinda Rajapaksa said Saturday that his military had "finally defeated" the insurgents after a generation-long war that killed thousands of civilians, saw the first use of suicide bombings and of women and children in terrorist attacks, and included assassinations of many Sri Lankan political leaders and, allegedly, of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Ghandi. According to the Associated Press, the Tamil Tigers rebel group, which had been fighting for the establishment of an independent state for the minority Tamils in the island nation, was calling for peace and for negotiations with the government in Colombo. It was a far cry from the 1980s when the Tamil Tigers operated a virtual state in the country's north, commanded a navy and controlled a smuggling network, the AP said. The vast majority of Sri Lankans are Sinhalese, mostly Buddhist and speak the Sinhala language; the Tamils come from India, are primarily Hindu and speak Tamil, according to the nonprofit Council on Foreign Relations. But the government has rejected entreaties for a truce, even from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, and pressed on with a massive bombing campaign against the remaining rebels. Tigers spokesman Selvarasa Pathmanathan told the AP that U.S. President Barak Obama call on Wednesday for a peaceful resolution of the conflict was welcome, but did not agree to Obama's request for lay down their weapons.

Pakistan offensive highlights unintended consequences of warfare

Now we can see why Pakistan was so reluctant to go to war against the Taliban in the Swat valley. In the two days since Islamabad launched its all-out campaign to force the radical Islamic group's fighters from their strongholds, hundreds of thousands of residents have fled the area and sought refuge at U.N.-run refugee camps along Pakistan's long border with Afghanistan, according to the Associated Press. Pakistan's attack began Thursday, at least partially in response to pressure from the United States and other Western nations, which were highly critical of Islamabad's peace deal with the Taliban in January that surrendered control of the valley. The Taliban promptly imposed Islamic law in the former tourist locale and began expanding its influence to the neighboring Buner and Lower Dir districts, just 60 miles from the capital, the AP said. Pakistani officials said they wanted to give the peace deal a chance to work before going on the offensive. The flight of so many residents from the war zone, where Pakistan has sent 15,000 soldiers backed by warplanes, has created a humanitarian crisis on top of the region's already dire security, economic and political problems, the AP said. Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani convened an emergency cabinet meeting today and authorized millions of dollars in relied to the border region, calling the campaign a "war of the country's survival." Taliban militants dominate the tribal region just across the border in Afghanistan, where the United States believes al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden is hiding. Pakistani and U.N. officials say as many as 500,000 people could be displaced by the fighting, the AP said.

Blackwater saga keeps getting worse and worse

Just when we thought the Blackwater scandal in Iraq had faded from the headlines when the U.S. Army security contractor changed its name after five of its guards were indicted in an ugly shooting incident incident in Baghdad in 2007, comes word from Raleigh, N.C., that a different contractor claims Blackwater guards asked him to dispose of weapons after the shooting. According to the Associated Press, the other contractor, John Houston, was an employee of SOS International Ltd. of New York when he allegedly tried to smuggle a case of firearms out of Iraq. Houston now faces smuggling charges in federal court in Maryland based on testimony given by two informants, army reservists in Iraq, who told authorities they had been approached about the scheme, the AP said. The weapons were seized before they were shipped to an accomplice in the North Carolina, according to court papers, the AP said. The alleged accomplice, Michael Henson, also faces smuggling charges. Houston is a former Special Forces soldier. It is not clear, the AP said, whether the planned weapons shipment including the weapons used by Blackwater guards in the 2007 incident, which left 17 dead in Baghdad's Nisour Square. The bloody incident strained relations between the United States and the fledgling Iraq government, and led to last year's agreement to withdraw U.S. forces from the countryside to the cities by June and from the country in 2011.