Flit

SHARIF DON'T LIKE IT Sorry,

SHARIF DON'T LIKE IT

Sorry, but I have to make the Clash reference before anyone else does:

Now over at the temple
Oh! They really pack 'em in
The in crowd say it's cool
To dig this chanting thing
But as the wind changed direction
The temple band took five
The crowd caught a wiff
Of that crazy Casbah jive...

UM... THANKS... I GUESS... Steven

UM... THANKS... I GUESS...

Steven den Beste comes to Canadians' defence by... mocking Canada's national sport. With friends like these... :-)

NICE SUMMARY OF DYER FUNERAL

NICE SUMMARY OF DYER FUNERAL

Jim Coyle of the Star wrote a nice piece on the funeral, here. Richard Gwyn also has an insightful piece on it, as well.

FISK ON "COLLABORATOR" LYNCHINGS: IT'S

FISK ON "COLLABORATOR" LYNCHINGS: IT'S ISRAEL'S FAULT

Can't say the old guy isn't predictable.

BACK TO AFGHANISTAN A little

BACK TO AFGHANISTAN

A little more detail coming out about the accident in Afghanistan itself. A lot of survivor accounts are mentioning hearing the jet at the point of weapons delivery... indicating the pilot was likely flying below the 9,000 foot ceiling of all AA fire. Why? There'd be no reason if it was just a flight loitering over Kandahar as air support cover; the Americans have Apaches and AC-130s that can loiter a lot longer than an F-16 for that kind of stuff, and it could have patrolled much higher up. Nor was the F-16 actually out actively looking for the enemy: low-level night flying at 600 mph is meant for penetrating air defences; it's not a useful way of developing information on new ground contacts.

So if it wasn't air support, and it wasn't recce... what was the pilot doing there? The obvious answer is he was doing the same thing the Canadians were doing, actually; a little night training. Likely the primary reason those particular F-16s were out was to build up their experience in low-level night flying, likely over an area considered relatively safe. The pilot, you see, was training too... and then, when confronted with something he hadn't expected (ie, a little HMG tracer fire that looked like it might have been aimed at him) he made a series of what can only be considered to be reckless and dangerous decisions. From that point on, whoever had fired that tracer (Canadian, American, U.N., Afghan) was going to die: no fancy communications or target ID equipment would have made any difference.

Significantly, the reports also note that an AWACS plane (ie, an air-to-air controller), as opposed to the more sophisticated air-to-ground JSTARS was controlling the air activity over Afghanistan that night. An AWACS is not configured to keep track of troops on the ground, or coordinate air strikes; that's not its job. Over Afghanistan, the best an AWACS could do would be to keep planes from killing each other: it wouldn't have information on ground forces -- other than zones on the map which were designated for various purposes (ie, live fire training). And that probably would have been enough, if the pilot had taken time to confirm his location, with them. But that would assume the pilot was thinking rationally and calmly... it's quite clear by now that he was not.

Think about it... at 600 mph, even if it had been tracer being shot up at him, instead of along the ground, and with no particular reason for that pilot to deny the enemy that particular part of Afghanistan, the guy could have just flown on, or up, or done as many passes as necessary at a safe altitude to identify the target to everyone's satisfaction. He should know the capabilities of his aircraft, and the threats against it, better than any one: even he cannot have thought he was seriously in real danger at any point from one or two anti-aircraft machine guns with a maximum vertical range of 5,000 ft being fired blindly at the sound of his motor (because he himself would have been invisible and all but unhittable at even a low altitude from the ground at night). He could have called the base to get soldiers to prosecute the contact, once its location was confirmed, on the ground. But no, what he clearly did was push the button, and fly home, convinced he'd struck a blow for the World Trade Center. And one of the victims of that blow was carried past me in a pine box today.