Flit

BEFORE ANYONE ELSE SAYS IT

BEFORE ANYONE ELSE SAYS IT

Henry Kissinger
How I'm missing yer
You're the doctor of my dreams
With your crinkly hair and your glassy stare
And your machiavellian schemes
I know they say that you are very vain
And short and fat and pushy but at least you're not insane
Henry Kissinger
How I'm missing yer
And wishing you were here.

Henry Kissinger
How I'm missing yer
You're so chubby and so neat
With your funny clothes and your squishy nose
You're like a German parakeet
All right so people say that you don't care
But you've got nicer legs than Hitler
And bigger tits than Cher
Henry Kissinger
How I'm missing yer
And wishing you were here.

TARNAK FARMS REVISITED The counsel

TARNAK FARMS REVISITED

The counsel for the defense of the 2 F-16 pilots accused of killing Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan continues to aggressively represent his clients. Good for him. Here are the latest points he raised, in a recent article by the National Post's Michael Friscolanti and Greg MacGregor.

1) Some of the small arms fire on the Kandahar weapons range that was bombed was directed skyward.

On the range that night, the Canadians were firing from a wadi (a shallow ditch, really: it looked from the TV pictures to be 5-6 feet deep). On entering the wadi, the point man, likely carrying a C-9 5.56 mm LMG, put a burst through what's called a "Figure 11" target (a full-size cardboard image of a charging soldier) on the lip of the wadi entrance. This fire would have necessarily been at a high angle, and would likely have included 2 or 3 tracer rounds.

The lawyer's point cannot be that this affects the material facts implicating his clients. It was long conceded that small arms tracer fire, from the range, either from ricochets or other means, was what attracted the pilot's attention. A passing U.S. helicopter crew said it was burning out at 500-1,000 feet. The F-16s above, however, were flying at 23,000 feet, perhaps 20,000 feet above any conceivable threat from small arms. The pilots knew the AA threat, and their own altitude. They therefore had to know self-defence didn't apply. They also knew their strict orders were not to open fire without authorization, under any circumstances short of an immediate threat to their lives. Maj. "Psycho" Schmidt disobeyed those orders, resulting in deaths. Whether the tracers that first caught his eye were ricochets, or that short burst into the Fig.11, or another burst later on (there was lots of ground-to-ground tracer that night as well) is completely irrelevant.

(In any case, it's unlikely the tracers at the Fig. 11 target drew Schmidt's attention, as they were recorded as being fired at roughly 21:15 Zulu time, and Schmidt first remarked on seeing ground fire at 21:21. In all likelihood, what he saw was the actual range exercise that immediately followed, with a much larger volume of horizontal tracer fire, not this little preliminary.)

No, the lawyer's point is that there was no mention of this fact in the U.S. inquiry (it is mentioned in the parallel Canadian one, which is how he knew about it), and that means there's some kind of coverup. Not much of a cover-up really, if the Canadian inquiry noted it, is it? It's much more probable that the U.S. inquiry, which was focussed on the American side's activities, just didn't consider it relevant, for all the reasons outlined above, and omitted it.

2) The Canadian air sentry had ordered the range to stop firing 5-10 minutes before the incident, due to a C-130 taking off from Kandahar.

Again, not much ammunition here. First off, the sentry's recollection (it's only the sentry's own testimony to the Canadian inquiry that supports it) is quite possibly off a couple minutes. After evaluating all the evidence, the Canadian inquiry put the sentry's call to "check fire" at 21:27 Zulu time... the fatal bomb explosion having taken place at 21:26. Schmidt above saw the fire and made his decision to engage it without orders between 21:21 and 21:25. (It's possible, but pretty unlikely, that the sentry was remembering an earlier checkfire he gave, which shut down the range between 20:35 and 20:51.) The likely explanation is that the procedure for shutting down the range WAS initiated five minutes or so before Kandahar tower knew of the explosion, and the word in both directions was taking a little time to filter through. Radio communications, even with continuously monitored stations, is never instantaneous. Anyway, so what? If anything, this actually confirms Schmidt's culpability... because even though the Canadians were close enough to the airport they had to shut down activity everytime a plane took off, Schmidt's own radio traffic shows he never noticed Kandahar or Kandahar airport being right below him before he dropped his bomb, and that despite the obvious visual cues out the window (the airport was brightly lit) the coordinates he gave for his location were completely wrong. It's certainly ironic, in a ghastly sense, that if Schmidt had happened by five minutes later, when the range was in checkfire, 4 Canadians would likely be alive today... but it doesn't absolve him in any way for disobeying his orders not to fire.