America's Dunkirk

I was going to post this yesterday, but ASM826 posted about the victims of that day.  But this story is exceptionally well-told and deserves to be remembered.

No training.  This was just what people did that day.

- One of the captains that evacuated Manhattan on 9/11 

It's not quite fair to call this "America's Dunkirk", since the English Channel is a lot wider than the Hudson River.  And the Luftwaffe had something to say in 1940, that they didn't have in 2001.

But this is a great story, well told by Tom Hanks.  About the time that the Coast Guard sent out a radio message to all boats that can help evacuate Manhattan.  This is the story of the boats who responded, and evacuated a Million people in a day.

 I've posted about this before.  But this seems somehow apropos.  And click through to that post to see the comment from Friend Of The Blog Paul, Dammit! who knows a bunch of the people interviewed in this.  It's worth your time. 

America's Dinkirk

No training.  This was just what people did that day.

- One of the captains that evacuated Manhattan on 9/11 

It's not quite fair to call this "America's Dunkirk", since the English Channel is a lot wider than the Hudson River.  And the Luftwaffe had something to say in 1940, that they didn't have in 2001.

But this is a great story, well told by Tom Hanks.  About the time that the Coast Guard sent out a radio message to all boats that can help evacuate Manhattan.  This is the story of the boats who responded, and evacuated a Million people in a day.

I've posted about this before.  But this seems somehow apropos.  And click through to that post to see the comment from Friend Of The Blog Paul, Dammit! who knows a bunch of the people interviewed in this.  It's worth your time.  

And you do read his blog every day, don't you?  Thought so.

Twenty-One Years

Christine Lee Hansen was 2 1/2. She was going to Disney with her parents when their plane, United Airlines Flight 175, was hijacked by Muslim extremists and flown into the Trade Center in New York City. She was the youngest person to die on 9/11. Her father was holding her on his lap as the impact occurred. We know this because he was on the phone with his dad as it happened.

 

It was twenty-one years ago today.

UPDATE 11 SEPTEMBER 2022 14:06 [Borepatch]:  (This is Borepatch now)  ASM826 has posted about Miss Hansen for as long as I can remember, first on his blog and now here.  It's a fitting tribute.  I'm butting in with a song that I think captures the mood.

Rest in peace and rise in Glory, Christine.

Damn. How did we bomb a hospital in the Middle East?

Oh, wait:

Okay, never mind.  After all, the Press doesn't mind - when it's a hospital bombed by Democrats ...

Boy, it sure would be awful if a President bombed Iraq right before an Impeachment vote

pic.twitter.com/oyGBbhkLWa

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) January 3, 2020

But, but, but - he was an Islamic Scholar

Err, one that burns captives alive.  But don't ask the Washington Post, because they want this news to die in the Darkness ...

Good Dog.  Do you have a bone to chew?

Eighteen years of futility

ASM826 posted a moving tribute but I find I find that words for that day mostly fail me.  And so here are some pictures to remember that day.

They call him the Falling Man.  He's not the only one they got a picture of.

There's a reason that we call these men "heroes".  343 firemen and 71 police ran into the building to save people, but never came out.  Rest in peace.

I found this very moving from back then, but some folks complained that it endangered birds.  Same planet, different worlds.

Looking back after 18 years, I think this was George W. Bush's greatest moment:



The follow-through lightening campaign driving the Taliban from power was the pinnacle of his presidency, but it was all down hill from there.  18 years later, we're still in Afghanistan, because Bush flinched from what it would take to "nation build" there.  Publius Cornelius Tacitus is probably the easiest of the Roman historians to read.  Son-in-law to the governor of Britannia, he recorded a speech of a vanquished chieftain:

To us who dwell on the uttermost confines of the earth and of freedom, this remote sanctuary of Britain's glory has up to this time been a defence. Now, however, the furthest limits of Britain are thrown open, and the unknown always passes for the marvellous. But there are no tribes beyond us, nothing indeed but waves and rocks, and the yet more terrible Romans, from whose oppression escape is vainly sought by obedience and submission ... To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a desert and call it peace.

- Tacitus, Agricola ch. 30

The Romans would have known how to deal with the Taliban, and would have made the Taliban's lands a peaceful desert.  America did not. Bush got us into that mess, and rather than pulling out in 2002 with the message that there's more of that where it came from if you don't behave, Bush dithered with a foreign policy that has led to thousands of American dead and tens of thousands of maimed.  He didn't even go after Osama, holed up under the protection of the Pakistani military.  Obama did, in probably the only positive even of his tenure.  Tacitus would have approved.

But we're still in the Middle East.  We're still hated there.  "Nation building" has been a failure, as has pinprick bombing.  People complain that turning on some lights to commemorate the World Trade Center towers will harm birds, while Dover Air Force Base continues to receive flag-draped coffins.

Nothing symbolizes for me the utter incompetence of both parties than the last eighteen years.  The dead from 9/11 deserve better, as do we all.

UPDATE 11 September 2019 16:56: Well, it has shown us who are friends are, and aren't.  That's a plus.

Regarding Syria

Peter has a must-read post that goes in-depth to the war there.  I have nothing to add other than to say read the whole thing.

They also remember, far across the seas

An Italian friend posted on Facebook about the small town of Galliate in northern Italy, and how they have put up a memorial to 9/11:

Their memorial includes a piece of the World Trade Center:

To the good citizens of Galliate, let me just give a heartfelt Mille grazie.

The American people at their very finest

America's Dunkirk: hundreds of private boats spontaneously organized a rescue of 500,000 people from Manhattan island on 9/11.



Nobody organized anything.  People just did what needed done.  It was the largest maritime rescue in history.

There's also a book about the rescue.

My thoughts on 9/11

Since September 12, 2001 we have lost 6800 combat dead and almost 60,000 wounded.  I'm not sure where this war is going, what the goals or victory criteria are, or how much longer to expect dead and wounded troops to come back from over seas.

Photo copyright Borepatch.  You can see these at Arlington far too often

It's been 17 years since we were attacked, and here we are.

The Dogs of War vs. ISIS Jihadis

Dog 1, ISIS 0:

The hero Alsatian was accompanying the troops on a training exercise in the north of the country when their convoy of four vehicles came under fire from extremist militants.

One of the SAS cars was destroyed by a homemade bomb and the outnumbered forces were forced to split up and take cover.

With the ISIS fighters pinning the British troops down using two heavy mounted machine guns, an American soldier who was with the group released the snarling dog.

That's like opening a can of whoop-ass, only furrier.

It charged at the attackers, dodging bullets before taking down one of the jihadis and ripping his neck and face.

It then turned its attention to another extremist, savaging his arms and legs in a frenzied assault.

The jihadis, who are thought to have never seen an Alsatian before, fled the scene screaming, allowing the SAS team to call in air support.

Good dog.

The team then made their way to safety with the dog, who is now being treated by the troops as a hero.

Ya think? Bravo Zulu Kilo Niner.

"A snarling Alsatian running at you is very frightening and probably not something the jihadis had encountered.

"The dog did its job and returned to its handler worth its tail wagging."

This made me laugh out loud.  I can just imagine what the dog was thinking in his doggie brain.  Didja see what I did?  Didja?  Didja?  Can I do it again?  At least, that's what Wolfgang would be thinking.

This moment of awesome is brought to you by a heads up from the Queen Of The World, who knows a thing or two about German Shepherds.

Now that's how you tweet

We just smuggled a half ton of smoking gun evidence of Iran's nuclear program in a daring mission to save the world and you're all talking about the PowerPoint font. Just for that next time we're using comic sans.

— The Mossad (@TheMossadIL) April 30, 2018

HAHAHAHAHAHA!  Maybe next time they'll use Sharks with frickin' "lasers" too ...

Well played, Mossad.

Man with a knife, hollering "Allahu Akbar" drives into a crowd of bikers

Hilarity Exactly what you'd expect breaks out:

On Saturday almost 1,500 motorcyclists gathered in Aix-en-Provence in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, protesting against the speed limit of 80 kmh [50mph]. Around 5 pm one of the drivers, irritated by the blockage of the road by the demonstration, couldn’t stand it any more and, swinging a knife through the open window, he plowed his car into the rallying motorcyclists. Some of the witnesses testified that he was shouting “Allahu Akhbar”.

Ah, France.  Blocking roads has become an art form.  Or an entertainment.  Or both.

Two of the motorcyclists were wounded: one in the hand and the other in the arm. Both were hospitalized. However, the angry crowd turned on the car, and with the help of helmets and rocks they began to destroy it. The driver and the passengers, however, managed to break free and avoid lynching.

It may be France, but these are bikers.  Click through to enjoy the video of, well, bikers reacting exactly how you think they'd react.  I'm actually surprised at how many of them used their helmets to hammer the car - good helmets aren't cheap, and once you give it a thwack like that, it's off to the Helmet Shoppe for you.

File this under a major failure of the victim selection process.

Memoriam

Grooming at Gitmo?

The World wonders.

The spirit of Vichy lives

Locked inside #notre dame cathedral in #paris while police investigate attack outside against a policeman. All calm pic.twitter.com/Z4B8wUzPTV

— Nancy Soderberg (@nancysoderberg) June 6, 2017

So some jihadi dude attacks a cop at the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.  The police response?

1. Shoot the jihadi.  Well done, mes amis.

2. Hold the French citizens and tourists at gunpoint in the cathedral.

Well, well, well.

It seems that the urge to collaborate with the enemy is not a distant instinct, at least in the Fifth Republic.

"Losers"

That's what Trump called the suicide bombers.

It's about time.  So far we've just seen candle-lit vigils.  Or glorification of the bombers:

It's high time to remove any glamor from what these animals do.  Trump is on to something here.  Hopefully everyone will pick up his term for this.

Was Yahoo looking for Al Qaeda encrypted messages?

Interesting:

What they are likely referring it is software like "Mujahideen Secrets", which terrorists have been using for about a decade to encrypt messages. It includes a unique fingerprint/signature that can easily be searched for, as shown below.

The text string in these sorts of things is not hard to identify at all.  The string is used by programs to know where to start decrypting (all sorts of crypto programs do this).

The obvious "highly unique signature" the FBI should be looking for, to catch this software, is the string:

### Begin ASRAR El Mojahedeen v2.0 Encrypted Message ###

Indeed, if this is the program the NSA/FBI was looking for, they've now caught this message in their dragnet of incoming Yahoo! mail.

It's speculation that this is what Yahoo was looking for, but as Mythbusters would say, "Plausible."

I posted about this a couple years ago, in a post titled How do you say "Hey, NSA!  Look over here!" on the Internet?  In it, I said:

I've been very critical about how NSA is spying on citizens unsuspected of any crime, but this seems to be precisely what they should be doing.  I'm even OK with secret FISA court warrants allowing automated monitoring (and even attacking) anyone using al Qaeda code.  Seems like that falls under "probable cause" to me.

In most jurisdictions possession of lock picking tools is presumptive evidence of wrongdoing (if you're not a locksmith).  It seems plausible that possession of custom Al Qaeda encryption software is also presumptive of wrongdoing.  Sure, there's a First Amendment argument that can be made here, cryptographic research, yadda yadda - but this seems quite narrowly tailored to me.  If this is what Yahoo was looking for, it seems reasonable to me.

Remember how the FBI wanted Apple to unlock the San Bernadino terrorist's iPhone?

Remember how they said it was impossible for them to do it without Apple's help?

Yeah, not so much.

Shorter FBI to Apple: "Please unlock this for us because we're lazy and incompetent and unable or unwilling to do our jobs investigating terrorists.  But it would be great if you'd give us the ability to unlock non-terrorist's phones anytime we want."