Israel might as well top a few Iranian leaders, since they are behind both Hamas and Hezbollocks.

The risk that Netanyahu etc take on – is that they themselves and their families may be treated the same.

Bibi Netanyahu is no stranger to risk. He was part of the special forces group that had to storm a hijacked airliner all those years ago. His brother Yoni told him to step back – “just one of us needs to do this.”

It was Yoni, not Bibi, who stormed the airline at Entebbe and freed the hostages in 1976
I was talking about Sabena Flight 571 at Tel Aviv, 1972, not the storming of the airport terminal at Entebbe 1976. I know Yoni was killed then. He was lucky not to have been killed a number of times before that, but very unlucky on that occasion. After all, he had been involved in various actions as an infantryman, and tank commander (very risky) before his special forces career.
Please don’t try to make me look silly.

Will the Greens be in mourning for the loss of their mates.
Faruqi in particular is going to be upset at the blow to her side.

Here’s Trump back in June with similar comments to the ones the media are dishonestly twisting:

“The evangelicals and the Christians, they don’t vote as much as they should,” Trump told hundreds of supporters at a Washington conference put on by the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a conservative advocacy group.

“They go to church every Sunday, but they don’t vote,” he said, adding in a half-joke that “in four years, you don’t have to vote. Okay? In four years, don’t vote. I don’t care.”

If elected, Trump would be ineligible to run for president again in 2028 because of term limits.

In other news having billions of bucks doesn’t protect you. Not a martyr, dead! The world is a better place.

Some good news: tachyons may exist

Fun paper this week on warp drives. Alcubierre gets a mention.

New study simulates gravitational waves from failing warp drive (Phys.org, 29 Jul)

I figured that if you can detect gravity waves from a failing warp drive, and if the only other gravity waves we can detect are from merging neutron stars, that the warp drive may be somewhat beyond our capability right now…

Despite Dot’s interest in such things I didn’t link the story at the time since he’s still on his sabbatical.

From my book The Truth of War, formerly Lethality in Combat:

The Calley massacre

Lieutenant William Calley, the US Army 2nd Lieutenant officer who was held responsible for the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, put his experience into his own words after his trial. The account is significant.

Calley’s troops were sniped at from Vietnamese villages, but they hardly made any contact with the enemy. They searched hamlets; found friendly villagers, but then found Vietcong flags. Calley was constantly asked what his unit’s body count was. They took reprisals for being sniped at, burning villages down. He interrogated civilians for the locations of the VC, and got nowhere.  

Calley took a VC prisoner; sent him to the military police, who got nothing out of him, and Calley took the same prisoner again three weeks later. On querying this with the MPs he was told: “…So why didn’t you go and shoot him? I can’t,” the MP said. “I’m at headquarters with the Geneva people on me.”  The MP complained about having to house and feed prisoners, and accept their word that they were not VC. He finished up by advising Calley to shoot his prisoners if he didn’t want to see them released.  

This frustration was commented upon by Second Lieutenant Robert Ransom Jr, an infantry platoon commander in Vietnam. He noted that: 

…more than once we have captured or killed people with weapons whom we recognized as one of those smiling faces we had picked up and released earlier. It’s maddening because we know damn well that they’re dinks but we can’t do anything to them until we catch them with a weapon or actually shooting at us. 

Despite these sort of difficult situations for himself and his men, Calley did not execute “suspected VC” or civilians in the field. He says however, that: “Everyone said eliminate them. I never met someone who didn’t say it”. Then his troops lost a squad leader to a booby trap set in a village; killed an injured Vietnamese woman in reprisal, and then planned their response. According to the court-martial record, Captain Medina told the preliminary briefing that the women and children would be out of the hamlet and all they could expect to encounter would be the opposition. The soldiers were to explode brick homes, set fire to thatch homes, shoot livestock, poison wells, and destroy the enemy. The soldiers, approximately 75 in number, would be supported in their assault by gunship pilots. 

Medina later said he did not give any instructions as to what to do with women and children in the village. Some soldiers agreed with that recollection, others thought that he had ordered them to kill every person in the village. It does seem that Medina intentionally gave the impression that everyone in My Lai would be their enemy. As we have seen, women, children, and old people in Vietnam sometimes could be.

On 16 March, 1968, when landing from helicopters, the troops took ground fire. They began killing civilians; at first one by one in different ways, and in different areas; then more, and then many together in a ravine. Several soldiers testified they killed the civilians: in one case the witness said he regarded them as Viet Cong, and added during testimony, that he still did.  Calley was in tactical command on the spot, and it seems he took part in the shooting of around 500 civilians, executed by single shots; and bursts of automatic gunfire. By lunchtime, there was no-one left alive.

With the operation over, Calley and his men returned to normal operations. In Calley’s account, there was developing a casual attitude towards death, and the general feeling was to 

…kill every man, woman and child in South Vietnam. GIs said to use napalm, or low-yield atomic bombs…or to line up along the China sea and say, “Prepare to shake hands with your ancestors. We are rolling through….a GI became a quick philosopher and would say, “God, if I go and kill everyone here, I could leave”. 

Some while later, after two of the men present had complained of the actions, Calley was transported back to the United States and tried. He was found guilty, and served a period – under three years – in an Army prison, and was then released. He is still alive, and works in his father’s jewelry business.

During the trial, and after it, he received considerable support from around America, which included letters from numerous veterans. This was for a variety of reasons, perhaps partly because in Richard Holmes’ words, with the advent of television beaming the conflict into lounger-rooms “War has become moving wallpaper, and its familiar pattern no longer horrifies us” , but also because, in summing up many arguments, such procedures were acknowledged as being the norm. In His Own Story, Calley recounted that he had received around “5000” letters during the period of his trial. He listed some of the statements in which some recounted events similar to the massacre:

I served in Korea from June 1953 to August 1954. I heard of many similar incidents.

I’m a retired marine. I spent twenty years in the service of God and Country. I was in two operations in Korea where women and children were killed.  

In 1943, 1944, 1945, and 1946 I was a first lieutenant with 45th Infantry Division. I was witness to many incidents similar to the one you’re being held for.

I served in combat in the German war. My fellow soldiers and I did on occasion kill enemy soldiers, civilians and children. Marquess of Queensbury rules do not prevail in war.

During my duty in Africa we were under orders to shoot the Arabs to keep them from taking our clothes.

I was given the order to seal a cave where a mother and her eleven or twelve children were holed up. This took place in 1944 on the island of Ie Shima.

On Okinawa, I saw men throw grenades on old men and women, figuring what the hell – they’re the enemy…

Many years ago I had a platoon, and we went through the villages as you and your people had to. 

Calley recounted that he was amazed that he had been charged when it was common practice to target civilians:

I couldn’t understand it. An investigation of Mylai. Why not Operation Golden Fleece? Or Operation Norfolk? Or Operation Dragon Valley? Or why not Saigon itself? We had killed hundreds of men, women and children there in February and March, 1968: in Tet…simply read it in Stars and Stripes. Or the New York Times. 

His allegation that such massacres were carried out is supported by others. Cherokee Paul McDonald said of his Vietnam experience: “Both sides had their My Lais – ours were rare and highly publicized, theirs were continuous throughout the war and after and largely dismissed, ignored, defended, or rationalised by brave intellectuals.”  

David Hackworth, who commanded Tiger Force, although not in the period covered by The Toledo Blade, supported this scenario:

“Vietnam was an atrocity from the get-go,” Hackworth said in a recent telephone interview. “It was that kind of war, a frontless war of great frustration. It was out of hand very early. There were hundreds of My Lais. You got your card punched by the numbers of bodies you counted. 

The US Army today refers to these incidents as “misconduct stress behaviour” and notes without ironical inflexion that: “…overstressed human beings with loaded weapons are inherently dangerous”.  Its Handbook gives examples of such frustration in the field and also orders:

Commission of murder and other atrocities against noncombatants must be reported as a war crime and punished if responsibility is established. This must be done even though we may pity the overstressed soldier as well as the victims.

A central point of this work though is that if infantry are placed in a situation where civilians may be identified as combatants, then those soldiers will doubtless make mistakes and kill civilians who are not combatants. The politicians – and behind them the people – who make the decisions to send warriors into such situations need to accept their part of this responsibility. The worst consequences of these situations may be seen as we proceed.

Apparently the far right and “misinformation” is to blame already for riots in the UK. The Oz is already running the narrative for Australia.

Nup not that people might be a tad upset an immigrant killed innocent WASP kids in an absolute horrific manner, are again seeing a cover up in the making by an unholy alliance of media/government or even more two tier policing. Noooo its all about those far right boogy men.

Then again a quick search on one articles author Constance Kampfner throws up the tripe she writes for the Times and one could characterise her as far left looking at the Headlines/intro blurb.

Dare I say it, Mental Health Problem Knives come out all the time in Blighty, but the mobs only hit the streets if it’s nice out in the evenings in July.