Blogs of War

His death was reported on evelknievel.com but it’s getting hammered by traffic at the moment.

Nobody cheated death more times than Evel. I was six or seven when he tried to jump Snake River Canyon. He was, unquestionably, the man.

Reports are that he has a bomb, or at least claims to have a bomb, strapped to his chest:

Two people are being held hostage by an armed man at Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign office in Rochester, New Hampshire, police said Friday.

Emergency crews arrive at the office building in Rochester, New Hampshire, Friday.

The man walked into the office at about 1 p.m., Maj. Michael Hambrook of the New Hampshire State Police told CNN affiliate WMUR-TV.

Hambrook and Clinton campaign officials said two people were believed to be inside.

Hillary was not at the office and is not a hostage. Ed Morrisey:

At one time, one could have written these kinds of people off as impotent lunatics, but the world has changed. It’s still likely the work of a lunatic, but the kind of lunacy involved makes the difference between a hoaxer and a real bomber. For the sake of all involved, let’s hope it’s the former and not the latter.

This event is going to have profound implications regardless of the outcome. However, the primary concern at this time is the status of the hostages.

Updates:
Final update – It’s over Lee Eisenberg has surrendered. Thankfully, this one ended well.

4:00 PM – Apparently the man who started this is fairly well known in the town. Locals are apparently familiar with his mental issues.

3:42 PM – The hostages have been released. The suspect is still inside Clinton’s campaign office. Authorities are trying to confirm the number of folks in the building.

2:35 PM – WHDH has live video.

2:30 PM – Initial demands include a conversation with Hillary.

Also Blogging:
Michelle Malkin
Barking Moonbat Early Warning System
The Carden Chronicles
Suitably Flip

As many as 10,000 insanely barbaric protesters are demanding blood:

Thousands of Sudanese, many carrying knives and sticks, have taken to the streets of Khartoum calling for the execution of British school teacher Gillian Gibbons, jailed over a teddy bear.

Crowds demonstrated outside the presidential palace, saying the 15-day prison sentence imposed on Mrs Gibbons for allowing her class to call a teddy bear Mohammed was too lenient.

The protesters streamed out of mosques after sermons, as pick-up trucks with loudspeakers blared messages against Mrs Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool.

According to MP Boris Johnson It doesn’t sound like Muslims back home are any more sympathetic:

If you want grounds for despair, read the entries on the BBC website, in which some British Muslims say that she should be punished; or read the entries from people in Sudan saying that the children should be punished.

You can find some of those comments here. His calls for counter-protests seem to be falling on deaf ears. Michelle Malkin is probably not surprised:

If it’s Friday, it’s call-for-an-infidel-execution day. The Mohammed Teddy Bear Blasphemy outrage continues, with the usual suspects doing the usual things–waving weapons, screaming bloody murder, and advocating death in the name of Mohammed.

Update:
America is to blame:

Sheikh Hussein Mubarak told thousands of faithful gathered for the Muslim day of prayer that the court’s “verdict was lenient out of fear of criticism from human rights organisations, America and the West”.

You had to see that coming. Comments like that just illustrate the underlying political nature of these protests.

The whole case is crazy but there is a tinyl silver lining here. The sentence could have been far worse:

A Sudanese court found a British teacher guilty of insulting religion and sentenced her to 15 days in prison Thursday for allowing a teddy bear to be named “Mohammed,” British authorities and her lawyer reported.

Gillian Gibbons also faces deportation from Sudan after her prison term, her lawyer told CNN.

I think she’ll view welcome deportation after the treatment she’s received.

Journalists rushed to their computers and cameras to report the deaths of innocent construction workers in Afghanistan. However, they’re not quite as eager to report the fact that the story might not be accurate:

An air strike earlier this week in eastern Afghanistan was based on credible intelligence from multiple sources and by all indications struck its intended targets, the Pentagon’s press secretary told reporters today.

NATO International Security Assistance Force troops used precision-guided munitions in the late Nov. 26 air strike in the mountainous Nuristan province, killing several insurgents, Geoff Morrell said during a Pentagon briefing. Abdullah Jan, the western Nuristan Taliban commander, is believed to be among those killed.

Morrell dismissed press reports that the attack had mistakenly killed civilian construction workers. He noted that the closest known construction site was a kilometer away from the target area and that no structures, vehicles or other construction equipment were anywhere near the impact area.

Sadly, even the VOA ran this headline: Afghan Construction Workers Killed in NATO Air Strike.

Moments like this make me wish that McCain and I didn’t disagree on so many issues. There’s another great exchange over Vietnam on YouTube.

Update:
Jim Geraghty comments on McCain and Paul over at The Campaign Spot:

Win: John McCain. Seemed to be front and center throughout the night. I agree with Thompson on the immigration policy proposals, but disdain any nativist tone, the kind that drips from every pore of Tancredo. McCain spoke like a grownup during that segment, as well as the discussion on interrogation/torture. As I said earlier, in a noisy room, he dominated by speaking softly. Ron Paul wanted to be taken seriously, and tonight McCain took him seriously by head-butting him on the Iraq war.

…Another troubled night: Did Ron Paul really refer to the Trilateral Commission? Sorry, talk like that won’t expand his base of support. For every guy who is up to speed on conspiracy theories and finds them plausible, two voters start thinking of the cigarette-smoking man from the X-Files. I was ready to give him a second look; didn’t win me over tonight.

Just got an e-mail from one of his charming supporters: “PAUL WASN’T EVEN CLOSE TO BLAMING AMERICA YOU STUPID IGNORANT SOCIALIST LOVING CONSTITUTION HATING DUMB***. PULL YOUR HEAD OUT… **** FOR BRAINS!!!” Well, that persuaded me.

I feel your pain Jim.

This is particularly frightening if it turns out it the material is in fact enriched uranium as some have reported:

Slovak and Hungarian police seized a kilo (2.2 lbs) of radioactive material and arrested three people in a joint operation on Wednesday, a spokesman said.

Slovak police spokesman Martin Korch said the material was being examined and did not confirm a report carried by the Slovak news agency SITA that it was enriched uranium.

“This one kilogram should have been sold for one million U.S. dollars,” Korch said.

These cases are not uncommon in and around the former Soviet Union. It is truly just a matter of time before terrorists get their hands on enough material to make a radiological weapon.

She faces up to 40 lashes, up to a year in prison, or some kind of fine. I’m sure that the British government is doing their best to prevent the worst:

Gillian Gibbons, 54, is being held by police in the capital Khartoum after she asked her class of seven-year-olds to come up with a name for the toy as part of a school project, Robert Boulos, the head of Unity High School told CNN.

It is expected that she will appear in court Thursday, Sudan state media reported.

A British Foreign Office spokeswoman said Gibbons had been charged under Article 125 of Sudan’s constitution, the law relating to insulting religion and inciting hatred.

Blackwater Facts
A group of trial lawyers that includes a representative of an al Qaeda front group and a longtime advocate of terrorists has filed suit against Blackwater in US district court. The suit claims to be on behalf of victims of the September 16 shooting incident at Nisoor Square. But why the lawyers’ terrorist connections? And why didn’t AP and other news organizations report those connections, which are on the public record? The Associated Press and other news organizations don’t report it that way, of course, citing only the lead attorney who is not known to be tied to terrorists. But as this blog has reported several times, the cooperating attorneys are well known for their terrorist connections.

Defense Tech
Moderate temperatures, nearly perpetual sunshine, flat landing areas and subterranean resources make the rim of the Shackleton Crater — situated within the solar system’s largest impact crater — an ideal location for a lunar homestead, down near the moon’s south pole. NASA hopes to send the first pioneers there by 2020.

FrontPage Magazine
Moral inversion was well manifested in the Israeli-Palestinian “joint statement”—pursued like a sacred elixir for months by Secretary of State Rice and finally read out by Bush at the start of the conference—in which the sides “express our determination to . . . confront terrorism and incitement, whether committed by Palestinians or Israelis.” With those words Israel—a democracy struggling against sixty years of violent aggression that does not engage in terrorism or incitement any more than Finland or Iceland—trashed its achievements, its identity, its Jewish heritage, and equated itself with one of the most terroristic and incitement-ridden societies of all time.

The Associated Press
A former security guard at Andrews Air Force Base who failed to put his Muslim name on a job application was trying to conceal his ties to a controversial Washington imam, federal prosecutors said Tuesday.

Michelle Malkin
I told you earlier today about the NAACP’s war on the high school students who wanted to perform Agatha Christie’s “Ten Little Indians” at their school. One of the high school students, Lakota East High School senior Alicia Frost, e-mailed me an update. The students are trying to put the show on outside of school and they could use the public’s help.

NewsBusters
Mark Twain, famously warning against getting into a spat with newspapers, said “never pick a fight with someone who buys their ink by the barrel.” To his chagrin, Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s chief campaign strategist, is learning a modern corollary: never pick a fight with someone with three hours of national airtime. And for gosh sakes, don’t use arguments in picking the fight so false as to be child’s play to disprove.

Noah Shachtman
For the first three years of the Iraq insurgency, American troops largely retreated to their fortified bases, pushed out woefully undertrained local units to do the fighting, and watched the results on feeds from spy drones flying overhead. Retired major general Robert Scales summed up the problem to Congress by way of a complaint from one division commander: “If I know where the enemy is, I can kill it. My problem is I can’t connect with the local population.” How could he? For far too many units, the war had been turned into a telecommute. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon were the first conflicts planned, launched, and executed with networked technologies and a networked ideology. They were supposed to be the wars of the future. And the future lost.

This is all part of the same FAA test that got so much attention here in Houston.

Miami-Dade police said only licensed pilots with the aviation unit will operate the devices because the airspace in the county is so busy.

Only the Miami-Dade police department and the Houston police department were given permission by the FAA to experiment with the drones.

“The capability of the unit is phenomenal,” said Miami-Dade Detective Juan Villalba.

The unmanned aircraft will be used during SWAT team and tactical operations, especially when officers need video of a heavily armed suspect.

The Miami-Dade police department has not yet taken possession on its drone, but the Houston police department has and is already conducting tests.

They’re testing Honeywell’s Micro Air Vehicle.