This and That...

[Warph]

Syrian Rebels Upon Seizing Christian Village:
"We Are From Al Nusra Front And Have Come To
Make Lives Miserable For The Crusaders"

The "rebels" then put a gun to the head
of a Christian man and forced him to
convert to Islam.

Via AFP:
http://news.yahoo.com/jihadists-force-syria-christian-convert-gunpoint-202910353.html;_ylt=A2KJ3CSchi9S5XAAwhXQtDMD

Jihadists who overran Syria's ancient Christian town of Maalula last week forced at least one person to convert to Islam at gunpoint and executed another one, residents said Tuesday.

"They arrived in our town at dawn on Wednesday and shouted 'We are from the Al-Nusra Front and have come to make lives miserable for the Crusaders," an Islamist term for Christians, said a still frightened woman who identified herself as Marie.

She spoke to AFP in Damascus, where she was attending the burial with hundreds of others of three Christians from Maalula killed in last week's fighting, the long line of mourners led by a brass band playing dirges.

"Maalula is the wound of Christ," mourners chanted as they marched through the narrow streets of the capital's ancient Christian quarter, their voices nearly drowned out by the rattle of automatic gunfire in honour of the dead.

There was an irony in that, as the assault on Maalula came only a couple of weeks before a major feast, the Exaltation of the Cross.

Maalula, around 55 kilometres (34 miles) from Damascus, is one of the most renowned Christians towns in Syria, and many of its inhabitants speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus.

Recalling the events last Wednesday, 62-year-old Adnan Nasrallah said an explosion destroyed an archway just across from his house that leads into the town.

"I saw people wearing Al-Nusra headbands who started shooting at crosses," said Nasrallah.

One of them "put a pistol to the head of my neighbour and forced him to convert to Islam by obliging him to repeat 'there is no G-d but G-d.'"
"Afterwards they joked, 'he's one of ours now.'"

[...]

Lurch Kerry Admits Al-Nusra Front Are
The Syrian Rebels "Best Fighters"

(Thanks for admitting the obvious, Lurch.  According to the article above, they are really great bloody killers when it comes to killing unarmed peaceful Christians, you idiot)

(What Lurch won't admit is the Free Syrian Army he's praising fights alongside al-Nusra Front who are described as "the most aggressive and successful arm of the rebel force fighting in Syria with the slimey killers, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.  All three factions affirmed their allegiance to al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, Lurch... you IDIOT!)

[Warph]

Apache GunShip At Work

[Warph]

(This is Toooooo Funny)

The Freakishly Close To Reality Second City Skit
Mocking Obumabots

Obumabot: "When I first saw the President speak in 2008 in a YouTube clip posted to my Facebook page, I knew he was going to be right all the time. So I support World War III, and IV, and any moon war the President may want to start." [...]

"So please, help us reach our goal of $1.6 trillion so we can make World War III a reality.  Why?  Because Obuma, man...  Because Obuma."

[Warph]

There's Almost No Chance Russia's Plan for
Syria's Chemical Weapons Will Work

By Yochi Dreazen  Tuesday, September 10, 2013
http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/09/10/theres_almost_no_chance_this_russian_plan_for_syrias_chemical_weapons_will_work

(Hmmmm..... this is rather a shocker)

Russia's proposal for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to place his chemical weapons under international supervision and then destroy them is quickly gaining steam. Assad's government accepted the plan this morning. A few hours later, President Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Francois Hollande announced that they'd seriously explore the proposal. It already has the backing of United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and a growing number of influential lawmakers from both parties. There's just one problem: the plan would be nearly impossible to actually carry out.

Experts in chemical weapons disposal point to a host of challenges. Taking control of Assad's enormous stores of the munitions would be difficult to do in the midst of a brutal civil war. Dozens of new facilities for destroying the weapons would have to be built from scratch or brought into the country from the U.S., and completing the job would potentially take a decade or more. The work itself would need to be done by specially-trained military personnel or contractors. Guess which country has most of those troops and civilian experts? If you said the U.S., you'd be right.

"This isn't simply burning the leaves in your backyard," said Mike Kuhlman, the chief scientist for national security at Battelle, a company that has been involved in chemical weapons disposal work at several sites in the U.S. "It's not something you do overnight, it's not easy, and it's not cheap."

The decades-long U.S. push to eliminate its own chemical weapons stockpiles illustrates the tough road ahead if Washington and Damascus come to a deal. The Army organization responsible for destroying America's massive quantities of munitions says the effort will take two years longer than initially planned and cost $2 billion more than its last estimate. The delay means an effort that got underway in the 1990s will continue until roughly 2023 and ultimately cost approximately $35 billion.

To be fair, the U.S. stockpiles were far larger than Assad's. At its height, the American military possessed 30,000 metric tons of mustard gas, VX and sarin, the nerve agent Assad is alleged to have used to kill more than 1,400 civilians late last month. Assad has similar weapons, but his arsenal is thought to be significantly smaller. On the other hand, the U.S. chemical weapons were stored at just a handful of sites. Assad's have been disbursed across dozens of sites, many of them moveable, so locating all of the facilities would require the complete cooperation of the Assad regime. That, to put it mildly, is far from guaranteed.

Gwyn Winfield, the editorial director of CBRNe World, a magazine that focuses on biological and chemical weapons, said the success of the Russian proposal "depends on Assad making an honest declaration of where his munitions are" because the personnel charged with destroying those weapons can only work at sites they know about. Assad, he noted, would have a clear incentive to hold on to as much of his stockpile as possible.

"The reason why they created this program in the first place was as a deterrent to the expected Israeli nuclear option," he said. "That isn't going to go away."

Finding and securing all of Assad's sites would be the first major challenge of implementing the Russian plan, but it would be far from the only one. The U.S. and allied personnel would then have to separate the chemical substances themselves from the warheads of his rockets, artillery shells or missiles that had been designed to carry them to their targets. The work itself would be carried out by either robots, contractors or specially-trained troops, but it would still be time-consuming and dangerous.

The next step would be to physically destroy all of chemical weapons, which can be done through one of two basic options.  The first involves spraying the chemicals themselves into specialized furnaces and then burning them at around 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit for one or two seconds. Nerve agents like sarin can also be rendered largely harmless by the addition of liquid sodium hydroxide, while mustard gas can be made safe with alkaline water.

Kuhlman and other experts say that either type of destruction would have to be done at individual Syrian weapons sites because it wouldn't be safe to move the munitions to a centralized collection point inside Syria while the fighting was raging.  That would mean either building a new permanent disposal facility at each Syrian compound or bringing in newly-fielded mobile disposal units from the U.S.  The mobile systems have not been tested in an active warzone and may not have the capacity to deal with Assad's huge quantities of weapons.   

"Do you really want to have truckloads of chemical weapons driving around Syria during the current situation?" Kuhlman asked.

A senior Defense Department chemical weapons specialist raised a different concern.  The official said the biggest security challenge would be keeping the weapons safe while they were in storage waiting to be destroyed, not while they were being moved.

"Does an insurgent group attack a heavily armed convoy of chemical weapons moving from one or more sites to a disposal facility, with lots of response plans and forces on call, or does it wait until the weapons are moved and the nasty military units go away and the disposal operations start," the official said. "The easier target is the disposal facility."

The official said a safer option might involve moving the weapons out of Syria entirely and doing the disposal work in a safer and more secure country. 

Cheryl Rofer, who supervised a team responsible for destroying chemical warfare agents at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, said none of the work could be carried out until there was a full cease-fire between Assad and the rebels fighting to unseat him. There are no indications, she noted, that either side was prepared to come to the negotiating table or wind down a civil war that has already been raging for more than two years.

"This is simply dangerous to do while people are shooting at each other," she said.

Libya, the most recent country to embark on a chemical weapon destruction effort, offers another cautionary tale. Tripoli declared its possession of the weapons in January 2004 and voluntarily promised to get rid of them. In November 2011, the Libyan government abruptly declared that it had found a "previously undeclared chemical weapons stockpile" that included several hundred munitions loaded with mustard gas. The destruction of those weapons was halted because of a technical malfunction at the disposal facility and is still not complete. Nine years after vowing to get rid of its weapons, Libya has destroyed barely half of its total mustard gas stockpile and just 40% of its stores of chemical weapons precursor elements.

Rofer noted that Syria has far more chemical weapons than Libya, so getting rid of them could take even longer. "I wouldn't be surprised to see this last as long as ten years," she said.

If the U.S. and Syria came to a deal -- a very, very big if -- there would still be one major wrinkle. Rofer said that the only two organizations who really know how to get rid of chemical weapons are the Russia and American militaries. Given the amount of time it would take to build and then operate the disposal facilities, those specially-trained troops would need to stay in Syria for years. In a war-weary U.S., keeping that many boots on the ground for that long would be an extremely hard sell.

[Warph]

 

Lt. Col. Allen West: "Obama Has Shown Incompetence and Weakness-
Looks Like A Confused Community Organizer"

[Warph]

Never Forget...

Today we remember the thousands who lost their lives to Islamic terrorists in 2001 and 2012.  America must not lose sight of the fact that the enemy who carried out these atrocities is stronger than ever.

"May G-d rest the fallen and bring comfort to their families.  May He also rip the blinders from the eyes of those who have been blinded and strike down the foes of this nation...  both foreign and domestic."

[Ross]

They were denied a permit and showed up anyway.

[Ross]

Miss Kansas is not in Kansas anymore. And the Miss America pageant has never seen anyone like her.

First off, Miss Kansas Theresa Vail is a sergeant in the U.S. Army, only the second contestant ever to be on active duty.

"Nobody expects a soldier to be a beauty queen," Vail told People magazine. "But I'm all about breaking stereotypes."

Second, Sgt. Vail has big tattoos. Two of them. One, the insignia for the U.S. Army Dental Corps, is on her left shoulder, while a massive version of the Serenity Prayer runs down her right side. And when she struts her stuff in the bikini contest in the Miss America competition this week in Atlantic City, they'll both be on display for the world to see.

"My whole platform is empowering women to overcome stereotypes and break barriers. What a hypocrite I would be if I covered my ink," Vail said. "How can I tell other women to be fearless and true to themselves if I can't do the same? I am who I am, tattoos and all."

Sgt. Vail is also an M16 marksman, a bow hunter, and a mechanic. Only recently did she add beauty queen to her resume, when she entered her first pageant just nine months ago on the advice of her commanding officer. When she was told she wouldn't be able to use archery as her talent, she had to pick another one and quick.

She chose to sing opera.

"I'd never sung opera in my life," Vail says. Forty-eight hours later she had mastered a Pavarotti piece she found on Youtube, and  won the Miss Kansas talent competition.

It's all about showing girls they can do anything they want to," Vail said. "I want to help them develop confidence, to let them know that they have what it takes to accomplish anything they want to accomplish. I know many young girls look at beauty candidates and think, 'What a perfect life they have.' But I want them to know that I haven't led a perfect life. And that beauty comes from the inside.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2013/09/11/miss-kansas-is-deer-hunting-tattoo-wearing-seargent-in-us-army/#ixzz2ee1gtIVi

[Warph]

CA Gov. Jerry Brown To Sign Bill Approving
Non-Physician Abortions

(Welcome to CA's No.#1 IDIOT, Gov. MoonBeam.  I already foresee the women who will die because of this bill, which, in its zeal to increase abortions, cares not a whit for the health of the mother)

Via Breitbart:
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/13/Gov-Brown-to-Sign-Bill-Legalizing-Non-Physician-Abortions-in-CA

A bill that would allow non-physicians to perform abortions in the first trimester of pregnancy is awaiting signature by Gov. Jerry Brown of California by Sep. 30. The bill, AB 154, passed both houses of the state legislature with strong support from Planned Parenthood and pro-choice groups. Planned Parenthood stands to benefit most directly from the bill, as non-physician staff at its clinics would be able to obtain abortion licenses.

One doctor–who identified himself as pro-choice–told Breitbart News that "the bill is a disaster since it sends us back 100 years to the problems of the complications from back-steet abortions." The bill's critics warn that the training provided to non-physician staff is weak, that supervision by physicians in clinics will be minimal, and that there is real risk of injury or death to women who will be treated in such conditions.

The California Medical Association has endorsed AB 154 because of "provisions for training in the bill and the amendments that clarify physician supervision." Yet the training is to be provided by the Board of Registered Nursing, not by physicians, and the protocols for defining "supervision" have not been specified. There is nothing in the legislation requiring a physician to be present or on-site during an abortion.

The bill permits licensed non-physicians to perform two kinds of abortion in the first trimester–by medication, and by aspiration, which requires the insertion of medical instruments into the uterus. Though many doctors agree that non-physicians could provide medications with few risks, the idea that a non-physician would perform an invasive procedure such as aspiration strikes many as rife with risks.

[Warph]

John McRINO And Lurch Kerry's Syrian "Expert" Signed Affidavit Vouching For Rebel Group That Depicted Burning U.S. Capitol As Not Being Jihadist

(This is amazing... O'Bagy actually signed an affidavit declaring the
Al Aqsa Islamic Brigades to be non-jihadist in nature. 
Where in the hell does the government get these young liberal know-it-alls)

Via Fox News:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/09/13/syrian-expert-elizabeth-obagy-vouches-for-jihadist-group-in-court-affidavit/

Elizabeth O'Bagy...

...a pro-Syrian opposition analyst whose credibility has come under fire, might have even more explaining to do – as court documents show she once vouched for a rebel group whose website displayed extremist and anti-American images.

Among the pictures was one showing a burning U.S. Capitol:

O'Bagy was fired earlier this week by the Institute for the Study of War for allegedly lying about her academic credentials. Her writings had been used by U.S. officials to bolster their case for military action against the Assad regime.

O'Bagy discussed the rebel group in question in a June 19, 2013 signed affidavit filed in the case of American Eric Harroun, who was indicted for fighting alongside the terror group al-Nusra in Syria.

O'Bagy's signed declaration, which included a breakdown of rebel groups and their varying degrees of affiliation to Al Qaeda-linked terrorists, was used by Harroun's defense to argue that the former Army medic had actually fought with a splinter group and not a terrorist one – a group tied to the one O'Bagy described.

In the document, O'Bagy said she had reviewed the apparent Facebook page for the Al Aqsa Islamic Brigades, and found no signs of jihadist leanings.

"I have also reviewed a Facebook site ... that purports to be associated with the al Aqsa (Islamic) brigades," she stated in the affidavit. "The facebook site does not appear to be particularly jihadist in orientation, and posts videos associated with groups that are all affiliated with the Free Syrian Army."

Yet newly uncovered images from the group's Facebook page depict otherwise – including one that shows the U.S. Capitol building engulfed in flames, and armed fighters marching in the foreground. Other images show what appears to be a black-and-white flag, which is viewed by intelligence analysts as a sign of a group's Islamist bent (although O'Bagy wrote that many fighters not affiliated with jihadist groups use a similar flag).