“You break it, you own it,” as Colin Powell once said, and when Barack Obama began bombing Libya in March 2011, he acquired some very nasty property.

Libya’s neighbors warned of missing surface to air missiles early

President Idriss Deby Itno of Chad warned of missing surface to air missiles going missing from Libya back in March, as did sources from Mali and Niger. Itno warned that pillaged weapons were falling into the hands of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

20,000 surface to air missiles unaccounted for in Libya, any number of them leaking out to al Qaeda affiliates, and every one of them can knock down a helicopter full of Navy Seals. You don’t even have to aim those things! Just point them at the sky and they find the nearest hot body.

Grinch SA-24s are designed to target front-line aircraft, helicopters, cruise missiles and drones. They can shoot down a plane flying as high as 11,000 feet and can travel 19,000 feet straight out.

So how long would it take for al Qaeda in the Maghreb to move a few missiles to al Qaeda in Afghanistan? From March to August?

August 6, 2011… The SEALs suffered a devastating loss when nearly two dozen of the elite troops were among 30 Americans who died when their helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan early Saturday… and a significant number were members of SEAL Team 6, the unit that conducted the Bin Laden raid.

Grinch SA-24

What defeated the Russians in Afghanistan?

Surface to air missiles. (Anthony H. Cordesman and Abraham R. Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War Vol III. The Afghan and Falklands Conflicts, (Mansell Publishing Limited: London, 1990), p.175)

Without helicopter transport and tactical air support, foreign soldiers in Afghanistan are nothing but dead meat.

So the US assassination of UBL was trivial in comparison with the Taliban’s elegant tit-for-tat…

The Associated Press reported that most of the Americans killed [when their CH-47 Chinook helicopter was shot down by a surface to air missile] were from SEAL Team Six, the same elite unit that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in a raid on a compound in Pakistan in May.

And thanks to NATO’s senseless intervention in Libya, now jihadis all over the world can access a more or less unlimited supply of SAMs…

A potent stash of Russian-made surface-to-air missiles is missing from a huge Tripoli weapons warehouse amid reports of weapons looting across war-torn Libya.

Grinch SA-24s are designed to target front-line aircraft, helicopters, cruise missiles and drones. They can shoot down a plane flying as high as 11,000 feet and can travel 19,000 feet straight out.

Peter Bouckaert, Human Rights Watch emergencies director, told CNN he has seen the same pattern in armories looted elsewhere in Libya, noting that “in every city we arrive, the first thing to disappear are the surface-to-air missiles.”

He said such missiles can fetch many thousands of dollars on the black market.

“We are talking about some 20,000 surface-to-air missiles in all of Libya, and I’ve seen cars packed with them.” he said.

So that’s how it ends for the United States in Afghanistan…

Not with a whimper but with a bang!

The United States spent about $400 billion for “defense” in FY 2001, and what did we get for that enormous amount of money?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/f-16-pilot-was-ready-to-give-her-life-on-sept-11/2011/09/06/gIQAMpcODK_story.html?

The day’s fourth hijacked airliner seemed to be hurtling toward Washington. (Lt. Heather) Penney, one of the first two combat pilots in the air that morning, was told to stop it.

The one thing she didn’t have as she roared into the crystalline sky was live ammunition. Or missiles. Or anything at all to throw at a hostile aircraft.

“Corporate crony capitalism!”

“Socialism for the very rich!”

And look who’s talking!

It’s called corporate crony capitalism. This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk. No, this is the capitalism of connections and government bailouts and handouts, of waste and influence peddling and corporate welfare.

It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest – to the little guys.

Now to be fair, some GOP candidates also raised mammoth amounts of cash, and we need to ask them, too: What, if anything, do their donors expect in return for their “investments”? We need to know this because our country can’t afford more trillion-dollar “thank you” notes to campaign backers.

I don’t think anything has irked me more than this nonsense coming from the White House about maybe not sending our seniors their checks. It’s their money! They have paid into Social Security all of their working lives; and for the President to say, “ah, we may not be able to cut their checks,” ah, well, where did all their money go, politicians?

A few weeks ago, after my visit to the Iowa State Fair, I took my daughter Piper and my niece McKinley with us to the World War I Liberty Memorial in Kansas City. And standing in the rain, reading the inscriptions on the Memorial about the honor in one’s dedication to God and country, I thought of all those young patriots who suffered and died so far from home. And revering our vets there with the next generation by my side, there was such clarity – clarity in our calling, patriotic Constitutionalists. We have a duty not just to the living, but also to those who came and died before us and to the generations yet to be born.

No, the road isn’t easy, but it’s nothing compared to the suffering and sacrifice of those who came before us.

This is how we break the back of crony capitalism because it feeds off corporate welfare, which is just socialism for the very rich.

You can watch the whole speech on Youtube at…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hl5lhZKgobM

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About 7000 people lived in the little town of Futaba once upon a time.

Somali girl surrounded by the fresh graves of about 70 children in the enormous refugee camp near the town of Dadaab in Kenya.

(Oxfam photo by JJ Singano)

Fukushima Reactor 3, August 24, 2011

Does this thing look under control to you?

(You can see the original very large jpeg at http://cryptome.org/eyeball/daiichi082411/daiichi082411.htm)