WHEN PENGUINS FLEW AND WATER BURNED This is the true memoir of one US Air Force navigator’s journey from the schoolhouses of Air Training Command to the nuclear alerts of the Cold War to combat in a 35-year-old anachronism called the B-52. It is a first-hand account of life during the last days of Strategic Air Command, the early days of Air Combat Command and the ensuing military drawdown of the 1990s. From peacetime training exercises across the globe to combat operations in Desert Storm, Jim Clonts takes the reader inside the cockpit where life and death are seconds apart. Often comical, sometimes heart-pounding, other times tragic, WHEN PENGUINS FLEW AND WATER BURNED takes you into the world of military aviation, a crucible where warriors learn the true nature of character, conscience and mortality.

Friends of Liberty VOL 32
by Jim Clonts, 2009

11/16/2009

Last week when Major Nadal Malik Hasan pulled his pistols and began to murder American soldiers and their families, his actions constituted the first successful act of Islamic terrorism to be committed in the US Homeland since September 11th, 2001. Thirteen unarmed Americans died, and another thirty wounded, at the hands of a Muslim extremist shouting "Allahu Akbar" as he fired.

Rather than call it what it was, the Obama Administration insists we cannot call Major Hasan's actions terrorism. Here are some of his comments:

"In a country of 300 million people, uh, there are going to be acts of violence that are inexplicable, even within the extraordinary military that we have. Uh, and, uh, I think everybody understands how outstanding the young men and women in uniform are under the most severe stress. There are going to instances, uh, in which, uh, an individual cracks."

Sounds to me like he's either blaming the military itself or maybe the previous administration's use of the military. In any event, the individual was not acting as a Jihadist. He simply "cracked under stress."

More from Obama:

"This is a time of war. And yet these Americans did not die on a foreign field of battle. They were killed here, on American soil, in the heart of this great American community. It is this fact that makes the tragedy even more painful and even more incomprehensible."

He's baffled by Hasan's actions. Will you sleep better at night knowing our young president finds this incomprehensible?

The Mainstream Media spent days trying to convince us Major Hasan was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, even though he never saw combat, nor was even deployed. Then "experts" tried to tell us it was the stress of listening to the horror stories of soldiers who did have PTSD that caused Major Hasan's "break-down." They will say whatever it takes to convince people the US has not been attacked by a terrorist on Obama's watch.

Since the investigation began, it has been disclosed that Major Hasan had been posting radical, religious and anti-US statements on Islamic extremists websites. (The media acknowledges the word extremists, but does not add the adjective Islamic.) It seems Major Hasan also attended the same mosque as several of the 9-11 terrorists and has been in communication with the Imam of that mosque as late as early 2009. Major Hasan had fairly good officer performance reports, with one notable exception where he was chastised for trying to convert his patients to Islam.

If Osama Bin Laden himself announced tomorrow that he had personally recruited Major Hasan to commit a terrorist act on a US military base, the Administration would just say Bin Laden was using Hasan's story as propaganda. The final report will show Hasan was a lone wolf, a man broken by the stress of being a Muslim in the US military, a victim of being bullied and taunted by racists Americans. He cracked under the pressure, took advantage of our too lax gun control laws and naturally, as a good Muslim, wanted to acknowledge Allah as he committed his crime, knowing he would die and shortly be with Allah. It's a tragedy that an otherwise good man was broken by American hatred for Muslims.

There is no way his actions will be called terrorism for one simple fact: it shows the folly of treating terrorism as a criminal offense, rather than an act of war. Throughout the 1990s the Clinton Administration treated terrorism as a form of organized crime. The terrorists were innocent right up to the time they pressed the detonator button or pulled the trigger or took over the controls of the 767. They had constitutional rights, even though they weren't US citizens. Now the Obama Administration has taken us back to the pre-911 era. Now, we won't listen in to their plotting. We won't trace their cash flows. We won't even ask why they don't want to learn how to land the airplane.

Wars are fought using both offensive and defensive actions. The War on Terror, a phrase which has been removed from the US Government lexicon, used intelligence agencies and our military to seek out the enemy and capture or kill them while they planned their attacks. Stopping the enemy before he attacks is a fundamental precept of war and absolutely required if winning is the objective. Defensive wars are rarely successful because the initiative always rests with the attacking forces. According to our President, the War on Terror is over. Of course, it's over for us, not the other side.

Now, instead of treating the enemy as a combatant, we Mirandize him, bestow constitutional rights on him and give him nation-wide media attention and a bully pulpit in our courts system. You the citizens of the United States will be able to rest assured that after the crime is committed and, the police chalk the outlines of the bodies, our criminal justice system (and ACLU lawyers) will spring into action and assure a fair trial for the killers. After all, it's probably our fault they're killers, right?

What do you think?

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