Rolling up Al Qaeda in Somalia

[Chemical Ollie]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
I'm totally serious. Europeans are fags and only care about civilian casualties when America is involved.

And Americans only mourn if their own guys die in battle, not if they killed 1000 civilians to save one American life.

The reason we care is because America claim to be morally better than the terrorists. Still, you quite often end up killing more civilians than they do.

[Drake Tungsten]

See? Chemical Ollie thinks America is morally equivalent (or even worse?) to terrorists. That's the kind of idiotic America-hatred that runs rampant in Europe.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Chemical Ollie


And Americans only mourn if their own guys die in battle, not if they killed 1000 civilians to save one American life.

AS info, assuming they really bagged the guy they say they bagged, he killed alot more Kenyans and Tanzanians than he did Americans, and he was definitely a threat to kill alot more Africans.

[lord of the mark]

"NAIROBI, Kenya -- A fear swept the crowd gathered at the wreckage of the U.S. Embassy the other day: that the 22-story Cooperative Bank next door was about to collapse.

The building is still standing, though crippled, just as Kenya, its people and its economy are crippled.

Like shock waves, the impact of the embassy bombing has spread from downtown Nairobi across the nation. At least 247 Kenyans died in the blast -- 20 for every American killed -- and each death diminished the lives of a large circle.

"There is not a family, not a district in Kenya that is not in some way affected," said Gitobu Imanyara, an opposition member of Parliament. "In my district, 250 kilometers away, we will be burying three victims of the blast tomorrow. The list of the dead -- they come from every part of this country."

Lists of the dead and of the 5,000 wounded are posted in Uhuru Park, half a mile from the blast site, on boards that look like paper and wood versions of the Vietnam memorial in Washington. Mourners gather much as they do at the war monument, mute, stock-still, lost in memory.

At a table staffed by soldiers, Sarah Karugi, a clothing designer, was grimly filling out forms to get a coffin for her sister, Margaret Uambui, who was a secretary on the 14th floor of the bank building. Ms. Karugi said five other relatives were wounded, including two who worked at the embassy.

"They were innocent, and they were blown up," she said. Her sister leaves three orphaned children still in school, she said.

Gloria and Caroline Mutuiri, teen-age sisters, had gone to the embassy to apply for visas. The line was long, so they went to visit their mother, who worked next door at the Ufundi House. She went out to buy them a snack. They died. She lived.

Many of the dead who worked in and around the embassy made a decent living. They were breadwinners for extended families. And with the deaths, thousands of people have lost their lifelines.

"In Africa, one person supports about 10 people," said Solomon Kasina, an automobile and electronics dealer who was among the crowd gathered at the embassy one day to watch the cleanup. Robert Shaw, the director of the Institute for Economic Affairs here, said: "When you give someone a job, you're feeding 20 or 30 people, giving them some sort of subsistence."

Many of the 5,000 wounded are permanently scarred or blinded. Hundreds of survivors never made it to hospital wards, but linger outside with symptoms of extreme stress. Some of those will surely develop lasting psychological problems, counselors said.

June Koinange of the Kenya Psychological Association said: "It's too early to tell but they are all manifesting the reactions that become disorders."

Businesses, both big and small, are limping too. Small shopkeepers spent the week sweeping up glass and debris from ruined office buildings near the embassy.

It may cost hundreds of millions of dollars simply to repair the physical damage to the capital. Big businesses have been immobilized, and small ones may be bankrupted, because insurers have said they do not intend to cover losses from the explosion, defining the blast as force majeure, an act of God.

One barrier to reconstruction may be the president, Daniel arap Moi.

Moi, who has been in power for 21 years and whose ruling circle is widely viewed as corrupt, toured the site of the blast Wednesday and, for one of the few times in his presidency, took questions from the press. He said it would take at least $500 million just to repair the damage.

The figure may have been plucked from the air but it represents some complicated problems for Moi, who is perceived as having looted his nation's treasury. Kenya has been ranked as the world's third-most-corrupt nation, after Pakistan and Nigeria, by Transparency International, an anti-corruption organization. Several large financial institutions have collapsed in Kenya in recent years, destabilized by bad debts from shady government deals.

Shaw, the economist, who is also a member of the political opposition, said that all of this made it difficult to imagine that the United States, or the International Monetary Fund, which suspended aid to Kenya a year ago because of corruption, would contribute much new help without strict guarantees that the money would go into something other than a presidential bank account.

"How are we going to approach this reconstruction?" he said. "Will it be a presidential fund without accountability? A pot of money from donors that goes into government budgets? Or will we set up systems so that the money actually goes in and you get something out of it?"

The image of the United States also was damaged in the past week. People are talking about how Israeli rescuers clambered over the rubble of the Ufundi House searching for victims while marines clutched their weapons, guarding the mission rather than joining the search. A few are even saying the embassy should be closed, leaving the Americans to fight their battles elsewhere.


The State Department lifted a warning Friday that advised against travel to Kenya, but thousands of Americans and Europeans have probably tossed away their brochures for safaris and seaside vacations by now, and one tourism official predicted that the impact on the industry would be "horrible."

Tourism, already damaged by accounts of crime in the capital and at resorts, has constituted roughly 10 percent of the Kenyan economy, and brought in 20 percent of its foreign exchange, while providing better-paying jobs for thousands of people.

The disaster assures that the economy will not grow this year, according to several economic analysts.

Kenya has had its share of hardship in recent years -- a corrupt leadership, climate changes blamed on El Nino that have killed crops, and ethnic clashes among tribes.

"The economy is in terrible shape, tourism has been devastated and now this," said Tim Vaulkhard, an architect whose company designed some of the buildings damaged in the blast. But he added, "Maybe this will be the catalyst to get Kenyans pulling together again."

In fact, some good can come from the carnage, Imanyara, the opposition politician, said. "I've never seen Kenyans so united," he said. "This is what it took to see ourselves as a nation." That unity has taken several forms. When President Moi toured the wreckage this week, he was accompanied by the leaders of the political opposition. No one here can recall him ever appearing in public with any of them before.

And while ethnic conflicts have taken a toll, and tribal differences play out among politicians, there is a measure of tolerance in Kenyan society that may promote healing. Even though it is widely thought that the perpetrators were Arabs and Islamic fundamentalists, Kenya's Muslim leaders say they have not felt a backlash from their neighbors, whether civilian or police.

"Generally, it has been good," Hammad Mohammed Kassin, a judge in the Islamic courts, said during prayers Friday at Nairobi's main mosque, which was rattled by the blast. "There have only been one or two incidents," he said, involving women in Muslim dresses dragged off buses.

Kenyans know that the Muslims of the country could never do such a thing, the judge said.

Imanyara said: "It's ironic that it would take the death of more than 200 Kenyans to wipe out our ethnic and racial prejudices, that this horror had the effect of making Kenyans think as Kenyans. It removed barriers among tribes. And this makes people see themselves as all equal. It brings us closer."

Thinking of Gloria and Caroline Mutuiri, who were friends of his son, he said: "When I realize those kids are dead, I know at the end of the day we must live as human beings, without barriers to our common humanity."

In Uhuru Park, among the names of the dead, Ms. Karugi said much the same. In pulling people from the wreckage, and caring for the wounded, "we did not mind the tribes, the kind of people" being taken care of, she said. "We were Kenyans. We did not have any boundaries."

[Last Conformist]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


AS info, assuming they really bagged the guy they say they bagged, he killed alot more Kenyans and Tanzanians than he did Americans, and he was definitely a threat to kill alot more Africans.

Don't pretend America would care half as much if he'd killed twice as many Kenyans and Tanzanians but no Americans.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Last Conformist

Don't pretend America would care half as much if he'd killed twice as many Kenyans and Tanzanians but no Americans.

Im not sure how to quantify caring, or how to compare it to the degree to which people from other countries focus on their own losses. But to say America mourns only its own is completely false.

When youre bombing terrorists, sometimes you kill civilians. Thats unfortunate, but otherwise hiding among civilians would make terrorists immune. Canadians and Brits and Dutch and Danes have found that out in Afghanistan. So did every Nato country that participated in Kosovo. I dont know what Swedish forces have been doing the last 5 years.

[Chemical Ollie]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


Im not sure how to quantify caring, or how to compare it to the degree to which people from other countries focus on their own losses. But to say America mourns only its own is completely false.

When youre bombing terrorists, sometimes you kill civilians. Thats unfortunate, but otherwise hiding among civilians would make terrorists immune.

That's the reason you should not bomb terrorists. Bombing is a terrorist method. The victims could care less if what killed them was a stealth bomber or a suicide bomber, they would still be as dead. No moral difference.

Canadians and Brits and Dutch and Danes have found that out in Afghanistan. So did every Nato country that participated in Kosovo. I dont know what Swedish forces have been doing the last 5 years.

We use special forces in Afghanistan and Congo. They are very secret and about the only time any reports of them reached media was when some of them were killed by an IED. But I assume they are as effective in finding Bin Ladin as your forces are.

[Drake Tungsten]

That's the reason you should not bomb terrorists. Bombing is a terrorist method. The victims could care less if what killed them was a stealth bomber or a suicide bomber, they would still be as dead. No moral difference.

[Jaakko]

Originally posted by Geronimo


so true. This is precisely why Germany, Japan, and south Korea are the appalling basket cases we see today.

Go on, apologize some more for Shrubya by including 50+ year old wars. The fact is that your monkey has been a failure on every front except convincing the American people that he should be elected (which tells us a lot).

This latest is no exception, seeing as how the strike didn't hit its target. Is that no wonder when it was all nothing but brainless flexing of muscles?

[Jaakko]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


report is we got the head AQ guy for east africa, who was responsible for the embassy attacks. Some local elder said that dozens of civilians were killed. What credence to give to an elder of a village where a high level AQnik was hiding out is left as an exercise to the reader.

So the mere accusation has already condemned the targets as guilty? Everyone the US bombs is therefore by definition terrorists, because if they weren't, they wouldn't have been bombed.

How murderous of you. Not to mention that you're coddling incompetents, which is a running theme in US these days.

[Jaakko]

dp

[Jaakko]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
I'm totally serious. Europeans are fags and only care about civilian casualties when America is involved.

I like how a grown man uses "***" as what he thinks is a mortal insult. Oh my gawd, homosexuals!

Go thump the bible and protect the sanctity of your wifebeater of sumfink.

[MOBIUS]

It's just Drake's way of shouting:

"I am Drake Tungsten and I am a DICK!"

[MOBIUS]

BTW

Somali raids miss terror suspects

Translate: US attacks Somali village, scores of innocent civilians massacred!

[Arrian]

There seem to be conflicting reports. The ambassador says one thing, an unnamed source says another.

It's gotta be hard to know for sure if you got the guy. They've got what, a grainy picture of him? How do you positively ID the body? Especially after an airstrike.

-Arrian