Michael Ledeen’s new book The Iranian Time Bomb contains some brief but stark words that, in a nutshell, wrap up the worldview of radical Shi’a Islam concerning nation-states and how this concept is not a part of their world view.  In the words of Khomeini:

“We do not worship Iran.  We worship Allah.  For patriotism is is another name for paganism.  I say let this land [Iran] burn.  I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.

In Marine Artillery Does Oakland, I covered my contempt for the Oakland Airport Authorities (upon their refusal even to allow Marines to deplane their aircraft at the terminal to meet family members) along with my plans for an amphibious assault on the Socialist Republic of San Francisco to reoccupy it for the United States of America.  In response to this article, I received a note from a nice woman at the Department of Homeland Security that reads as follows.

I was reading your blog, and wanted to send you TSA’s statement on what happened at Oakland.

TSA STATEMENT ON INCIDENT INVOLVING U.S. TROOPS AT OAKLAND INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

On Thursday, September 27, 2007 North American Airlines flight #1777 carrying soldiers and marines landed at Oakland International Airport from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) where passengers were screened by U.S. Customs upon landing from overseas.

At no time were service men and women prohibited from entering the sterile area of Oakland International Airport by TSA personnel or regulations. Airport officials, the airline and ground handling company coordinated the arrival and all services associated with this flight, including refueling, refreshing supplies on the aircraft, maintenance checks and all passenger services.

TSA personnel across the country have worked closely with airports to ensure the utmost care when handling flights involving our troops and will continue to facilitate their movement to the greatest extent possible while ensuring a high level of security for all travelers.

In response to this note, the nice woman is invited to read my blog all the time.  I discuss things like satellite patrols, gated communities and biometrics, body armor, and Swarm Theory in Counterinsurgency.  I am sure that she didn’t just happen to be reading my blog.  She was performing damage control for the DHS, bless her heart.  There are plenty of reasons to detest TSA actions towards the military, but in this case, the TSA isn’t to blame, and this nice lady at the DHS can go about her duties, regretably never to visit my blog again.  But if not the TSA, who is to blame for this insulting debacle?

Mercury News of San Jose gives us a more detailed rundown of the official response to this incident from the Oakland Airport Authorities (the San Francisco Chronicle also has the story).

Oakland International Airport officials said Tuesday that security concerns about a charter plane ferrying military personnel from Iraq led them to direct the aircraft to a remote corner of the airfield, causing the troops to spend a two-hour layover on the tarmac.

The group of more than 200 troops, which reportedly included both U.S. Marines and Army soldiers, stopped in Oakland Sept. 27 during a trip from Iraq to Hawaii so the North American Airlines charter could be refueled, cleaned and restocked with food …

Airport authorities said they learned from Hilltop Aviation, which provides services to airlines on the ground, that the passengers had not been screened by the Transportation Security Administration at a previous stop in New York. Moreover, the authorities learned that there were weapons on the plane.

“Together with our security partners, the airport made a decision to park this aircraft at a remote location on the tarmac,” Deborah Alle-Flint, assistant director of aviation for the airport, said in a prepared statement.

Airport authorities did not know some passengers wanted to go to the main terminal to visit relatives because Hilltop did not say so, Barnes said. Had the airport authorities known, the troops could have been transferred to a terminal area where they would have remained separate from civilian passengers who had been screened.

This account it a lie, plain and simple.  They didn’t have “security concerns.”  The Oakland Airport Authorities know that the Marines are given a shake-down by customs officials more thorough than any given by the TSA, as pointed out by the nice lady at the Department of Homeland Security in her e-mail to me.  In fact, at the link above consider the comment left by Slab at Op-For:

[Customs] screens for contraband brought back from the CentCom theater. Of course, they are supposed to be screened even before leaving theater. We spent several hours being thoroughly screened at an airbase in Kuwait on this last trip back. I e-mailed the TSA a few months back after I noticed that the screeners were looking to confiscate automatic knives. They are prohibited under TSA regulations. However, Title 15 § 1244 says that members of the Armed Forces may carry automatic knives acting in the performance of their duties. I don’t know about you, but I think a combat deployment to Iraq might qualify as performance of my duty. Anyway, so far no response to my e-mail.

Very good, but I have one better.  Consider a Marine who has a multitool for working on his weapon to keep it in functioning order.  Since it has a blade as one of the tools, it is not allowed to be transported aboard one of the many commercial aircraft which carries tens of thousands of our troops to the theater.  It has to be packed in the luggage compartment.

As for the weapon, it has no ammunition.  The TSA knows this.  The Oakland Airport Authorities know this.  The Marines have their rifles because it would be blasphemous for it to be out of the armory but out of control of their person.  They could be stolen.  Moreover, the rifle creed of the Marine goes as follows:

This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.

My rifle, without me, is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will . . . .

My rifle and I know that what counts in this war is not the rounds we fire, the noise of our burst, nor the smoke we make. We know that it is the hits that count. We will hit . .

My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weaknesses, its strengths, its parts, its accessories, its sights, and its barrel. I will ever guard it against the ravages of weather and damage. I will keep my rifle clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready. We will become part of each other. We will . . .

Before God I swear this creed. My rifle and I are the defenders of my country. We are the masters of our enemy. We are the saviors of my life.

So be it, until victory is America’s and there is no enemy, but Peace!

Their may have been political concerns, but there were no security concerns.  To leave the aircraft on the tarmac in Oakland while letting the Marines deplane, but not with their families, is insulting and disengenuous.  The Marines aboard the aircraft were no threat to force the aircraft to fly into a building in New York City or Washington, D.C.  They were heros who had served their country well, only to return to their country to be denied entry because of the the authorities at the Oakland Airport.  The account by the Oakland Airport Authorities only increases their culpability for the things they said they thought but actually knew otherwise.  They are liars.

Oakland Airport is defamed and shown for what they are, the United States Marines are dishonored, and no amount of damage control can change reality.

National Geographic gives us what John Robb calls a low impact introduction to swarm theory.  It is interesting not only for the potential application to an insurgency (as Robb claims) but also for counterinsurgency.

How do the simple actions of individuals add up to the complex behavior of a group? How do hundreds of honeybees make a critical decision about their hive if many of them disagree? What enables a school of herring to coordinate its movements so precisely it can change direction in a flash, like a single, silvery organism? The collective abilities of such animals—none of which grasps the big picture, but each of which contributes to the group’s success—seem miraculous even to the biologists who know them best. Yet during the past few decades, researchers have come up with intriguing insights.

One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one’s in charge. No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all—at least none that we would recognize. It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing.

Consider the problem of job allocation. In the Arizona desert where Deborah Gordon studies red harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex barbatus), a colony calculates each morning how many workers to send out foraging for food. The number can change, depending on conditions. Have foragers recently discovered a bonanza of tasty seeds? More ants may be needed to haul the bounty home. Was the nest damaged by a storm last night? Additional maintenance workers may be held back to make repairs. An ant might be a nest worker one day, a trash collector the next. But how does a colony make such adjustments if no one’s in charge? Gordon has a theory.

Ants communicate by touch and smell. When one ant bumps into another, it sniffs with its antennae to find out if the other belongs to the same nest and where it has been working. (Ants that work outside the nest smell different from those that stay inside.) Before they leave the nest each day, foragers normally wait for early morning patrollers to return. As patrollers enter the nest, they touch antennae briefly with foragers …

That’s how swarm intelligence works: simple creatures following simple rules, each one acting on local information. No ant sees the big picture. No ant tells any other ant what to do. Some ant species may go about this with more sophistication than others. (Temnothorax albipennis, for example, can rate the quality of a potential nest site using multiple criteria.) But the bottom line, says Iain Couzin, a biologist at Oxford and Princeton Universities, is that no leadership is required. “Even complex behavior may be coordinated by relatively simple interactions,” he says.

But breaking this down into Aristotelian categories, the fact that ants have no “leadership” may be an accidental feature of their behavior rather than an essential feature.  While ants may communicate with signals, smells and other things that only an ant would know about, these instincts and biological functions may be in fact the leadership which governs the colony.  Further, swarm theory may be applicable in societies which are governed by more strict individual leadership roles.

It is not readily apparent how this theory applies to insurgents who lack the biological features of ants, but given the rapid communication abilities of U.S. forces currently in Iraq, it is becoming apparent that they are swarming with respect to the insurgency.  Information flow is critical – it is the foundation for this swarming.  In Al Qaeda’s War on Iraq we discussed the killing of al Qaeda in Iraq leader al-Tunisi several days ago.

“Al-Tunisi was one of the most senior leaders … the emir of foreign terrorists in Iraq and part of the inner leadership circle,

In Al Qaeda’s War on Iraq, we pointed out that senior al Qaeda leader and emir of foreign fighters Abu Osama al-Tunisi was killed along with two other terrorist suspects in a U.S. F-16 strike that dropped two 500-pound laser-guided bombs on a safehouse where they were meeting.  The Islamic State of Iraq confirmed his death today, and subsequently boasted of questionable victories for themselves.

“The war between us and them is a competition; they get us, we get them. Yesterday, we tore their bodies and their parts were scattered everywhere, and we killed them and they are still licking their wounds,” the Islamic State of Iraq said in its statement.

In a separate posting on an extremist Web site Monday, the Islamic State of Iraq issued a video allegedly showing an U.S. Apache helicopter being shot down by an anti-aircraft machine gun.

The short video, which could not be independently verified, shows brief clips of a man holding a machine gun, a helicopter flying and later landing with plumes of smoke rising from it. The video indicated the shooting took place on Sept. 25 in southwest Baghdad suburb of Hor Rajab.

The U.S. military reported last week an Apache helicopter that was fighting off a ground attack on U.S. forces was hit by enemy fire and made a hard landing south Baghdad. There were no casualties in the attack, which the U.S. military said took place on Wednesday.

It is a sign of their further diminution that they would make such a fuss over causing a “hard landing” of a helicopter.  The recent alliance of a few Sunni resistance groups together seems more a publicity stunt than anything with real meaning.  The same tactic is used by American corporate officers: when the company is failing, reorganize.  Al Qaeda and the Sunni insurgency is losing, and badly.  Unlike the Shi’ite militia in the South, the U.S. forces have taken the fight to them and won.  A few days ago and soon after killing al-Tunisi, coalition forcers disrupted another al Qaeda meeting which was being held for the purpose of electing another yet another emir because of the death of his predecessor.

Soldiers from the 2nd Iraqi Army Division, with U.S. Special Forces as advisers, detained 23 suspected al-Qaeda in Iraq terrorists during an intelligence-driven raid in Sharqat Sept. 29.
 
Acting on intelligence, Iraqi Soldiers raided targeted locations in Sharqat to disrupt a meeting between al-Qaeda in Iraq leadership.  The meeting was held to elect a new emir since their previous one, Sabah Abdul-Rahman Abosh, was killed by Iraqi and Coalition Forces in a firefight Sept. 28.  The detainees are suspected of conducting terrorist attacks in the area.

Three hundred candidates appeared for a drive to recruit police in Ameriya.  “Allowing residents to take a stake in providing their own security for their neighborhood will go a long way toward denying Al-Qaeda the ability to move back into Ameriya,

In 2006 coalition forces intercepted a letter from al Qaeda high command to Zarqawi in Iraq, in which he was urged to stop the violence perpetrated against Sunnis.

“… be humble to the believers, and smile in people’s faces, even if you are cursing them in your heart, even if it has been said that they are “a bad tribal brother,

In 2006 coalition forces intercepted a letter from al Qaeda high command to Zarqawi in Iraq, in which he was urged to stop the violence perpetrated against Sunnis.

“… be humble to the believers, and smile in people’s faces, even if you are cursing them in your heart, even if it has been said that they are “a bad tribal brother,