How about another story ignored by the MSM?

Of course it was ignored, it was good news from Iraq.
I lucked out the other day while channel surfing over to C-SPAN. They were just starting a press conference from Iraq with Colonel H.R. McMaster, the commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. Naturally I have a soft spot for fellow tankers, so I stuck around.

I haven't been able to track down the press conference in the C-SPAN archives, but I did find the transcript on the DOD web site.

In case you don't have the time to read it all, here are a couple interesting points.

After giving a glowing report on the operation to clear out terrorists from Tal Afar, what was the very first question asked of him?

Q: Colonel, Charlie Aldinger with Reuters. A couple of brief questions. First of all, what does the "H. R." stand for? What name do you go by besides your initials?

Another great Reuters reporter in action!

As far as the degenerates we are up against....

In terms of specialized weapons, some crude attempts, I think, in the western part of the city. We've been able to put this picture together now. The enemy had rigged a lot of buildings for destruction, and they wanted to time the destruction of these buildings with the entry of our forces. In one of these buildings the enemy had big barrels of chemicals that had explosives implanted in the chemicals, wires running around, and the whole house was rigged for demolition.

I don't know if you've been following some of the enemy's propaganda. You know, one of the cells in this enemy's structure here, this very well developed enemy structure, is a propaganda cell. And on the sort of jihadist and extremist websites, they've been saying, you know, that coalition forces are using chemical weapons. I think what they had hoped to do was detonate this building, kill innocent civilians in this neighborhood and then blame it on coalition forces. But we preempted their ability to do that by evacuating the civilians from that building. That's one example of it.

One of the things we said when I was still under arms, was that if you can see the enemy, you can kill him.

I mean, basically, you know, in a lot of areas of this city, it was -- it was the schoolhouse for the enemy. And they would go in -- they took over schools. They would go into schools, have classes on how to do an IED. I mean, literally, chalkboards. We've got photos of students and teachers standing in front of chalkboards. And, you know, in one engagement we had about a month ago we were able to gain observation of the enemy having an IED class outside of a school with, you know, 30 people gathered around, digging up a hole, and showing how you put in an IED. Now, we disrupted their class with an artillery attack that resulted in 30 of the enemy being killed on that occasion. But it's another example of what the enemy was using this area for.

IED class in the open. Fire for effect. SWEET!

posted by Tanker at 02:27 PM

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