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January 14, 2006

Zawahiri Not Among Dead, Pakistani Spook Says

Ayman al-Zawahiri -- Osama bin Laden's right-hand man in the al Qaeda terrorist network -- was not killed in a CIA airstrike on a remote Pakistani village, according to a Pakistani intelligence official.
U.S. sources said al-Zawahiri was the target of Friday's strike and initially reported that he may have been among the 18 people killed.

The Pakistani intelligence official said it was not known whether al-Zawahiri was in the area.

Pakistan's Foreign Office said Saturday it had lodged a protest with the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan over the attack on the village of Damadola, near the Afghan border.

"Pakistan will also take up this matter in the next meeting of Tripartite Commission," a statement read. The group is made up of senior military and diplomatic representatives from coalition forces, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Associated Press quoted a senior Pakistani intelligence official as saying "our investigations conclude that they (the CIA) acted on a false information."

Update: So we're dropping artillery rounds from airplanes now, huh?

posted by Ace at 03:00 PM

Comments

I saw a film today oh, boy
The english army had just won the war
A crowd of people turned away...

Posted by: scarshapedstar on January 14, 2006 03:04 PM

Whoo-hoo! A terrorist escaped! I'm so jazzed!!

I really love how Zawahiri is playing Bush like a violin!

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!

Posted by: Don't Question My Patriotism on January 14, 2006 03:07 PM

Someone should tell the CIA that the boss always shows up late.

Posted by: Michael on January 14, 2006 03:27 PM

Woohoo! We got Al Qaeda's #2 -- again! Time to fire off a blog post about how this is proof that Bush, having personally planned this operation, is the greatest President of all time, taking care to throw in something along the lines of "John Kerry, true to form, immediately pinned a purple heart on the terrorist's corpse, which was subsequently eaten by Michael Moore! (Get it? He's FAT!)" Hopefully my commenters will chime in with regrets that Al Franken, Ted and/or Anthony Kennedy, Hilary Clinton, and the Dixie Chicks weren't lying among the rubble. Ooh, sweet, a trackback from Misha noting that Dennis Kucinich wouldn't have supported this strike and therefore the city streets should be ripened with the gibbeted corpses of voting-age Democrats.

Oh, damn, turns out we didn't get him after all. I bet those liberals are gonna start gloating.

Posted by: Don't Question My Sanity on January 14, 2006 03:43 PM

Yes Don't but those women and children they just murdered might have grown up to be tarists. It was a preemptive assassination.

Posted by: PLV on January 14, 2006 03:46 PM

"immediately pinned a purple heart on the terrorist's corpse, which was subsequently eaten by Michael Moore! (Get it? He's FAT!)"

LOL.

Damn, you should work that into a bit Ace.

Posted by: on January 14, 2006 03:49 PM

"Yes Don't but those women and children they just murdered might have grown up to be tarists. It was a preemptive assassination. "

The only good tarist is a dead tarist.

Posted by: on January 14, 2006 03:51 PM

48 hour rule applies, even to this.

Remember when we did/didn't/did get Abu Zubaydah?

Posted by: someone on January 14, 2006 03:58 PM

48 hour rule applies, even to this.

I thought it was the five second rule? You mean I have to wait 48 hours before i eat Zawahiris corpse?!

Posted by: Michael Moore(a-a) on January 14, 2006 04:02 PM

Nothing's over till we say it is!

Posted by: Bluto Blutarsky on January 14, 2006 04:24 PM

*phone rings*

al-Zawahiri: Hey bro, it's Ayman. I need a favor, Ahmed. I want to have a meeting of my top terrorist leaders at your house.

Ahmed: What's wrong with the place you were using ?

Ayman: It's, erm, being renovated by the owner. New carpets and shit. They, um, had a roof leak.

Ahmed: Yo Ayman, I'd like to help, really. I mean, you da man! But that is Parcheesi-and-pizza night at my house.

Ayman: Uh, Ahmed, I didn't say what night.

Ahmed: Dude, take at hint.

Posted by: Michael on January 14, 2006 05:31 PM

We do fire 105mm from C-130's, but that isn't a 105mm. Kind of like a small artillary piece that fires down on the target as the plane circles.

Posted by: digitalbrownshirt on January 14, 2006 05:37 PM

Nothing like having arty rounds handy for the propaganda photo op and nothing like our MSM publishing the photo without comment.

Posted by: BrewFan on January 14, 2006 06:48 PM

If you check the photo's properties it actually has the word "afghan" in it's title. Just an accident at the NYT I'm sure.

Posted by: digitalbrownshirt on January 14, 2006 06:59 PM

We fire 105s and (I think) 155s from c130s.

Posted by: DeeDaGo on January 14, 2006 09:57 PM

The only pictures I've seen of spectre in action have been the little 105's.

Posted by: on January 14, 2006 10:03 PM

So we missed him - we still killed at least 18 of those muslims - only one billion left to go. I don't know why they grumble about this. They have lots of spare kids anyway. Soon they'll all be our friends when they understand we just want the best for them. We'll give them democracy and they'll give us oil - a great deal for all!

Posted by: myname on January 14, 2006 11:05 PM

They have lots of spare kids anyway.

myname:

FYI, our host is exceedingly tolerant, but someone named Cedarford got banned for exactly those kinds of comments.

Posted by: Michael on January 15, 2006 03:08 PM

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What? Skeleton of the most famous Musketeer, D'Artagnan, possibly discovered in Dutch church closet.
Dumas picked four names of real musketeers out of a history book, D'Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos. So there was an actual D'Artagnan, though he made most of the story up. (Or, you know, all of it.)*

Charles de Batz de Castelmore, known as d'Artagnan, the famous musketeer of Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV, spent his life in the service of the French crown.
The Gascon nobleman inspired Alexandre Dumas's hero in "The Three Musketeers" in the 19th century, a character now known worldwide thanks to the novel and numerous film adaptations.
D'Artagnan was killed during the siege of Maastricht in 1673, and there is a statue honoring the musketeer in the city. His final resting place has remained a mystery ever since.

A lot of Dumas's stories are based on bits of real history. The plot of the >Three Musketeers, about trying to recover lost diamonds from the queen's necklace, was cribbed from the then-almost-contemporaneous Affair of the Queen's Necklace. And the Man in the Iron Mask is based on real accounts of a prisoner forced to wear a mask (though I think it was a velvet mask).
* Oh, I should mention, Dumas says all this, about finding the names in an old book, in the prologue to his novel. But authors lie a lot. They frequently present fictions as based on historic fact. The twist is, he was actually telling the truth here. At least about these four musketeers having actually existed and served under Louis XIV.
Fun fact: You know the beginning of A Fistful of Dollars where the local gunslingers make fun of Clint Eastwood's donkey and Eastwood demands they apologize to the donkey? That's lifted from The Three Musketeers. Rochefort mocks D'Artagnan's old, brokedown farm horse and D'Artagnan is incensed.

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Easy, no question -- read The Hobbit first. It's actually the start of the story and comes first chronologically. It sets up some major characters and major pieces in play in LOTR.
Also, the Hobbit is Beginner-Friendly, which LOTR isn't. The Hobbit really is a delightful book, and a fast read. It's chatty, it's casual, it's exciting, and it's funny. In that dry cheeky British humor way. I love that the narrator is constantly making little asides and commentary, like he's just sitting next to you telling you this story as it occurs to him.
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Oh, I should say: The Hobbit is written as if it's for children, but one of those smart children's stories that are also for adults. Don't worry, there's also real fighting and violence and horror in it, too.
LOTR is written for adults. (It's said that Tolkien wrote both for his children, but LOTR was written 17 years later, when his children were adults.) Some might not like The Hobbit due to its sometimes frivolous tone. Me, I love it. I find it constantly amusing. Both are really good but there is a starkly different tone to both. LOTR is epic, grand, and serious, about a world war, The Hobbit is light and breezy, and about a heist. Though a heist that culminates in a war for the spoils.

The Hobbit Challenge: Read two more chapters. I didn't have much time. Bilbo got the ring.
I noticed a continuity problem. Maybe. Now, as of the time of The Hobbit, it was unknown that this magic ring was in fact a Ring of Power, and it was doubly unknown that it was the Ring of Power, the Master Ring that controlled the others.
But the narrator -- who we will learn in LOTR was none of than Bilbo himself, who wrote the book as "There and Back Again" -- says this about Gollum's ring:
"But who knows how Gollum had come by that present [the Ring], ages ago in the old days when such rings were still at large in the world? Perhaps even the Master who ruled them could not have said."
In another passage, the ring is identified as a "ring of power."
I don't know, I always thought there was a distinction between mere magic rings and the Rings of Power created by Sauron. But this suggests that Bilbo knew this was a ring of power created by Sauron.
Now I don't remember when Bilbo wrote the Hobbit. In the movie, he shows Frodo the book in Rivendell, and I guess he wrote it after he left the Shire. I guess he might have added in the part about the ring being a ring of power created by "the Master" after Gandalf appraised him of his research into the ring.
I never noticed this before. I know Tolkien re-wrote this chapter while he was writing LOTR to make the ring important from the start. And also to make Gollum more sinister and evil, and also to remove the part where Gollum actually offers Bilbo the ring as a "present" -- Bilbo had already found it on his own, but Gollum was wiling to give it away, which obviously is not something the rewritten Gollum would ever do.
But I had no memory of the ring being suggested to be The Ring so early in the tale.

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