Avril Benoît, executive director for Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) USA stated on March 8:
“The US plan for a temporary pier in Gaza to increase the flow of humanitarian aid is a glaring distraction from the real problem: Israel’s indiscriminate and disproportionate military campaign and punishing siege. The food, water, and medical supplies so desperately needed by people in Gaza are sitting just across the border. Israel needs to facilitate rather than block the flow of supplies. This is not a logistics problem; it is a political problem. Rather than look to the US military to build a work-around, the US should insist on immediate humanitarian access using the roads and entry points that already exist.
In the past months, the US has vetoed three UN Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire—which is the only way to ensure a real scale up in emergency assistance. We reiterate our call for an immediate and sustained ceasefire to stop the killing of thousands more civilians and allow for the delivery of desperately needed humanitarian aid.”
As they should, it was always a terrible plan. The US should instead apply pressure (eg. no more bombs unless you let aid through) on Israel instead. This (and the air drops) was always a way to avoid having to do that.
Two vessels are beached along Israel’s coast near Ashkelon while the other two are anchored on the beach near the temporary pier built and put in place by the U.S. military, U.S.Central Command announced Saturday.
Maybe the inability to rapidly set up a pier that can operate under heavy weather represents a military readiness issue. Not all wars are conveniently attended by sunny and calm weather.
Typhoon Cobra, also known as the Typhoon of 1944 or Halsey’s Typhoon (named after Admiral William Halsey Jr.), was the United States Navy designation for a powerful tropical cyclone that struck the United States Pacific Fleet in December 1944, during World War II. The storm sank three destroyers, killed 790 sailors, damaged 9 other warships, and swept dozens of aircraft overboard off their aircraft carriers.
Task Force 38 (TF 38) had been operating about 300 mi (260 nmi; 480 km) east of Luzon in the Philippine Sea, conducting air raids against Japanese airfields in the Philippines and had been trying to refuel their ships. Information given to Halsey about the typhoon was incorrect, and despite warning signs of worsening conditions, the ships remained on station until December 17 when Halsey ordered the Third Fleet into the center of the typhoon.
TF 38 consisted of 7 fleet carriers, 6 light carriers, 8 battleships, 15 cruisers, and about 50 destroyers. The carriers had been conducting raids against Japanese airfields in the Philippines, and ships were being refueled, especially many destroyers, which were running low on fuel. When the storm hit, the procedure had to be aborted.
Damage to the fleet was severe. Some ships rolled more than 70 degrees. Three destroyers, Spence, Hickox, and Maddox, had nearly empty fuel stores (10–15% of capacity) and so lacked the stabilizing effect of the extra weight, making them relatively unstable. Additionally, several other destroyers, including Hull and Monaghan, were of the older Farragut-class and had been refitted with over 500 long tons (510 t) of extra equipment and armament, which made them top-heavy.
Spence, Hull, and Monaghan either capsized or were sunk after water flooded down their smokestacks and disabled their engines. Without power, they were unable to control their heading and were at the mercy of the wind and seas. Hickox and Maddox pumped seawater into their empty fuel tanks, adding enough stability to ride out the storm with relatively minor damage.
Many other ships of TF 38 suffered various degrees of damage, especially to radar and radio equipment, which crippled communications within the fleet. Several carriers suffered fires in their hangars, and 146 aircraft were wrecked or blown overboard. Nine ships—including one light cruiser, three light carriers, and two escort carriers—suffered enough damage to be sent for repairs.
The carrier Monterey was nearly taken down in flames by its own airplanes as they crashed into bulkheads and exploded during violent rolls. One of those fighting the fires aboard Monterey was Lieutenant Gerald Ford, later President of the United States. Ford later recalled nearly going overboard when 20° and greater rolling caused aircraft below decks to career into each other, igniting a fire.
Like, maybe we need some mechanism to be able to create better moorings.
Have the ability to rapidly create breakwaters, to reduce the impact of waves on the moored ships?
Mulberry harbours were two temporary portable harbours developed by the British Admiralty and War Office during the Second World War to facilitate the rapid offloading of cargo onto beaches during the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944. Designed in 1942 and then built in under a year in great secrecy, within hours of the Allies successfully creating beachheads following D-Day, sections of the two prefabricated harbours and old ships, to be sunk to create breakwaters, were being towed across the English Channel from southern England and placed in position off Omaha Beach (Mulberry “A”) and Gold Beach (Mulberry “B”).
The Mulberry harbours solved the problem of needing deep water jetties and a harbour to provide the invasion force with the necessary reinforcements and supplies, and were to be used until major French ports could be captured and brought back into use after repair of the inevitable sabotage by German defenders. Comprising floating but sinkable breakwaters, floating pontoons, piers and floating roadways, this innovative and technically difficult system was being used for the first time.
I’m not an expert on this, but I’m pretty sure there’s no storm hitting northern France that comes anywhere close to a strong typhoon/cyclone/hurricane. There’s no breakwater that’ll help you when faced with an 18ft storm surge or the kind of swells generated by 140mph winds. The WWII typhoon you cite hit the fleet in open water, there’s literally no technology to save you from that except weather forecasting that lets you get out of the way
Sure, I’m not saying that that something t a magnitude of that particular storm would show up, but using it as an example of not being able to just rely on sunshine and calm skies when you want it.
Naval war isn’t really a thing any more. There’s no need to assault from water when we can perform guided missile and drone strikes from the air. Maybe naval artillery too, if you really want. Then you can more easily roll in with tanks and troops.
The landings at Normandy were the best option because the UK was right across the channel, and the other major borders were Spain and Italy, both aligned with Nazi Germany and would mean crossing the Pyrenees or Alps, respectively.
It’s worth reading the article, and better articles are available in the UK press too.
The coverup came from ignorance, no one actually knew this was happening but the NHS staff had reason to reassure patients and just assumed everything was ok without looking hard.
NHS management also didn’t look.
When ministers tried to ask about it they got told everything was fine by their civil servants. And so they go out and tell the press everything is fine.
No one can start an investigation for the suspicions because it looks like admitting it’s happening, and they genuinely didn’t know it was. Because there had been no investigation.
“Standing back and viewing the response of the NHS and of government, the answer to the question ‘was there a cover-up?’ is that there has been. Not in the sense of a handful of people plotting in an orchestrated conspiracy to mislead, but in a way that was more subtle, more pervasive and more chilling in its implications. To save face and to save expense, there has been a hiding of much of the truth,” Langstaff wrote.
“Over decades successive governments repeated lines to take that were inaccurate, defensive and misleading. Its persistent refusal to hold a public inquiry, coupled with a defensive mindset that refused to countenance that wrong had been done, left people without answers, and without justice. This has also meant that many people who are chronically ill have felt obliged to devote their time and their energies to investigating and campaigning, often at great personal cost.”
“Britain’s National Health Service allowed blood tainted with HIV and Hepatitis to be used on patients without their knowledge, leading to 3,000 deaths and more than 30,000 infections, according to the 2,527-page final report by Justice Brian Justice Langstaff, a former judge on the High Court of England and Wales.”
This happened between 1970 and 1991. If I’m not mistaken, those were the years of the AIDS scare, right? How did this go under the radar in times of such paranoia?
I’m actually heartened to see an American rep say this. I’m not hopeful, but i am heartened.
Now my cynical side heard me feeling ok about something and he is telling me to look for her career to be over now. He says he’ll betcha anything she gets primaried out of her spot by the DNC next election at the latest.
The ICC doesn’t have police, they rely on the coalition who supports them to enforce anything. So I think she’s saying that like France or someone needs to arrest him, which of course is never going to happen
In practice, an ICC conviction is more about diplomatic isolation and making it impossible for the suspects to enter countries party to it. I’d say that even German politicians may rethink their stance on Israel and its leadership if this goes through with a conviction.
upi.com
Hot