Sunday, March 27, 2011

Halter on Siegel


Zounds, on Thursday evening's ATC, Mr. Heft and Humanity himself, Robert Siegel, was even more jazzed for the dazzling "accuracy" of our air-war toys than his guest, General Halter. And who is this Halter fellow? I'll let Siegel describe him: "Irv Halter. That's retired U.S. Air Force Major General Irving Halter Jr., who is now with the applied technology group of the defense contractor, CSC. " CSC? Oh them...ka-ching!

Here are some of Siegel's laser-guided questions for the Halter:
"Does a pilot who is flying over Libya today have a very different and clearer sense of what his targets are than a pilot who was flying over, say, the Balkans back in the early '90s?"
-or-
"Is the result of all this that when a plane goes out and it's hoping to hit a tank on a highway, that the odds of hitting the gas station alongside the highway are far, far, far less than they might have been, say, 15 or 20 years ago."
To which Halter gleefully answers:
"Absolutely. We had pretty good precision 20 years, 15 years ago. We have much better precision now. But at the end of the day, something can occur, for instance, you know, during the Serbian fight there was a situation where an individual was getting ready to drop a bomb on a bridge and he noticed that there was a train coming for that bridge. And so, he had to steer the weapon away at the last minute. That was a decision that the pilots made. If he hadn't have seen that, then something bad could have happened."
Let's just say that "pretty good precision" depended on whether you were on the delivering or receiving end of NATO's humanitarian operation, and that BS about not hitting the train is pure Reaganesque making-crap-up - but since NPR seems to do so little research for these pieces, there is no attempt at correcting the record. Then again NPR never lets facts get in the way of selling the idea that US airpower is the most compassionate in the world.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

i was listening to BBC and they kept reporting Gates was stating that Ghadaffi was trying to show the airstrikes were killing civillians by trotting out corpses of people his troops had killed. He siad "intelligence services" had provided this information. As of now I haven't heard this dreck repeated on NPR. Like I said, As of now.

OOPS! http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/51991.html

Now that his BS has been on CBS i expect tomorrow we will hear all about this. I wonder why people allow gates and others of his ilk to simply spew this crap with any kind of credibility. Check Gates' entire career and I see nothing but a liar.

edk

larry, dfh said...

Well Ed,
Ray McGovern
sees it pretty much the same way you do.

Anonymous said...

larry:

i wonder if these are the same "sources" that claimed Afghans were torching their kids so the ISAF would look bad?

and Guy Razz-Ma-Tazz had Steven Hadley to explain why there were no WMDs found in Iraq . . . oh wait that's my bad cause he was on to . . . what bolster NPR's cred with the scorpions I guess

edk

Anonymous said...

oh I forgot he had eliott abrams on to explain why the contras were like the founding fothers except when they weren't

edk

Patrick Lynch said...

I heard the Gates dreck on NPR sometime yesterday during one of those top of the hour news snippets. My B.S. detector started flashing and then the meter pegged.

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