Libyan Evacuation: Ferry Bring Americans to Malta, USAF Flying Egyptian Nationals Home.

While some 200 Americans being evacuated from Libya had to wait for a ferry to Malta last week, President Obama dispatched US Air Force C130s to Tunisia in order to aid in the evacuation of Egyptian workers trapped in Libya since an uprising against the Gahdaffi regime and ensuing crackdown

President Obama announced today that he had approved the use of military planes to transport Egyptian refugees from the Tunisian border back to Egypt.

Defense officials says the operation will be run by Africa Command (Africom) which is based in Stuttgart, Germany. One of the officials says Africom will use between two and four C-130 aircraft based in Germany to carry out the flights between Tunisia and Egypt. C-130’s are smaller aircraft compared to C-17’s so it looks like they could be making a lot of trips.

The flights will operate between Tunisia and Egypt. A Department of Defense official said that USAID would charter additional civilian aircraft to evacuate foreign nationals who are fleeing strife-torn Libya via the Tunisian border. Spain and German are sending aircraft and warships to aid in the evacuation of foreigners (mostly Egyptians) while India and South Korea have dispatched Naval vessels to evacuate their citizens.

You know what? I hope I don't come off like I'm against using US Air Force aircraft and personnel to evacuate foreign nationals from the escalating and increasingly bloody clusterfuck in Libya, because I'm not....

Simply put, It's the right thing to do......

I'm sure there were some logistical concerns as well. But with that said, how come these assets weren't made available to the American citizens who needed them first?

Food for thought.

Fort Hood- 1 Year Later

Today marks the 1-year anniversary of the massacre at Fort Hood, TX where Maj. Nidal Hasan shot and killed 12 unarmed soldiers preparing for deployment to Afghanistan and a civilian Department of Defense worker and wounded 32 others.

Hassan was cut down after exchanging fire with civilian police officer Mark Todd [I had incorrectly identified officer Kimberly Munley as the one who stopped Hassan's rampage- NANESB!]. Hasan survived, but was paralyzed from the waist down and has been in custody ever since.

At first blush, the background behind the Major's shooting spree isn't that dissimilar to other, infamous workplace shootings that have taken place. And this has allowed many so-called journalists and writers to circumvent the obvious by overlooking significant details like Hasan's e-mail correspondence with fugitive Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula leader Anwar al-Awlaki or shouting 'Allahu Akhbar' while embarking his killing spree.

And that denial seems to be one of the more disturbing legacies of the shooting on this somber 1 year anniversary. Esquire tells us about the granular earthen materiel they're seeing in amazing detail with jaw-dropping, head-in-the-sand statements such as:

But the real story at Fort Hood was never terrorism

Really? How does one respond to an almost proud display of ignorance on that author's part?

I guess one could flail around desperately trying to find other possible motivations behind the shooting aside from the most glaringly obvious and self-explanatory one. In the immediate wake of the shooting, the media had no idea how many shooters there were, whether or not they were soldiers and where they came from. But in those same vague, urgent reports they let us know that despite the lack of information available from Ft. Hood at the moment, they could reassure us it wasn't terrorism.

Then the spin-meisters went to work with a cornucopia of excuses- it was post traumatic stress disorder; despite Hasan never serving in a combat area. It was a victim of racial/religious discrimination lashing out; despite the ethnic plurality of the victims he gunned down and the fact that his time at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington D.C. was marked with more red flags than a Chinese military parade.

Hasan's Article 32 Hearing began last month and Army prosecutors rested their case against Hasan two weeks ago. The defense had been considering an attempt to use the insanity defense, but experts say that's easily undermined by the weeks of preparation Hasan underwent prior to the shooting spree.

Since the shooting, Al-Alwaki and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula are thought to have been behind the failed Christmas day underpants bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 and last week's attempt to send explosive parcels through airfreight- both of which used PETN explosives.

Meanwhile, the soldiers from the 20th Engineer Battalion and 467th Medical Detachment (the units being outprocessed to Afghanistan) are now coming home from their rotation in Afghanistan.