Quote:
because it shows the level of integrity you think is on the ground at the airport. The rest is just supposition and I have to say a bit of bile.


The majority of armed forces throughout the world do not have integrity (no matter what Military Personnel involved would like to think), they just follow orders from the top down. Thats how they get things done. They are tools to do someone else's political bidding. The General in charge has his orders and his priorities and he will be carrying them out to the best of his abilities within the framework he has been given.

Quote:
Lessons learned, quickly we hope. Adapt, and overcome - its someone's motto anyway.


This is the main problem I have with the current setup in response to the military operations in Haiti in response to the Earthquake. Its the NGOs operating in Haiti that currently in the country have been there, done that, and not the General in charge of USSOUTHCOM. There isn't time to go through the learning curve required for the delivery of humanitarian assistance to such a large disaster.

http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/international/2010/01/20/bs.penhaul.haiti.us.troops.cnn&hpt=P1

Quote:
And I assume by ex President you are referring to UN Special Envoy for Haiti President William Clinton: if you want to suggest that the government of Haiti shouldn't give any landing privilege to the UN envoy then I guess I have to give up on convincing you otherwise.


There is no Haitian Government, they have no say in what is going on, despite the propaganda. Even during the first day after the Earthquake the President of Haiti was caught attempting to get out of dodge by a news reporter. The rest of the Haitians who survived the earthquake who attempted to previously run the country weren't far behind trying to get out of dodge. The Haitian government was a corrupt puppet regime at the best of times.

Quote:
Personally if I were to have any bile it would be for the surfeit of reporters on the ground - whose space did they take up on an inbound flight, from what relief supplies are they fed and watered while on the ground in Port au Prince: how many life-saving meals are they eating while they are there. A local Seattle TV affiliate has no less than 2 reporters in Port au Prince right now, a condition probably duplicated across the other 37 major US media markets. Apparently they can't rely on a network pool reporter to report the news, they need to be in Haiti during this early phase, reporting on who knows what.


The US military was in charge of the Airfield in Port-au-Prince apparently just a few hours after the Earthquake. Perhaps that question of priorities for the authorities in charge of the airfield about getting the news media into the country should be directed at them rather than me.

BTW its not 'bile' (it may seem that way) its just that the situation is now getting to the point where I can begin to see beginnings of 'the worst case scenario'. There appears to be little being done right now to mitigate what may well happen in the next few weeks.





Edited by Am_Fear_Liath_Mor (01/20/10 11:24 PM)