The tenth anniversary of the attack on the USS Cole
Jerry920 writes to remind us that today marks the tenth anniversary of the attack on the USS Cole which cost us 17 good sailors’ lives and dozens injured while the destroyer was taking on fuel in the Yemeni port of Aden.. (MSNBC link)
At 11:15 a.m. on Oct. 12, 2000, the Cole — a billion dollar destroyer armed with the most advanced weapons in the U.S. naval arsenal — was docked off the coast of Yemen for refueling when it was approached by a small skiff packed with explosives and manned by two suicide bombers. The resulting explosion was a chilling precursor to the attacks on Sept. 11. It ripped a 60-by-40-foot hole in the ship’s hull, trapping the bodies of many of the dead crew members in the wreckage.
In the days after the attack, President Clinton vowed retribution against the terrorists. “You will not find a safe harbor,” he proclaimed. “We will find you and justice will prevail.”
Of course there’s been no retribution through the terms of three presidents.
“The attacks on the USS Cole galvanized al-Qaida’s recruitment efforts,” concluded the 9/11 commission. The propaganda video that bin Laden instructed be made about the bombing was widely distributed in the Arab world and struck a nerve, causing “many extremists to travel to Afghanistan for training and jihad.”
Category: Terror War
One of the few points the 9/11 commission got right–that the Cole bombing helped Al-Q in their recruiting efforts.
Memo to leftist ri-tards–nothing helps your cause more than success. Your claims that our killing terrorists is helping their recruiting efforts is so much bullshit. Nobody wants to be part of an organization that routinely gets its dicks stuck in the fan, regardless of which culture you care to use as an example.
The fact that most of these guys haven’t been brought to justice via prison or the business end of a Hellfire missile only serves to encourage more of the same.
Fair winds and following seas, brothers.
A long time ago a former Navy man told me that Navy ships are never fueled in foreign ports. They are always fueled out to sea. Is this true? Clinton had reduced the military so much that we only had half the tanker ships we usually do. Was this the reason the USS Cole was ordered to fuel in the port?