Bent Corner

I almost forgot all about the terrorist attacks 9-11, but then I got stuck driving behind a rusty pick-up truck with a bumper sticker on the back that told me to never forget what happened on September 11, 2001. So I wont.

Of course I am being facetious. You would have to be a complete retard to ever forget about the attacks on 9-11. Like most Americans living on the east coast, I remember that day only too well. I was working second shift back then. I’d get home from work around 1:00 a.m. and would normally sleep in till 9:00 a.m. I remember waking up that morning and checking my email to find three frantic messages from my mother back in California. She wrote about trying to call me and not getting through and how she just saw on the news that Washington D.C. was being attacked too.

Huh?

I immediately woke up Sheri. She too was working second shift. I didn’t know yet what exactly was going on, but I wanted both of us to find out together.

If you had told me then that we would quickly ascertain who was responsible for the attacks and instead of capturing or killing the individual responsible, we would focus all of our resources on invading a country that had nothing to do with the attacks, I would have told you that you were smoking crack.

It’s been seven years and Osama bin Laden is still at large. Who would have thought that?

This makes me wonder what other vile crap is hiding in so-called classified documents.

From Newsweek:

The American colonel, troubled by what he was hearing, tried to stall at first. But the declassified record shows he finally told his South Korean counterpart it “would be permitted” to machine-gun 3,500 political prisoners, to keep them from joining approaching enemy forces.

In the early days of the Korean War, other American officers observed, photographed and confidentially reported on such wholesale executions by their South Korean ally, a secretive slaughter believed to have killed 100,000 or more leftists and supposed sympathizers, usually without charge or trial, in a few weeks in mid-1950.

And to think that I always believed the machine gunning of political prisoners was something only the godless communists did.  It’s things like this that make me sometimes forget that we are supposed to be the good guys.

I learned from the same Newsweek article that the news of these exicutions first surfaced on May 19 in an AP article.  An article I don’t remember reading or hearing about.

During World War Two, Nazi Germany transported six U-boat submarines 2,000 miles overland from Germany to attack Russian shipping in the Black Sea. The subs operated out of Romania for over two years, hunting and sinking dozens of Russian ships.

When Romania switched sides and declared war against Germany, it left the remaining three subs - three had already been lost in combat - with nowhere to go. They were scuttled by their crew as the war neared its end.

The location of the three U-boats has been a mystery. Until now.

Selçuk Kolay, a Turkish marine engineer, has located one of the subs two miles off the coast of Turkey sitting 8o feet under the surface. He believes he knows the location of the remaining two.

I’ve always wanted to dive a U-boat. There are about seven that can be reached by SCUBA here on the east cost of the United States. I got to dive ship wreaks while I was in the Air Force and stationed on Guam. There is one Japanese tanker from Word War Two sitting atop a German cruiser from World War One. I once dove deep enough so that I could put one hand on the German ship while placing my other hand on the Japanese tanker. It turned out to be highly anticlimactic.

Guam had a lot of cool dive sites. It didn’t have any U-boats.

Link (Telegraph.co.uk)