Panetta Is Safe After Breach Near His Plane at Afghan Base

[WestVirginiaRebel]

NY Times:

KABUL, Afghanistan — A tense visit to Afghanistan by Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta got off to an alarming start on Wednesday when a stolen pickup truck sped onto a ramp alongside a runway at a British military airfield and crashed into a ditch as Mr. Panetta’s plane was landing.

Mr. Panetta was not hurt, but Pentagon officials said the Afghan driver emerged from the vehicle in flames.

No explosives were found on the driver, a civilian, or in the truck, the officials said, and the Pentagon was not immediately considering the episode an attack on Mr. Panetta. But it reinforced the lack of security in Afghanistan at the beginning of his two-day visit, the first by a senior member of the Obama administration since an American soldier reportedly killed 16 Afghan civilians, mostly children and women, in Kandahar Province. The visit had been planned months ago, but took on new urgency after the Sunday massacre.

Mr. Panetta, like President Obama, has denounced the deaths and vowed to bring the killer to justice, a message he was to deliver in person to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan. The killings have further clouded already strained Afghan-American relations. On Wednesday, an American official said the suspect had been moved out of Afghanistan. That is likely to further anger Afghans, who called for him to be tried in their country.

The truck crashed as Mr. Panetta landed at Camp Bastion, a British airfield next to Camp Leatherneck, a vast United States Marine base in Helmand Province.

Mr. Panetta and his aides were aware of the crash shortly after it happened, about 11 a.m., but he continued as planned, meeting with local Afghan officials; delivering remarks to 200 Marines, other international troops and Afghan security forces at Camp Leatherneck and then heading to a remote combat outpost, Shukvani, in western Helmand.

Mr. Panetta’s aides did not disclose the crash until nearly 10 hours later, well after Mr. Panetta had arrived in Kabul from his day in the south, and at least an hour after the British news media began reporting it. It was not clear if the aides would have made the disclosure had word not leaked out.

Defense officials said Mr. Panetta’s plane had been diverted away from the truck, which ended up in the ditch off the ramp, an area where Mr. Panetta’s plane had been expected to park. The Pentagon press secretary, George Little, said he did not know whether the truck reached the ramp parking area “while we were landing or before or slightly after.”

Mr. Little said that the stolen vehicle had not exploded, contrary to some earlier reports, and that Mr. Panetta had never been in danger. But he could not explain the Afghan’s motive or explain why he was on fire. “For reasons that are totally unknown to us at this time, our personnel discovered that he was ablaze,” Mr. Little said. “He ran, he jumped on to a truck, base personnel put the fire out, and he was immediately treated for burn injuries.”

In Washington, Capt. John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said the truck had been stolen from a coalition service member — he did not give a nationality — who was wounded in what was apparently a carjacking. There was no immediate evidence that the Afghan driver “had any idea who was on that aircraft,” Captain Kirby said.

Mr. Panetta flew from Washington to Manas, Kyrgyzstan, on his usual plane, a reconfigured Boeing 747 with “United States of America” emblazoned on the side, but as usual for security reasons, he transferred to a gray C-17 military cargo plane for the unannounced trip to Afghanistan.

In a sign of the nervousness surrounding the trip, a sergeant major abruptly told the Marines gathered to hear Mr. Panetta in a tent at Camp Leatherneck to get up, place their M-16 and M-4 automatic rifles and 9-millimeter pistols outside, and return unarmed. The sergeant major, Brandon Hall, told reporters that he was acting on orders.

“All I know is I was told to get the weapons out,” he said. Asked why, he replied: “Somebody got itchy — that’s all I’ve got to say. Somebody got itchy. We just adjust.”

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I think he's a terrible Defense Secretary but I'm glad he didn't get hurt.

[raygun]

 

Of course he's safe.

 

There aint an animal in the world'd mess with a hound dog like that (ready to flick their paw-of-death like that)?

 

C'mon, lets talk reality.