More Military Assistance
While the USS Carl Vinson has arrived and the guys from Special Ops are pushing through four-times the normal traffic at the Port au Prince airport, Danger Room reports U.S. Diverts Spy Drone from Afghanistan to Haiti
As part of the Haiti relief effort, the U.S. military is sharing imagery from one of its high-end, high-flying spy drones, the RQ-4 Global Hawk.
This image, shot yesterday by a Global Hawk, shows damage to the National Cathedral in Port-au-Prince. U.S. Southern Command is sharing the images so that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and relief groups can get a better picture of the situation on the ground.
They are not getting the highest resolution photos the system is capable of, but they are damn good, and allow people to gauge the areas of destruction in and around Port au Prince, something that usually tied up helicopter time and resources.
With so many roads blocked with debris, NGOs can now map routes to different areas and have a feel for what they will find. This is a capability that NGOs just don’t have, but the military does, and it will speed up the delivery of relief.
4 comments
Ah it is good to see such military hardware put to a fine use! You couldn’t drop Libaugh into Haiti to report on the situation.. without a parachute. Just heard an extract of his latest rant. what a piece of sh£t
.-= last blog ..photo hunt – jiggly =-.
If he had more meat and less fat, he might serve a useful purpose later in the disaster when certain taboos have broken down.
😈
Really! In fact, the entire bunch of wingnuts and useless corp exec’s could alleviate World food shortages for a year. Except the poor hungry people would probably end up with serious gastro-intestinal health problems. That whole ‘poisoned tree’ thing. 😉 Maybe a better use would be fertilizer, though even that value might be marginal at best. Maybe their best use would be target practice, and redistribute the mountain of food they would have each consumed to a small village in need. 🙂
They really ARE useless, aren’t they? *shaking head* 😉
Whether this US relief effort is primarily for humanitarian or PR reasons on Obama’s behalf, it serves as a black & white example when compared to the Bush Admin, and the World will take notice.
Whatever Obama’s reasons, at least he’s doing something good. Makes a change. Long way to go yet though.
They would have to be really well-done to overcome the E. coli and other coliforms they are infested with – it would be safer just to pitch them into the compost pile.
Obama is merely allowing the system to work the way it always worked before Rumsfeld took over the DoD. This is the norm, not something special. This is how things are supposed to work, and it is charged against training funds and funds from other agencies, as far as the expenses are concerned.