Word: refuel
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...strolled into the Oval Office, Bush was concentrating on the logistics of getting the crew home. The difficult diplomacy of selling the Chinese on an artfully limited U.S. apology was, thankfully, behind him. He could begin chewing over simpler problems. How long would it take to refuel the pickup plane in China? What would be the flight path? How long would the plane be on the ground? "He was very aware that we had to be careful in what we said while the crew was still on the ground," says senior aide Dan Bartlett...
...responsible for the dastardly attack on the U.S.S. Cole [WORLD, Oct. 23]? You do not have to conduct months and years of expensive investigations. It is the Administration, which decided to make the U.S. Navy refuel its vessels at dangerous ports in order to promote friendly political relations with hostile countries. It is also the Department of Defense, which allowed valuable assets of this country to go into harm's way without proper security precautions. And it is the captain of the Cole, who did not order a top-level security zone around his vessel to see that all approaching...
...Persian Gulf, where it would enforce the international oil embargo against Iraq, had upgraded the ship's Threatcon to "bravo," the Navy's second-highest state of alert. So as the Cole steamed into Aden harbor just before noon, maneuvering close to an offshore mooring station where it would refuel, crew members were on deck, armed and at attention. But they missed the threat. Several small boats approached to assist in attaching the Cole's thick 5-in. lines to fixed buoys. At 12:15, a small harbor boat mingling among the moorers pulled alongside. Two men stood upright...
...week's attack could have taken place offered little cause for comfort. The size of the blast, the perpetrators' ability to conceal the bomb and their advance knowledge of the arrival of the Cole--the ship's commanders notified Yemeni authorities 10 days before last Thursday that it would refuel in Aden--suggest that the attack was plotted weeks, even months, in advance. Once it pulled into Aden, the ship was highly vulnerable--to the bevy of small craft mingling around it, to the port authorities who had dispatched the moorers, to anyone with the cleverness and forethought to plan...
...recent years the U.S. has sought to improve ties with Yemen, hoping to pressure the government to defuse terrorist cells, draw the country away from its sometime ally Saddam Hussein and gain a foothold at the tip of the Saudi peninsula. Sending Navy ships to refuel in Yemen ports made strategic sense in that regard. "[Diplomacy] was at the heart of the motivation," Admiral Clark said last week. But the diplomacy outstripped the security. Crawling with terrorists who see the U.S. as invaders on the peninsula and protected only by a weak central government located 200 miles to the north...