On taking a ship with paintball guns

Aviation Week has a hard-headed comment on the Israeli landing on that Turkish ferry--or perhaps I should say, on the day Israeli took the bait the Turks and Gazans had laid for it. In particular, the writer gives a vivid description of the initial drop, and one you're unlike to hear on CNN:

As each commando, armed only with paint guns, rappelled down the from a helicopter, he was immediately besieged by a violent crowd, beaten, stabbed and assaulted with flying objects. Some were pushed down into the hold and stripped of their anti-flak vests first. Only when reinforcements boarded the ship were weapons used to disperse the furious chaos, which raged uncontrolled aboard the ship's upper and lower decks.

Paint guns!  It's easy to second-guess men in combat (because that's what they were in, armed only with toys), so let's just say that the vaunted Israeli intelligence service seems to have dropped the paint-ball on this one. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford