Defense Personnel Transport Uranium Ore Out of Iraq
Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:16:00 -0500

Major KUDOS to the people of Cheboygan and northern Michigan for participating in a very successful fund raiser on July 3rd. 

NOTE:  If you are in the Madison, WI or Sault Ste Marie, MI areas there will be fund raisers held in those locations on July 19, 2008.  Details will be posted here soon.

From 9and10 News Cheboygan, MI.

From Cheboygan to Afghanistan With Love
Posted: 7/3/2008

Written by American Ranger Charles M. Grist:

I would ask that war veterans of any era never give up, never quit and that they seek help to deal with the memories that seem too painful to endure.

Remember my fellow veterans, when you wore that uniform you were one of the finest citizens and warriors of your generation. You were taught to be strong in the face of adversity, to endure any hardship and to solve whatever problem rose to face you.

You may no longer serve in the active military, but the essence of the warrior is still within you. Never forget your warrior training, your mental strength, that steely resolve and the natural courage that led you to fight alongside your comrades, your buddies and those who were the best friends you will ever have.

You would never quit on your fellow soldiers in combat; do not quit on yourself now. If you need help, please ask for it, but giving up must never be an option...

American Ranger

http://www.americanranger.blogspot.com/

I will always place the mission first. I will never accept defeat. I will never quit.I will never leave a fallen comrade.Warrior EthosAfter I returned from Iraq in late 2004, I was patrolling the streets as a cop in Central Florida. One afternoon, along with other officers, I was dispatched to a shooting. As we arrived at the apartment complex, a man met us and said his room-mate had shot himself.Not exactly sure what awaited us, another officer and I entered the apartment – handguns at the ready – to search the rooms one-by-one. As we reached one bedroom door, there was a note taped above the door handle. With the other officer covering me, I pushed open the door.The young man was lying on his back in bed and blood was splattered across the wall behind his head. One hand was on his chest, but the other was out to his side. Next to that hand was a forty-five automatic handgun. The bullet had entered below his chin and traveled through his head until it exited the top of his skull.Not knowing yet whether we were dealing with a homicide or a suicide, we secured the scene and waited for the detectives to arrive. While we waited, I made a quick visual survey of the apartment and what I found made my heart begin to tighten with sadness. The note on the door was a suicide note from the ex-soldier and that note was also displayed on the computer screen in the man’s room. He was only 24 years old.On the bedroom dresser were several souvenirs from Iraq: old Iraqi money with pictures of Saddam Hussein, photographs of his fellow soldiers in the desert, his Global War on Terror Expeditionary Medal and other special things that only an American G.I. would bring home. On the fireplace mantle in the living room, the young veteran’s helmet sat quietly in its desert-camouflage cover.I have experienced many scenes of death as a police officer, from natural ones to gruesome homicides. Some of these people died because it was simply their time, such as the elderly woman who died at ...

Overdose kills ex-Fort Bliss soldier

In 2003, Dwyer returned to Fort Bliss after serving four months in Iraq with the 3rd Squadron of the 7th Cavalry Regiment. A native of Mount Sinai, N.Y., he had joined the Army as a medic two days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to El Paso Times archives.

Read the rest at AmericanRanger.blogspot.com

Army Times

Sign the guest book at SPC Dwyer's Legacy page

I found this over at Michelle's site. Its from CNN but I like the topic. Check out that 05 'Stang.

This looks like victory.

Ya gotta love it.

.

Do you think we should make Nancy Pelosi step down from
Speaker of the House?

Read this report from Gateway Pundit:


SWAMP POLITICS---

New information reveals that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was indirectly sending messages to the FARC. The Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) is designated as a terrorist group by the US government. Speaker Pelosi was doing this while at the same time she refused to bring a free trade agreement with Colombia up for a vote in the US House. In fact, Pelosi took extraordinary steps to block this trade agreement with America's closest ally in South America.

Cordoba-Pelosi-McGovern
Colombian Sen. Piedad Cordoba (left) is currently under investigation by the Colombian attorney general for ties to the FARC. Cordoba claims that Speaker Nancy Pelosi was sending messages to the FARC terrorists. Cordoba also claimed during FARC negotiations that Pelosi had assigned Rep. Jim McGovern, as the point man. Captured FARC documents confirmed in March that Mr. McGovern had been working with an American go-between, who had been offering the rebels help in undermining Colombia's elected and popular government.

The Wall Street Journal reported on the confiscated FARC documents that implicated Rep. McGovern back in March:

The Reyes hard drive reveals an ardent effort to do business directly with the FARC by Congressman James McGovern (D., Mass.), a leading opponent of the free-trade deal. Mr. McGovern has been working with an American go-between, who has been offering the rebels help in undermining Colombia's elected and popular government.

Mr. McGovern's press office says the Congressman is merely working at the behest of families whose relatives are held as FARC kidnap hostages. However, his go-between's letters reveal more than routine intervention.

Now, today we find out who was directing Rep. McGovern--
Speaker Pelosi!
Mary Anastasia O'Grady at The Wall Street Journal reported:

Last fall, Mr. Chávez and the FARC hatched an audacious plan whereby the Venezuelan would take "proof of life" of Ms. Betancourt to French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris, where the plight of Ms. Betancourt was a cause célèbre. The rebels wrote that Mr. Chávez was sure French pressure for negotiations would cause President Bush to "order Uribe to allow the meeting" between Mr. Chávez and the rebels on Colombian soil, something Mr. Uribe had refused to do. The rebels reported that Mr. Chávez was "super-motivated," because he viewed the rendezvous as a public-relations coup that would give him and the FARC "continental and world renown."

That plan flopped, but Mr. Chavez had other cards up his sleeve. One involved Colombian Sen. Piedad Cordoba, who is currently under investigation by the Colombian attorney general for ties to the FARC. She figures prominently in the captured rebel documents, and is notoriously close to Mr. Chávez.

She met at the Venezuelan presidential palace with FARC leaders last fall. From that meeting the rebels reported that "Piedad says that Chávez has Uribe going crazy. He doesn't know what to do. That Nancy Pelosi helps and is ready to help in the swap [hostages in exchange for captured guerrillas]. That she has designated [U.S. Congressman Jim] McGovern for this."

If the speaker of the House was working with Ms. Cordoba in this scheme, her judgment was more than a little misguided. The rebels write that on a trip to Argentina Ms. Cordoba told them, "It doesn't matter to me the proposal that Sarkozy has made to free Ingrid. Above all, do not liberate Ingrid." In short, why give up such a useful pawn?

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (C), senior FARC rebel commander Ivan Marquez (L) of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and Colombian senator Piedad Cordoba walk at Miraflores Palace in Caracas November 8, 2007. (Reuters)

Don Surber believes it is time someone reined the Queen Bee in.
Karl at Protein Wisdom notes that this is far from the first time that democrats have cozied up to the communists.

Previously:
Captured FARC Documents Link Democrats to Terror Group
Busted!... Democratic Point Man on Colombia Caught Dealing With FARC
Interpol Confirms Authenticity Of Raul Reyes's Computer Files
Interpol Confirms: US Democrat Was Secretly Working With FARC
MEDIA IGNORES Rep. McGovern Was Secretly Communicating With FARC
FARC Connections to German Leftists & US Democrats Exposed
Will the Colombian Hostage Rescue Expose the Democrat's Links to FARC?


Again, do you think we should remove Nancy Pelosi
from her position of Speaker of the House?


FARK = "Terrorist Organization"
not a "revolutionary" force
.
.
.

I have a dear friend who has a long-time friend from Belgium.  EVERY significant holiday related to the military, and often other holidays, he sends a message from Belgium.  Here is his 4th of July message for 2008.  What a shame more Americans don't have the same feeling.

Cross Posted - Pat Dollard - Young Americans  H/T to Lftbhndagn

Washington Post
Sunday, July 6, 2008

In the six-and-a-half years that the U.S. government has been fingerprinting insurgents, detainees and ordinary people in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Horn of Africa, hundreds have turned out to share an unexpected background, FBI and military officials said. They have criminal arrest records in the United States.

There was the suspected militant fleeing Somalia who had been arrested on a drug charge in New Jersey. And the man stopped at a checkpoint in Tikrit who claimed to be a dirt farmer but had 11 felony charges in the United States, including assault with a deadly weapon.

The records suggest that potential enemies abroad know a great deal about the United States because many of them have lived here, officials said. The matches also reflect the power of sharing data across agencies and even countries, data that links an identity to a distinguishing human characteristic such as a fingerprint.

“I found the number stunning,” said Frances Fragos Townsend, a security consultant and former assistant to the president for homeland security. “It suggested to me that this was going to give us far greater insight into the relationships between individuals fighting against U.S. forces in the theater and potential U.S. cells or support networks here in the United States.”

The fingerprinting of detainees overseas began as ad-hoc FBI and U.S. military efforts shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It has since grown into a government-wide push to build the world’s largest database of known or suspected terrorist fingerprints. The effort is being boosted by a presidential directive signed June 5, which gave the U.S. attorney general and other cabinet officials 90 days to come up with a plan to expand the use of biometrics by, among other things, recommending categories of people to be screened beyond “known or suspected” terrorists.

Fingerprints are being beamed in via satellite from places as far-flung as the jungles of Zamboanga in the southern Philippines; Bogota, Colombia; Iraq; and Afghanistan. Other allies, such as Sweden, have contributed prints. The database can be queried by U.S. government agencies and by other countries through Interpol, the international police agency.

Civil libertarians have raised concerns about whether people on the watch lists have been appropriately determined to be terrorists, a process that senior government officials acknowledge is an art, not a science.

Large-scale identity systems “can raise serious privacy concerns, if not singly, then jointly and severally,” said a 2007 study by the Defense Science Board Task Force on Defense Biometrics. The ability “to cross reference and draw new, previously unimagined, inferences,” is a boon for the government and the bane of privacy advocates, it said.

An FBI Mission

The effort, officials say, is bearing fruit.

“The bottom line is we’re locking people up,” said Thomas E. Bush III, FBI assistant director of the Criminal Justice Information Services division. “Stopping people coming into this country. Identifying IED-makers in a way never done before. That’s the beauty of this whole data-sharing effort. We’re pushing our borders back.”

In December 2001, an FBI team was sent on an unusual mission to Afghanistan. The U.S. military had launched a wave of airstrikes aimed at killing or capturing al Qaeda fighters and their Taliban hosts. The FBI team was to fingerprint and interview foreign fighters as if they were being booked at a police station.

The team, led by Paul Shannon, a veteran FBI agent embedded with U.S. special forces, traveled to the combat zone toting briefcases outfitted with printer’s ink, hand rollers and paper cards. The agents worked in Kandahar and Kabul. They traversed the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. They hand-carried the fingerprint records from Afghanistan to Clarksburg, W.Va., home to the FBI’s criminal biometric database.

As they analyzed the results, they were surprised to learn that one out of every 100 detainees was already in the FBI’s database for arrests. Many arrests were for drunken driving, passing bad checks and traffic violations, FBI officials said.

“Frankly I was surprised that we were getting those kind of hits at all,” recalled Townsend, who left government in January. They identified “a potential vulnerability” to national security the government had not fully appreciated, she said.

The people being fingerprinted had come from the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan. They were mostly in their 20s, Shannon recalled. “One of the things we learned is we were dealing with relatively young guys who were very committed and what they would openly tell you is that when they got out they were going back to jihad,” he said. “They’d already made this commitment.”

One of the first men fingerprinted by the FBI team was a fighter who claimed he was in Afghanistan to learn the ancient art of falconry. But a fingerprint check showed that in August 2001 he had been turned away from Orlando International Airport by an immigration official who thought he might overstay his visa. Mohamed al Kahtani would later be named by the Sept. 11 Commission as someone who allegedly had sought to participate in hijackings. He currently is in custody at Guantanamo Bay.

Similarly, in 2004, an FBI team choppered to a remote desert camp on the Iraq-Iran border, home to the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), whose aim is to overthrow the Iranian government. The MEK lead an austere lifestyle in which men are segregated from women and material goods are renounced. The U.S. State Department considers the organization to be a terrorist group.

The FBI team fingerprinted 3,800 fighters. More than 40, Shannon said, had previous criminal records in the agency’s database.

While the FBI was busy collecting fingerprints, the military was setting up its own biometrics database, adding in iris and facial data as well. By October, the two organizations agreed to collaborate, running queries through both systems. The very first match was on the man who claimed to be a poor dirt farmer. Among his many charges were misdemeanors for theft and public drunkenness in Chicago and Utah, a criminal record that ran from 1993 to 2001, said Herb Richardson, who serves as operations manager for the military’s Automated Biometric Identification System under a contract with Ideal Innovations of Arlington.

Many of those with U.S. arrest records had come to the United States to study, said former Criminal Justice Information Services head Michael Kirkpatrick, who led the FBI effort to use biometrics in counterterrorism after Sept. 11. “It suggests there was some familiarity with Western culture, the United States specifically, and for whatever reason they did not agree with that culture,” he said. “Either they became disaffected or put up with it, and then they went overseas.”

Errors in matching, though rare, have occurred. In a noted 2004 case, Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield was erroneously named as a suspect in the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people. FBI lab analysts matched a print lifted from a plastic bag at the crime scene to his fingerprints that were stored in the FBI’s criminal database because of a 1985 arrest for auto burglary when he was a teenager. The charge had been dismissed. After a critical Justice Department Inspector General audit, the FBI made fixes in its system. A recent inspector general report found the FBI fingerprint matching to be generally accurate.

Worries About Watch List

Civil libertarians, however, worry that the systems are not transparent enough for outsiders to tell how the government decides who belongs on a watch list and how that information is handled.

“The day when the federal government can tell people the basis they’ve been put on the watch list is the day we can have more confidence in biometric identification,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Vetting the data is the job of analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center, an office park-like complex in McLean run by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Analysts there scour intelligence reports to create the master international terrorist watch list.

“You cannot draw a bright red line and say that’s a terrorist, this person isn’t,” said Russ Travers, an NCTC deputy director. “If somebody swears allegiance to Bin Laden, that’s an easy case. If somebody goes to a terrorist training camp, that’s probably an easy case. What if a person goes to a camp and decides, ‘I don’t want to go to a camp, I want to go home.’ Where do you draw the line?”

Investigators are working on ever more sophisticated ways to evaluate the data. Analysts at the Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center in Charlottesville, for instance, use software to scrutinize intelligence reports from sources such as electronic surveillance and informants. They then link the information to a person’s biographic and biometric data, and look for relationships that might detect terrorists and plots.

For example, a roadside bomb may explode and a patrol may fingerprint bystanders because insurgents have been known to remain at the scene to observe the results of their work. Prints also can be lifted off tiny fragments of exploded bombs, said military officials and contractors involved in the work.

Analysts are not just trying to identify the prints on the bomb. They want to find out who the bomb-carrier associates with. Who he calls. Who calls him. That could lead to the higher-level operatives who planned and financed attacks.

Already, fingerprints lifted off a bomb fragment have been linked to people trying to enter the United States, they said.

In a separate data-sharing program, 365 Iraqis who have applied to the Department of Homeland Security for refugee status have been denied because their fingerprints turned up in the Defense Department’s database of known or suspected terrorists, Richardson said.

If Iraq and Afghanistan were a proving ground of sorts for biometric watch-listing, the U.S. government is moving quickly to try to build a domestic version. Since September 2006, Homeland Security and the FBI have been operating a pilot program in which police officers in Boston, Dallas and Houston run prints of arrestees against a Homeland Security database of immigration law violators and a State Department database of people refused visas. Federal job applicants’ prints also are run against the databases. To date, some 500 people have been found in the database and thus are of interest to Homeland Security officials.

Steve Nixon, a director at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said the effort is key to national security.

“When we look at the road and the challenges, globalization and the spread of technology has empowered small groups of individuals, bad guys, to be more powerful than at any other time in history,” he said. “We have to know who these people are when we encounter them. A lot of what we’re doing in intelligence now is trying to identify a person. Biometrics is a key element of that.”

Kandigal Village Celebrates Girls’ School

The first girls’ school in Kandigal Village celebrated an opening ceremony with elders from all over the river valley June 14, in Konar Province, Afghanistan.

The new $200,000, 400-seat Kandigal Girls School was funded by the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, also known as Task Force Rock.

Gov. Hajji Sayed Wahidi, Konar, and a number of other Konar provincial government officials were joined by Lt. Col. William Ostlund, Task Force Rock commander, and Navy Cmdr. Daniel W. Dwyer, Konar Provincial Reconstruction Team commander.

“Girls schools are the first priority for the government because unfortunately when Afghanistan was in the hands of the Taliban, the women were kept in the dark, and not allowed to come out of their homes for learning,” said Wahidi. “The women are in a very bad situation; therefore we believe now we need to do more for women, we should have some positive discrimination to increase activities for women.”

The Kandigal Girls School is a community success story, said Dwyer. The school was only possible through the cooperation of the Ministry of Education, the district and provincial government, the elders, and the Coalition forces working together.

“The community recognized and stated its number one priority for Kandigal Village was a girls school,” said Dwyer. “The government is addressing the needs of the people.”

Five schools are currently under construction in Konar province, and in the next several months the provincial government plans to build 15 more, according to Wahidi.

“We always try to make more facilities for girls in Konar province, we have 140,000 students going to school, and fortunately 40,000 are girls,” said Wahidi. “The number is still not bad, but I think if you provide the facilities, the number of girls and boys will be [50 percent of each].”

The Konar PRT, in conjunction with the ministry of education, will continue to fund the construction of new schools throughout the province, according to Dwyer.

“Konar province has 315 schools with only 115 buildings,” said Dwyer. “The Konar PRT will fund schools only along roads with already existing locations, whether it is a tarp, tent, or open air school.”

“A year ago Kandigal District had only two schools,” said Army Capt. Louis B. Frketic, with Headquarters and Headquarters Company. “The schools consisted of two teachers, and a collection of children sitting under trees in the village center.”

“Afghan’s believe when you send a child to school, the education process ‘“the tailm”’ is a cleansing process,” said Frketic. “Where you wash away all the bad things from the children’s minds, you wipe away the 30 years of fighting from their minds.”

According to Frketic, building schools is only part of a grander scheme. The coalition forces are also building roads, power stations, health clinics, pipe schemes, bridges, and wells, in support of the Afghan government.

U.S. Dept. of State representative Alison Blosser, spoke on behalf of the Konar PRT, and in their native language, Pashtu. She addressed the elders during the celebration ceremony about the importance of women’s education. It is a good step for the Afghans to be educating Konar’s future women doctors and provincial council members, she said.

“The Kandigal Girls School celebration was actually a fantastic event,” said Blosser. “The bulk of the time was the Afghanistan government officials speaking about the importance of community participation in government, and they really stole the show.”

According to Blosser, Kandigal Village is a strategic village because it sits between two decisive valleys, the Korengal Valley and the Pech Valley. Now that coalition forces have built strong relations with the elders by giving them something to develop their children, and develop their future.

“The significance of Kandigal Village is that it sits at the mouth of the Korengal Valley, and the Korengal Valley is the place in Konar province where probably our toughest fight has been for the last five years,” said Blosser. “One important thing about the Kandigal Girls School is over the past two years we’ve been trying to gain the trust and confidence of the Korengalis, and what we have been trying to do in Kandigal Village is demonstrate all the benefits development can bring.”

DVIDS
By Spc. Gregory J. Argentieri
173rd Airborne Brigade Public Affairs

If stupid were painful, Reid, Pelosi, Durbin, Waters, et al, would make the doctor shopping Rush was accused of look like a walk through a five & dime. There'd be a shortage of "hillbilly heroin", oxycontin, the stock price of drug manufacturers would sky rocket, addicts would marching in the streets demanding that the dhimmicrat Congress share.

Stupid should also be ugly. That way, we wouldn't have to wait for the soundbites to determine who was stupid and who wasn't. Oh wait a minute, have you seen Reid lately?

Family Security Matters writer Raymond Kraft has piece up this morning about Reid's YouTube performance. He puts the facts about life expectancy in our time up against the life expectancy of just 80 years ago, before we really became an oil-consuming nation. It's interesting to say the least.

Nevada Senator Harry Reid gave a June 30 interview, now famous on YouTube, in which he somberly intones, "Coal makes us sick. Oil makes us sick. And this global warming is ruining our country. It's ruining the world." Oil and coal, of course, are all natural and organic, created deep in the womb of Mother Earth by Gaia herself, a point largely lost on the Enviromentalists and other Democrats infatuated with all things natural and organic.

Then there is another inconvenient truth Harry Reid hasn't noticed.

In the last hundred years, while we have been getting sicker and sicker from oil and coal, life expectancy in the world and in the US has doubled. Life expectancies in the world "before coal, before oil," were much shorter than now. In the age of Classical Greece and Rome, 1,500 to 2,500 years ago, and in Medieval Britain, 500 to 1,000 years ago, life expectancy was just 20-30 years.By 1900 life expectancy had risen to 30-40 years, and global life expectancy today is 78 years, three times as long as just two hundred years ago.In the US, life expectancy for men was 38 years in 1900, and 75 years in 2004. For women, life expectancy was 40 yearsin 1900, 80 years in 2004.

The malevolent Internal Combustion Engine, which Al Gore in his first book,"Earth in the Balance", declares must be abolished, and electric power plants burning coal and natural gas, and the gravest of all possible dangers, uranium and nuclear power, have freed man from the brutal physical labor that was once the common lot. There is an irrefutable correlation between the burning of more coal and more oil, and the doubling of global life expectancy in just 100 years.

In the last century, as we have been dying like flies from the evils of oil, coal, asbestos, lead paint and lead fillings, pesticides on our food, nuclear waste, carbon dioxide, Alar on apples, salmonella on tomatoes,asthma, rising sea levels, global cooling, global warming, climate change,electrical fields from power lines that cause leukemia, radiation from cell phones causing cancer in our brains, sugar, Nutrasweet,transfatty acids,vaccines, antibiotics, mad cow disease, the bird flu virus, fast food,and all the other horrors the media keep breathlessly warning us of, our life expectancy has doubled.

And our global temperature today is about 0.2 degrees warmer than during the Medieval Warm Period, a thousand years ago, and at least a full degree cooler than during the Holocene Optimum, eight thousand years ago. For a beautiful illustration of this, see http://www.globalwarmingart.com/. Harry Reid is plainly and conspicuously, openly and obviously ignorant of long-term climate trends, as the long-term climate trend for the last 8,000 years has been slowly cooling.

So Harry, once again, you are way off base in your doomsday prognostications. At least you provide us with some comic relief, and for that, you have the thanks of a grateful nation. 

One thing about this article that may upset you, if you're a male of the species, is that women are still gonna outlive us.

There's one other thing about "stupid" you should know: We live in the greatest country that ever existed on this planet in recorded history. We have medical miracles performed every day in this country. You can walk into a plastic surgeons' office and order a custom set of tits, but you can't fix stupid.