The following article is taken from OnPoint whose writers highlighted this chapter from James Brady’s latest book.  It is well worth the read.Todd

“Why Marines Fight”

11-16-2007, 08:26 AM • by ON Point

Not everything I write has to do with Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan; today’s feature article contains excerpts from James Brady (Parade Magazine, former Marine, and Bronze Star awardee in Korea ) newest book.U.S. Marines are known the world over as among the most dedicated and courageous soldiers ever to have engaged in battle. Author James Brady, who is regarded as a hero by many who have donned the uniform, explains what makes Marines so tough in “Why Marines Fight.” Here are excerpts:Chapter 1Hear them, listen to the voices: These are the Marines, the hard men who fight our wars, unscripted and always honest.Except, of course, when we lie.Half a dozen wars ago, in France, on June 2 of 1918, Marine gunnery sergeant Dan Daly stepped out in front of the 4th Brigade of Marines, mustered for another bloody frontal assault on the massed machine guns of the Germans that had been murderously sweeping the wheat fields at Belleau Wood. Death awaited. And the men, understandably, seemed reluctant to resume the attack. But old gunnies like Daly aren’t notable for coddling the troops, for issuing polite invitations, and Dan was having none of it. Nor was he much for inflated oratory or patriotic flourish. Instead, in what some remember as a profane, contemptuous snarl, and loudly, Gunnery Sergeant Daly demanded of his hesitant Marines: “Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?”Is that why we fight? Because we’re cussed at and shamed into it? Was that what motivated the men of the 4th Brigade in 1918 who went into the deadly wheat field? Do today’s Marines who take out combat patrols in Anbar Province and hunt the Taliban somewhere west of the Khyber have the same motivations as Dan Daly’s men? Or the Marines who once waded the bloody lagoon for General Howland M. “Howlin’ Mad” Smith at Tarawa, scaled Mount Suribachi, defied the Japanese at Wake Island, fought the Chinese in the snows of North Korea, and fought and died on the Perfume River at Hue and in a thousand other bloody places?The Marines in this book answer those questions; each in his own way attempts to say why we are drawn to the guns.Dan Daly had his methods: Curse the sons of bitches and lead them into the field. The men were impressed, by the man if not by his shouting, knowing Daly as a legend, with two Medals of Honor already. But was Daly’s leadership and their own training all it took for Marines to get up and run at the machine guns of Belleau Wood? It became a question I kept asking.General Jim Jones, tall and tough, a former commandant and more recently NATO commander, has a mantra: “Sergeants run the Marine Corps,” he told me once on a rainswept drive from Quantico to the Pentagon. Jones wasn’t just blowing smoke, keeping up noncom morale when he said that. He was attempting to tell me what he believed differentiates the Marine Corps from other military arms. Without its seemingly inexhaustible supply of good, tough sergeants, the Marine Corps would be nothing more than a smaller version of the army. Most Marines, officers or enlisted, would agree. They’ve had their own Dan Dalys. We all have.I found mine, thirty-three years after Daly, in a North Korean winter on a snowy ridgeline, the senior NCOs of Dog Company, a couple of blue-collar Marine lifers, hard men from the South Pacific and up through the ranks, one hard-earned noncommissioned stripe after another, who tutored me about war, not off their college diplomas but out of their own vast experience of service and combat, and incidentally about life, women, and other fascinating matters. These were the professionals; I was the amateur learning from them, not in any classroom but in a quite deadly field.Stoneking, the platoon sergeant, was a big, rawboned Oklahoman maybe twenty-eight or twenty-nine, who drove a bootlegger’s truck back home and was married to an attractive brunette WAVE who sent him erotic photos of herself. He had been a Marine eight or nine years, had fought the Japanese, and was in the bad Korea fighting. The men knew that if it came to that, he would (against the rules) strip his blouse and fight another enlisted man who was giving him angst. Stoneking was a cold, distant man with little regard for me or for most people (I don’t believe he really gave a shit about anyone), although for forty-six consecutive nights that winter he and I slept head to toe in our sleeping bags in a stinking, six-by-eight-foot bunker with a log-and-sandbagged roof so low it had to be crawled into and out of. That miserable hole was where we lived like animals and where from Stoneking I began to learn what it was to be and to lead Marines. Once when I’d been in a shooting and crawled back late that night into our bunker to tell about it, Stoneking wasn’t much impressed. “So you got yourself into a firefight,” he remarked, and rolled against the dirt wall to get back to sleep. “Yeah,” I said deflated, and got into my own sleeping bag.A pivotal event in my young life meant nothing to a hard case like Stoney.The right guide, our platoon’s ranking number three, was the more affable Sergeant Wooten.We weren’t supposed to keep diaries (in case we were captured or the damned things were found on our bodies) but I wanted one day to work on newspapers and write about people and things, so, to keep a record and get around the diary rule, I wrote long letters home to family and girlfriends for them to save. The mail back then wasn’t censored. Wooten might occasionally have composed a postcard, and little more, but he enjoyed watching me scribble away, marveled at my industry. “You are a cack-ter, suh.” Cack-ter being his pronunciation of “character,” in Wooten’s mind a compliment. He was leagues less surly than Stoney, so I occasionally lured him into deep, Socratic conversation.“It ain’t much of a war, Lieutenant,” Wooten would concede, having listened to me blather on, and then patiently explaining his own philosophy to a young replacement officer, “but it’s the only war we got.” He had other, maturely and placidly thought out commentaries on life and the fates, remarking with sly, rural witticisms on the nightly firefights and their bloody casualty rolls, “Sometimes you eat the bear / sometimes the bear eats you.” Or declaring as an unexpected salvo of enemy shells slammed into the ridgeline, scattering the men in dusty, ear-splitting, and too-often lethal chaos, sending us diving into holes amid incongruous laughter, “There ain’t been such excitement since the pigs ate my little brother.”You rarely heard a line like that back in Brooklyn.I ended up loving these men, as chill, as caustic, or as odd as they may first have seemed when I got to the war, an innocent who had never heard the bullets sing, had never fought, who yet, by the fluke of education and rank, was now anointed the commanding officer of hardened veterans of such eminence and stature. Maybe I could better explain about such men and why Marines fight and generally fight so well if only I were able to tell you fully and precisely about combat as my old-timers knew it, and how it really was. And how I would have to learn it.It’s difficult unless you’ve been there.War is a strange country, violent and often beautiful at the same time, with its own folklore and recorded history, its heroes and villains. It is as well a profession, strange and sad, poorly paid but highly specialized. Cruel, too. War is very cruel. And surprising, in that it can be incredibly thrilling and rewarding, though not for everyone. There is a sort of complicated ritual to it, a freemasonry, a violent priesthood. Only fighting men are qualified to exchange the secret fraternal handshake, the mythic nod and wink of understanding.Not all men are meant to fight in wars and fewer still do it well. Others, revolted by its horrors, its sorrows and pity, yet hold dear its memories, the camaraderie, its occasional joys. I have even heard men admit, without shame and rather proudly, “I love this shit,” speaking candidly about war and their strange passion for it. There are such Marines, plenty of them, men hooked on combat. They love it the way men love a woman in a relationship they suspect will end badly. Others are honest enough to admit they hate and fear it but go anyway. Their reasons may be strangely inspiring, or murky, puzzling.A few Marines can’t or won’t go to the battle, and they don’t last long, not in the infantry, not in the line outfits. They are transferred out to someplace less. They may still be fine men but they are no longer Marines.I never knew better, truer men than in the rifle company ranks in which I served, bold and resourceful Americans, beautiful men in a violent life. What each of them was and did later at home and at peace, having let slip the leash of discipline, I can’t always say. But in combat such men, even the rogues and rare scoundrels, were magnificent, hard men living in risky places. In this book, I write about some of them. Forget my commentary; hear the Marines, listen to their voices.The third platoon’s right guide, Sergeant Wooten, that salty career man, was a crafty rifleman who knew a little about demolitions. He once volunteered in North Korea to blow a Fox Company Marine’s body out of the ice of a frozen mountain stream; using too heavy a charge, he got the guy out, but in two pieces. When he came back to us at Dog Company he looked terrible, like a man after an all-night drunk. “You okay, Wooten?” “No, sir, I ain’t.After I got that boy out that way, I threw up on the spot.” A three-striper who had fought the damned Japanese for three years, all across the Pacific, Wooten took a drink. He’d been up and down the noncommissioned ranks, as high as gunnery sergeant and then broken back to buck sergeant, a lean, leathery, drawling rustic maybe fifteen years older than I was and lots wiser. Sometimes Wooten lost patience with those who were critical of the Korean War we were then fighting. He was pretty much enjoying himself and thought those people ought to shut the hell up and cut the bitching. As, giving me that flat-mouthed grin of his, Wooten declared with professional regret: “It’s the only war we got.”Excerpted from “Why Marines Fight” by James Brady © 2007 James Brady. All rights reserved. Excerpted with permission of St. Martin’s Press. 

In addition to the Emerald City writer, a leading UK military leader has come out against President Bush’s post-war plans for Iraq. No surprise here.

TC

Former Head of U.K. Army: U.S. Iraq Policy ‘Intellectually Bankrupt’

Saturday , September 01, 2007

The head of the British Army during the invasion of Iraq has condemned America’s postwar policy in the country as “intellectually bankrupt” and “very short-sighted”.

In an unprecedented attack, General Sir Mike Jackson, former Chief of the General Staff, said that insufficient troops were deployed to control the country after Saddam Hussein’s downfall, and he criticised the decision to disband the Iraqi Army and security forces.

Click here to read the story from the Times of London.

Sir Mike blamed Donald Rumsfeld, the former US Defense Secretary, for much of the fiasco and said that his claims that American forces “don’t do nation-building” were “nonsensical”.

He criticised the Bush Administration for handing control of postwar Iraq to the Pentagon, and claimed that Mr Rumsfeld discarded detailed plans for post-conflict administration that had been drawn up by the State Department. “All the planning went to waste,” he said. Mr Rumsfeld, who he labelled “intellectually bankrupt”, was “one of the most responsible for the current situation in Iraq”.

Sir Mike added that Washington relied too much on military power rather than nation-building and diplomacy in fighting global terrorism.

His outspoken attack, made in his forthcoming autobiography Soldier and reported in The Daily Telegraph, highlights the tension between British commanders and the Pentagon in the run-up to war and its aftermath in 2003. It is likely further to inflame tensions between Britain and the US over the war.

One of the biggest farces in recent memory is the war no drugs, particularly the war on drugs in Muslim states and enclaves.

As recently as the mid to late nineties, our government was well aware of the connectedness of Muslim drug crops being used to finance radical Jihadists and their Islamofascist attacks throughout the Western world. Even before we sent the US Armed Forces into Kosovo to protect the Muslims against the so-called evil Serbs, the pipeline of dope was well established between Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina, with the follow-on pipeline to the most radical Islamic states.

Today, the drug-financed Jihadist terror continues unabated in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as providing financing for Al Qaeda’s far-flung operations throughout the world. Thus, from the President on down, the American people are consistently lied to with the assistance of the DEA, the American military, and the main stream media (MSM) - including the New York Times whose article on the Taliban narco operation appears below.

Until our political structure is accountable to the people, its subordinate entities (e.g., the DEA, US military, State Department, etc.), and the MSM will continue to perpetuate the lies that Muslims (1) worship the same God as Christians, (2) live alcohol and drug-free lives, (3) are overwhelmingly “moderate,” and (4) the Jihadists rely on rich financiers (e.g. bin Laden) to support their worldwide network of terror. The truth is far different and our federal government knows it.

August 26, 2007

Taliban Raise Poppy Production to a Record Again

By DAVID ROHDE

LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan, Aug. 25 — Afghanistan produced record levels of opium in 2007 for the second straight year, led by a staggering 45 percent increase in the Taliban stronghold of Helmand Province, according to a new United Nations survey to be released Monday.

The report is likely to touch off renewed debate about the United States’ $600 million counternarcotics program in Afghanistan, which has been hampered by security challenges and endemic corruption within the Afghan government.

“I think it is safe to say that we should be looking for a new strategy,” said William B. Wood, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, commenting on the report’s overall findings. “And I think that we are finding one.”

Mr. Wood said the current American programs for eradication, interdiction and alternative livelihoods should be intensified, but he added that ground spraying poppy crops with herbicide remained “a possibility.” Afghan and British officials have opposed spraying, saying it would drive farmers into the arms of the Taliban.

While the report found that opium production dropped in northern Afghanistan, Western officials familiar with the assessment said, cultivation rose in the south, where Taliban insurgents urge farmers to grow poppies.

Although common farmers make comparatively little from the trade, opium is a major source of financing for the Taliban, who gain public support by protecting farmers’ fields from eradication, according to American officials. They also receive a cut of the trade from traffickers they protect.

In Taliban-controlled areas, traffickers have opened more labs that process raw opium into heroin, vastly increasing its value. The number of drug labs in Helmand rose to roughly 50 from 30 the year before, and about 16 metric tons of chemicals used in heroin production have been confiscated this year.

The Western officials said countrywide production had increased from 2006 to 2007, but they did not know the final United Nations figure. They estimated a countrywide increase of 10 to 30 percent.

The new survey showed positive signs as well, officials said.

The sharp drop in poppy production in the north is likely to make this year’s countrywide increase smaller than the growth in 2006. Last year, a 160 percent increase in Helmand’s opium crop fueled a 50 percent nationwide increase. Afghanistan produced a record 6,100 metric tons of opium poppies last year, 92 percent of the world’s supply.

Here in Helmand, the breadth of the poppy trade is staggering. A sparsely populated desert province twice the size of Maryland, Helmand produces more narcotics than any country on earth, including Myanmar, Morocco and Colombia. Rampant poverty, corruption among local officials, a Taliban resurgence and spreading lawlessness have turned the province into a narcotics juggernaut.

Poppy prices that are 10 times higher than those for wheat have so warped the local economy that some farmhands refused to take jobs harvesting legal crops this year, local farmers said. And farmers dismiss the threat of eradication, arguing that so many local officials are involved in the poppy trade that a significant clearing of crops will never be done.

American and British officials say they have a long-term strategy to curb poppy production. About 7,000 British troops and Afghan security forces are gradually extending the government’s authority in some areas, they said. The British government is spending $60 million to promote legal crops in the province, and the United States Agency for International Development is mounting a $160 million alternative livelihoods program across southern Afghanistan, most of it in Helmand.

Loren Stoddard, director of the aid agency’s agriculture program in Afghanistan, cited American-financed agricultural fairs, the introduction of high-paying legal crops and the planned construction of a new industrial park and airport as evidence that alternatives were being created.

Mr. Stoddard, who helped Wal-Mart move into Central America in his previous posting, predicted that poppy production had become so prolific that the opium market was flooded and prices were starting to drop. “It seems likely they’ll have a rough year this year,” he said, referring to the poppy farmers. “Labor prices are up and poppy prices are down. I think they’re going to be looking for new things.”

On Wednesday, Mr. Stoddard and Rory Donohoe, the director of the American development agency’s Alternative Livelihoods program in southern Afghanistan, attended the first “Helmand Agricultural Festival.” The $300,000 American-financed gathering in Lashkar Gah was an odd cross between a Midwestern county fair and a Central Asian bazaar, devised to show Afghans an alternative to poppies.

Under a scorching sun, thousands of Afghan men meandered among booths describing fish farms, the dairy business and drip-irrigation systems. A generator, cow and goat were raffled off. Wizened elders sat on carpets and sipped green tea. Some wealthy farmers seemed interested. Others seemed keen to attend what they saw as a picnic.

When Mr. Stoddard and Mr. Donohoe arrived, they walked through the festival surrounded by a three-man British and Australian security team armed with assault rifles. “Who won the cow? Who won the cow?” shouted Mr. Stoddard, 38, a burly former food broker from Provo, Utah. “Was it a girl or a guy?”

After Afghans began dancing to traditional drum and flute music, Mr. Donohoe, 29, from San Francisco, briefly joined them.

Some Afghans praised the fair’s alternatives crops. Others said only the rich could afford them. Haji Abdul Gafar, 28, a wealthy landowner, expressed interest in some of the new ideas.

Saber Gul, a 40-year-old laborer, said he was too poor to take advantage. “For those who have livestock and land, they can,” he said. “For us, the poor people, there is nothing.”

Local officials said all the development programs would fail without improved security.

Assadullah Wafa, Helmand’s governor, said four of Helmand’s 13 districts were under Taliban control. Other officials put the number at six.

Mr. Wafa, who eradicated far fewer acres than the governor of neighboring Kandahar Province, promised to improve eradication in Helmand next year. He also called for Western countries to decrease the demand for heroin.

“The world is focusing on the production side, not the buying side,” he said.

The day after the agricultural fair, Mr. Stoddard and Mr. Donohoe gave a tour of a $3 million American project to clear a former Soviet airbase on the outskirts of town and turn it into an industrial park and civilian airport.

Standing near rusting Soviet fuel tanks, the two men described how pomegranates, a delicacy in Helmand for centuries, would be flown out to growing markets in India and Dubai. Animal feed would be produced from a local mill, marble cut and polished for construction.

“Once we get this air cargo thing going,” Mr. Stoddard said, “it will open up the whole south.”

That afternoon, they showed off a pilot program for growing chili peppers on contract for a company in Dubai. “These kinds of partnerships with private companies are what we want here,” said Mr. Donohoe, who has a Master’s in Business Administration from Georgetown University. “We’ll let the market drive it.”

As the Americans toured the farm, they were guarded by eight Afghans and three British and Australian guards. The farm itself had received guards after local villagers began sneaking in at night and stealing produce. Twenty-four hours a day, 24 Afghan men with assault rifles staff six guard posts that ring the farm, safeguarding chili peppers and other produce.

“Some people would say that security is so bad that you can’t do anything,” Mr. Donohoe said. “But we do it.”

Mr. Wafa, though, called the American reconstruction effort too small and “low quality.”

“There is a proverb in Afghanistan,” he said. “By one flower we cannot mark spring.”

Many “patriotic” Americans do not see the reality of war. Death is sanitized and the wounded are hidden from public view. In addition to the physical scars, the mental and emotional scars can far out live the horror resulting from the body’s wounds. In fact, the traumatic stress nearly all combat veterans must eventually deal with creates lasting wounds to the soul - the mind, will, and emotions. Often these scars of the soul are so debilitating, a veteran never returns from a war.

In today’s New York Times, there is an article in the Art Review section that portrays the very REAL face of war. Our prayers go out to these veterans, their families, and for the country that found it necessary that these young men and women sacrifice so much at such a young age.

The Moderator

August 22, 2007

Art Review | Nina Berman

Words Unspoken Are Rendered on War’s Faces

By HOLLAND COTTER

One of the more shocking photographs to emerge from the current Iraq war was taken last year in a rural farm town in the American Midwest. It’s a studio portrait by the New York photographer Nina Berman of a young Illinois couple on their wedding day.

The bride, Renee Kline, 21, is dressed in a traditional white gown and holds a bouquet of scarlet flowers. The groom, Ty Ziegel, 24, a former Marine sergeant, wears his dress uniform, decorated with combat medals, including a Purple Heart. Her expression is unsmiling, maybe grave. His, as he looks toward her, is hard to read: his dead-white face is all but featureless, with no nose and no chin, as blank as a pullover mask.

Two years earlier, while in Iraq as a Marine Corps reservist, Mr. Ziegel had been trapped in a burning truck after a suicide bomber’s attack. The heat melted the flesh from his face. At Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas he underwent 19 rounds of surgery. His shattered skull was replaced by a plastic dome, and a face was constructed more or less from scratch with salvaged tissue, holes left where his ears and nose had been.

Ms. Berman took this picture, which is in the solo show at Jen Bekman Gallery, on assignment for People magazine. It was meant to accompany an article that documented Mr. Ziegel’s recovery, culminating in his marriage to his childhood sweetheart. But the published portrait was a convivial shot of the whole wedding party. Maybe the image of the couple alone was judged to be too stark, the emotional interchange too ambiguous. Maybe they looked, separately and together, too alone.

“Marine Wedding,” the portrait’s title, was not Ms. Berman’s first encounter with wounded Iraq war veterans. She photographed several others beginning in 2003, and 20 of her portraits were published as a book, “Purple Hearts: Back From Iraq” (Trolley Books, 2004), with an introduction by Verlyn Klinkenborg, a member of the editorial board of The New York Times. These pictures, accompanied by printed interviews with the sitters, have been traveling the country, and 10 are now at Bekman.

None are as startling as “Marine Wedding,” even when the disability recorded is more extensive. Former Spc. Luis Calderon, 22, of Puerto Rico, had his spinal cord severed when a concrete wall he was ordered to pull down — it was painted with a mural of Saddam Hussein — fell on him. He is now a quadriplegic, though this is not immediately evident from his portrait. Nor can we see from the photograph of Spc. Sam Ross, 20, of Pennsylvania, that he lost a leg in a bomb blast, which also caused permanent brain damage.

Almost all the veterans in Ms. Berman’s pictures look isolated, even if someone else is present. And a sense of loneliness comes through in their brief interviews. Mr. Ross, separated from his family, lives by himself in a trailer. Mr. Calderon, who waited months for veterans’ benefits, says he feels abandoned by the military; because he was not wounded in combat, he has not been awarded a Purple Heart.

Spc. Robert Acosta, 20, a Californian who lost a hand in a grenade attack, says he is psychologically unable to resume his former social life: “I don’t like dealing with the questions. Like, ‘Was it hot?’ ‘Did you shoot anybody?’ They want me to glorify the war and say it was so cool.”

Mr. Acosta’s interview has the only overt anti-war sentiment in the Bekman show, and there are few words of bitterness or recrimination. Mr. Ross calls combat in Iraq the best time of his life. Randall Clunen of Ohio remembers the excitement of search missions in Iraqi homes as a peak experience. Sgt. Joseph Mosner, at 35 the oldest in this group, was 19 when he enlisted. “There was no good jobs,” he said, “so I figured this would have been a good thing.” He still thinks so, despite his severe facial scarring from a bomb explosion.

Sgt. Jeremy Feldbusch, left brain-damaged and blind by an artillery attack, once had plans for medical school. but says: “I don’t have any regrets. I had some fun over there. I don’t want to talk about the military anymore.” He claims, as do others, that he has no political opinions.

Ms. Berman adds no direct editorial comment to the presentation. She has said in interviews that she started photographing disabled veterans soon after the war began mainly because she didn’t see anyone else doing so. In what may be the most intensively photographed war in history, the visual documentation has been selective. The fate of the injured veterans was not a public issue until news reports about substandard treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

This background provides the context for Ms. Berman’s photographs, which are themselves tip-of-the-iceberg images. No matter what the viewer’s political position, the images add up to a complex and desolating anti-war statement. Mr. Acosta makes that statement outright: “Yeah, I got a Purple Heart. I don’t care. I don’t need anything to prove I was there. I know I was there. I got a constant reminder. I mean like all the reasons we went to war, it just seems like they’re not legit enough for people to lose their lives for and for me to lose my hand and use of my legs and for my buddies to lose their limbs.”

And “Marine Wedding” speaks, as powerfully as a picture can, for itself.

“Nina Berman: Purple Hearts” continues through Aug. 30 at Jen Bekman Gallery, 6 Spring Street, between the Bowery and Elizabeth Street; (212) 219-0166, jenbekman.com.

In a typical reality check, the truth is revealed concerning how the military monolith speaks with the “don’t do as I do, do as I say” voice to the troops. Taking the RHIP (rank has its privileges) to a new steroid-enhanced level, the Department of Defense clearly demonstrates that its top decision makers don’t have any more understanding about operational security than they do about prosecuting the war against a crafty insurgency.

This should come as no surprise to anyone on the left or right of the political spectrum because today’s general officers are just as bad (if not worse) than GEN (Ret) Wesley “The Perfumed Prince” Clark was as the former NATO CINC. Engaging in the same level of political loyalty over loyalty to their subordinates in uniform, these GO’s have sacrificed truth for political expediency in their quest to garner then next star.

Granted, the example former SecDef Rumsfeld made of General Shinseki gave plenty for the GO’s to think about, but don’t we all have to wonder if some of these “leaders” ever came under enemy fire? If they could withstand the fear associated with seeing the elephant, why are they so cowardly now?

A serious question indeed.

The Moderator

Army Reports Brass, Not Bloggers, Breach Security

By Noah Shachtman 08.17.07 | 2:00 AM

For years, the military has been warning that soldiers’ blogs could pose a security threat by leaking sensitive wartime information. But a series of online audits, conducted by the Army, suggests that official Defense Department websites post material far more potentially harmful than anything found on a individual’s blog.

The audits, performed by the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell between January 2006 and January 2007, found at least 1,813 violations of operational security policy on 878 official military websites. In contrast, the 10-man, Manassas, Virginia, unit discovered 28 breaches, at most, on 594 individual blogs during the same period.

The results were obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, after the digital rights group filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.

“It’s clear that official Army websites are the real security problem, not blogs,” said EFF staff attorney Marcia Hofmann. “Bloggers, on the whole, have been very careful and conscientious. It’s a pretty major disparity.”

The findings stand in stark contrast to Army statements about the risks that blogs pose.

“Some soldiers continue to post sensitive information to internet websites and blogs,” then-Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker wrote in a 2005 memo. “Such OPSEC (operational security) violations needlessly place lives at risk.” That same year, commanders in Iraq ordered (.pdf) troops to register their blogs “with the unit chain of command.”

Originally formed in 2002 to police official Defense Department websites (.mil), the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell, or AWRAC, expanded its mission in 2005. A handful of military bloggers, including then-Spec. Colby Buzzell, were seen as providing too many details of firefights in Iraq. Buzzell, for one, was banned from patrols and confined to base after one such incident, and AWRAC began looking for others like him on blogs and .com sites.

But AWRAC hunted for more than overly vivid battle descriptions. It scoured pages for all kinds of information: personal data, like home addresses and Social Security numbers; restricted and classified documents; even pictures of weapons. When these violations were found, AWRAC contacted the webmaster or blog editor, and asked that they change their sites.

“Big Brother is not watching you, but 10 members of a Virginia National Guard unit might be,” an official Army news story warned bloggers.

Within the Army, some worried that the blog-monitoring had compromised AWRAC’s original goal.

“My suspicion … is that the AWRAC’s attention is being diverted by the new mission of reviewing all the Army blogs,” reads an e-mail (.pdf) from the office of the Army Chief Information Officer obtained in EFF’s FOIA lawsuit. “In the past they did a good job of detecting and correcting (website policy compliance) violations, but that is currently not the case.”

On one blog, AWRAC found photos showing bomb damage to a Humvee; on another, a description of a mountain near a base in Afghanistan; on a third, a video about “morale concerning incoming mortar.” AWRAC discovered a secret presentation on the official, unclassified Army Knowledge Online network. It found a map of an Army training center in Texas on a second .mil site. A “colonel’s wife’s maiden name” was caught on a third.

The documents unearthed by the EFF also show that AWRAC’s investigations may have been meant to discourage any Army blogging — not just correct security flaws. One soldier-blogger noted that “The DoD (Department of Defense) is cracking down … and I wouldn’t be able to continue blogging.” AWRAC’s internal response: “The word is getting out.”

“I won’t be blogging anything cool probably while we’re here,” another soldier wrote. “I remember really enjoying a few blogs at the beginning of the war, but they were pushing the limits a little bit on OPSEC and I don’t plan to get anywhere near those limits.” AWRAC’s answer: “GO ARMY!”

The AWRAC monitoring is part of an ongoing struggle in the military over digital media. To some, these new forms of communications are security risks waiting to happen. Others welcome soldiers posting to blogs, online video sites and social networks as information warfare, combating a wave of Islamist propaganda online.

This spring, the Army released stringent new rules (.pdf) telling soldiers to stop posting to blogs without first clearing the content with a superior officer. “Personal websites of individual Soldiers (to include web logs or ‘blogs’) are a potentially significant vulnerability,” Army Regulation 530-1 noted.

The guidelines’ author, Major Ray Ceralde, cited the Pentagon’s take-out pizza orders as an example of potentially damaging information that a blog might leak. Days later, the Army issued a “fact sheet” which seemed to back away from the rules — without officially retracting them.

The overlapping guidelines created a climate of confusion for soldier-bloggers. Sgt. Edward Watson, a blogger currently deployed with the 82nd Airborne Division in Baghdad, was threatened by his company’s commander for perceived transgressions of the blog policies.

“They wanted to give me an Article 15 (non-judicial punishment) for a regulation I was clueless about, and they never brief anyone about starting or running blogs,” Sgt. Watson told Wired News in an e-mail. He was eventually allowed to keep his website — after removing some of the more detailed entries.

Overall, the new documents reveal, AWRAC found few security breaches on soldiers’ sites — at most, 28 in more than a year. That’s a fraction of the thousands of violations found on official sites.

(The precise number of breaches is unclear. In AWRAC’s presentations, numbers contradict one another, or are transposed from one month to the next. For example, AWRAC came up at different points with five separate figures for the number of .mil pages scanned in September 2006. The documents show that the number of breaches may have been as high as 4,052 on official military sites, and as low as 14 on blogs.)

To D.J. Elliott, a blogger and former intelligence officer, the statistics — however uneven — are proof that “the milblogs (military blogs) are policing their own far tighter than officialdom is.”

“Most of the milblog(er)s are there or have people close to them there,” he wrote in an e-mail to Wired News. “They maintain OPSEC because it is personal to them. Self-preservation. It is risking them and/or theirs.”

Army spokesman Gordon Van Vleet seemed to agree with that assessment. One “factor that contributes to fewer violations being found on blogs is that in general the blogger is conscientious about their duty to not provide information that could be considered an OPSEC violation,” he wrote. “Often these bloggers are stationed in the combat areas and they more than anyone understand the importance of security and the potential impact any OPSEC violations could have on themselves and their fellow Soldiers, Airmen and Marines.”

For more on this story as it develops, check in on the Wired blog Danger Room.

Democrats Hide Pet Projects From Voters

Once again, our lovely political leaders show their true disloyal colors. Placing their buddies first, they spend money on pet projects while grandstanding at the Soldier’s and Marine’s expense.

The Moderator

From My Way News Jun 3, 7:20 AM (ET)

By ANDREW TAYLOR

WASHINGTON (AP) - After promising unprecedented openness regarding Congress’ pork barrel practices, House Democrats are moving in the opposite direction as they draw up spending bills for the upcoming budget year.

Democrats are sidestepping rules approved their first day in power in January to clearly identify “earmarks” - lawmakers’ requests for specific projects and contracts for their states.

Rather than including specific pet projects, grants and contracts in legislation as it is being written, Democrats are following an order by the House Appropriations Committee chairman to keep the bills free of such earmarks until it is too late for critics to effectively challenge them.

Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., says those requests for dams, community grants and research contracts for favored universities or hospitals will be added to spending measures in the fall. That is when House and Senate negotiators assemble final bills.

Such requests total billions of dollars.

As a result, most lawmakers will not get a chance to oppose specific projects as wasteful or questionable when the spending bills for various agencies get their first votes in the full House in June.

The House-Senate compromise bills due for final action in September cannot be amended and are subject to only one hour of debate, precluding challenges to individual projects.

Obey insists he is reluctantly taking the step because Appropriations Committee members and staff have not had enough time to fully review the 36,000 earmark requests that have flooded the committee.

What Obey is doing runs counter to new rules that Democrats promised would make such spending decisions more open.

In a May 27, 2007, editorial, the New York Times opines that Iraq is something of a war without end. Unfortunately, the Times’ coverage of the war and the paper’s editorials are too one-sided to take seriously. Failing to hold the liberal side of the aisle accountable for its failures in the war’s development and prosecution within a strategic framework, the Times continues to give far too many civilians and senior military leaders a “pass” for their ineptitude.

The Moderator

Editorial

War Without End

Never mind how badly the war is going in Iraq. President Bush has been swaggering around like a victorious general because he cowed a wobbly coalition of Democrats into dropping their attempt to impose a time limit on his disastrous misadventure.

By week’s end, Mr. Bush was acting as though that bit of parliamentary strong-arming had left him free to ignore not just the Democrats, but also the vast majority of Americans, who want him to stop chasing illusions of victory and concentrate on how to stop the sacrifice of young Americans’ lives.

And, ever faithful to his illusions, Mr. Bush was insisting that he was the only person who understood the true enemy.

Speaking to graduates of the Coast Guard Academy, Mr. Bush declared that Al Qaeda is “public enemy No. 1” in Iraq and that “the terrorists’ goal in Iraq is to reignite sectarian violence and break support for the war here at home.” The next day, in the Rose Garden, Mr. Bush turned on a reporter who had the temerity to ask about Mr. Bush’s declining credibility with the public, declaring that Al Qaeda is “a threat to your children” and accusing him of naïvely ignoring the danger.

It’s upsetting to think that Mr. Bush believes the raging sectarian violence in Iraq awaits reigniting, or that he does not recognize that Americans’ support for the war broke down many bloody months ago. But we have grown accustomed to this president’s disconnect from reality and his habit of tilting at straw men, like Americans who don’t care about terrorism because they question his mismanagement of the war or don’t worry about what will happen after the United States withdraws, as it inevitably must.

The really disturbing thing about Mr. Bush’s comments is his painting of the war in Iraq as an obvious-to-everyone-but-the-wrongheaded fight between the United States and a young Iraqi democracy on one side, and Al Qaeda on the other. That fails to acknowledge that the Shiite-dominated government of Iraq is not a democracy and is at war with many of its own people. And it removes all pressure from the Iraqi leadership — and Mr. Bush — to halt the sectarian fighting and create a real democracy.

There is no doubt that organized Islamist terrorism — call it Al Qaeda or by any other name — is a dire threat. There is also no doubt that terrorists entered Iraq — mostly after the war began.

We, too, believe that Iraq has to be made as stable as possible so the United States can withdraw its troops without unleashing even more chaos and destruction. But Mr. Bush is not doing that and his version of reality only makes it more unlikely. The only solution lies with the Iraqi leaders, who have to stop their sectarian blood feud and make a real attempt to form a united government. That is their best chance to stabilize the country, allow the United States to withdraw and, yes, battle Al Qaeda.

The Democrats who called for imposing benchmarks for political progress on the Iraqis, combined with a withdrawal date for American soldiers, were trying to start that process. It’s a shame they could not summon the will and discipline to keep going, but we hope they have not given up. As disjointed as the Democrats have been, their approach makes far more sense than Mr. Bush’s denial of Iraq’s civil war and his war-without-end against terror.

The former commander of the 1st Infantry Division (Big Red One) ripped President Bush’s war policy.  In an article published by the New York Times, Major General John Batiste explains his reasoing for going public.

May 13, 2007

Army Career Behind Him, General Speaks Out on Iraq

By THOM SHANKER

ROCHESTER, May 10 — John Batiste has traveled a long way in the last four years, from commanding the First Infantry Division in Iraq to quitting the Army after three decades in uniform and, now, from his new life overseeing a steel factory here, to openly challenging President Bush on his management of the war.

“Mr. President, you did not listen,” General Batiste says in new television advertisements being broadcast in Republican Congressional districts as part of a $500,000 campaign financed by VoteVets.org. “You continue to pursue a failed strategy that is breaking our great Army and Marine Corps. I left the Army in protest in order to speak out. Mr. President, you have placed our nation in peril. Our only hope is that Congress will act now to protect our fighting men and women.”

Those are powerful, inflammatory words from General Batiste, a retired major general who spent 31 years in the Army, a profession sworn to unflinching loyalty to civilian control of the military. Many senior officers say privately that talk like this makes them uncomfortable; when you pin that first star on your shoulder, they say, your first name becomes “General” for the rest of your life.

But General Batiste says he has received no phone calls, letters or messages from current or former officers challenging his public stance, although he occasionally gets an anonymous e-mail message with the heading “Traitor.” Having quit the Army in anger at what he calls mismanagement of the Iraq war, he says he chose a second career far from Washington and the Pentagon so that he could speak freely on military issues.

“I am outraged, as are the majority of Americans,” General Batiste said over sandwiches in a blue-collar diner here. “I am a lifelong Republican. But it is past time for change.”

A White House spokeswoman, Emily Lawrimore, said in response to the advertising, “We respectfully disagree.” Ms. Lawrimore said President Bush conferred routinely with senior officers, citing a three-hour meeting on Thursday with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a conversation earlier in the week with Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior American commander in Iraq.

“The decisions the president has made have been based on information he receives from commanders and generals on the ground,” she added.

A conversation with General Batiste offers one more window into the debate on Iraq. While some former commanders, like General Batiste, have been speaking out against the war, others, such as Gen. Jack Keane, the retired Army vice chief of staff, have offered advice to the White House on Iraq.

General Batiste said he chose to go public with his critique of the war effort only after 30 years of honoring the Army’s rules of silence. He said it was that time commanding 22,000 troops in combat, in 2004 and 2005, that convinced him that American fighting in Iraq was short of vision as well as troops.

“There was never enough. There was never a reserve,” he said. “Again and again, we had to move troops by as many as 200 miles out of our area of operations to support another sector. We would pull troops out of contact with the enemy and move them into contact with the enemy somewhere else. The minute we’d leave, the insurgents would pick up on that, and kill everybody who had been friendly.”

General Batiste was among a handful of retired generals first calling last year for the resignation of Donald H. Rumsfeld as defense secretary. He says he realizes lending his name to television advertisements aimed at the president and Republican members of Congress in an election cycle is different.

Officials of VoteVets.org, an Internet-based veterans advocacy organization, say the television spots will run in the home districts of more than a dozen members of Congress, among them Senator John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who, as former chairman of the Armed Services Committee, is considered one of Capitol Hill’s experts on the military.

“Like other citizens, retired generals have the constitutional right to engage in robust debate on one of the most important issues of our time,” said John Ullyot, the senator’s spokesman. “Senator Warner appreciates hearing from people on all sides of the debate, and Virginians have a clear understanding of his views on Iraq.”

VoteVets.org says it has tried to calibrate its message carefully, although there is a limit to the nuance that can fit into 30-second television spots. (Two other retired generals, Paul D. Eaton and Wesley K. Clark, speak in the campaign’s other advertisements.)

As described by General Batiste, the message is not antiwar; it argues that continuing the war in Iraq as a civil, sectarian conflict that cannot be won by outside forces is crippling the Army and the Marine Corps. It does not deny the danger of violent Islamic extremism, he says, but contends that the war in Iraq prevents the armed services from preparing to battle other global security threats.

And it says that if terrorism, and especially terrorists armed with unconventional weapons, truly threaten America’s very survival, then the rest of the country — not just the military — should be called to sacrifice.

On Thursday, General Batiste drove from the steel factory he now runs to a veterans’ center where he is president of a nonprofit association of local business leaders who support veterans in the region. He parked behind a shop selling American flags (sales are up 42 percent over last year, with profits going to aid veterans).

“In the Army, you communicate up the chain of command, and I communicated vehemently with my senior commanders while I was in Iraq,” he said. Of his departure from the Army, he said: “It was the toughest decision of my life. I paced my quarters for days. I didn’t sleep for nights. But I was not willing to compromise my principles for one more minute.”

[CBS announced this week that it was terminating its contract with General Batiste as a consultant because of the advertisements.]

His retirement from the Army in November 2005 meant turning his back on a third star and command of day-to-day combat missions in Iraq, the No. 2 military position in Baghdad. Having cast aside his military career, General Batiste cast his eyes away from the defense industry to join Klein Steel Service, which cuts and processes steel for commercial, civilian enterprises — and does no military work.

Despite the much vaunted mandatory training of Army Soldiers, it does not appear the time invested in this training is producing results.  Although we’ve experienced these types of losses in all our wars, perhaps more personnel on the ground would prevent patrols being ambushed and US Soldiers missing in action.

 Search Is On for 3 G.I.’s

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 9:57 a.m. ET

BAGHDAD (AP) — Thousands of U.S. soldiers searched Sunday for three Americans who were missing after their patrol came under attack in an explosion that killed four of their comrades and an Iraqi army translator. Two bombings — one in northern Iraq and another at a market in Baghdad — killed at least 62 Iraqis.

The Islamic State in Iraq, an al-Qaida front group, said it had captured several soldiers in the attack, but offered no proof to back up its claim, posted on an Islamic Web site.

The search for the missing Americans began after insurgents attacked a patrol of seven U.S. soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter before dawn Saturday near Mahmoudiya.

The U.S. military said Saturday that five people were dead and three were missing.

On Sunday, U.S. spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell confirmed that the Iraqi interpreter was among the dead — and that all the missing were Americans. He said about 4,000 U.S. troops were involved in the search.

Caldwell said the bodies of the three slain soldiers and the Iraqi interpreter had been identified, but the military was still working to identify the fifth.

(Full story here)

Afghanistan’s Taliban continues its butchery against its own. This time they murdered an Afghan journalist.

Despite the Bush Administration’s mismanagement of the War on Terror, failure of Bremer and his folks in Iraq, and Cheney’s neo-cons dismissing all criticism, it is important to realize not all cultures are equal.

Destruction of religious shrines (in violation of the world’s agreements on the issue of protecting each other’s religious sites), beheading of an innocent driver during the initial kidnapping of the Afghan reporter, punishing women for being raped, etc., is standard practice for this pack of savages masquerading as a “culture.”

Unfortunately, the politically correct crowd cannot find fault with this group of thugs, even though the PC slaves can agree with those right of center on the “God hates fags” pastor masquerading as a Christian. This duplicitous mindset is even distasteful to Joe Sixpack.

Again, regardless of any failures on America’s part to adequately or correctly address the post-war catastrophe in Iraq the United States, the world’s only superpower, cannot blithely go about our country’s business in a world of PC delusion. There really are evil men in the world and wishing that all “men are basically good” doesn’t make them so.

The Moderator

Taleban ‘Kill Afghan Journalist’

The Taleban in Afghanistan say they have killed an Afghan reporter abducted last month with an Italian journalist.

The group said it had killed Ajmal Naqshbandi as the government had refused to meet their demands to release senior figures from prison.

The Italian reporter, Daniele Mastrogiacomo, was released after five Taleban members were freed in exchange.

The two reporters and their driver, who was earlier beheaded, were captured on 6 March in Helmand province.

From the BBC