FALLOUT FROM THE COLUMBIA OUTRAGE

BLACKFIVE: Columbia Families and Alums are Speaking Out

President Bollinger,

Sir,

I am writing regarding Colombia's treatment of our military's wounded on your campus. Specifically, Anthony Maschek, an American hero. This is absolutely disgraceful. You need to denounce such behavior for it is because of wounded veterans your students have free speech but this is certainly lost on the Columbia student body and administration.

My uncle a WWII veteran (now deceased) received his masters from Columbia. Your students and administration dishonor him.

G.I.W.



Blackfive points out General Dwight D. Eisenhower served as Columbia University's President from 1948 to 1953 . . . Read more HERE - the entire episode is astonishing, but the veteran's families' response is incredible - S.L.


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SAME WAR, DIFFERENT NAME . . .

These guys are doing the Bag Drag . . . BUT . . .





. . . IT AIN'T OVER 'TILL IT's OVER . . .


Despite new mission, US troops still in the fight in Iraq

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US troops will still be in combat and taking on Islamist militants in Iraq even as the American military moves to an "advise and assist" role with a smaller force, officials said Thursday.

The withdrawal of the last US combat brigade on Thursday was hailed as a symbolic moment for the controversial American presence in Iraq, more than seven years since the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

But while the remaining 50,000 troops will no longer have a formal combat mission after September 1, they will be well-armed and possibly coming under fire as they join in manhunts for Al-Qaeda figures or other extremists.

"I don't think anybody has declared the end of the war as far as I know," Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell told MSNBC.

"Counter-terrorism will still be part of their mission," said Morrell, referring to the fight against militant networks.


Read it and weep . . .

DEATH BY POWERPOINT

When Army platoon leader Lt. Sam Nuxoll was asked how he spent most of his time in Iraq, he responded, “Making PowerPoint slides.” When pressed, he said he was serious.

The mind-numbing effect of the ubiquitous "Death By PowerPoint" 30-slide presentation has become so counter-productive, even the general officers are starting to get it.



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SEAL UPDATE

SEAL Trials to be Moved to Iraq
- Navy Times Tuesday Jan 12, 2010


A military judge has decided to move the trials for two of three Navy SEALs accused in connection with the alleged assault of a suspected terrorist to Iraq.

Cmdr. Tierney Carlos, the trial judge for the courts-martial of Special Warfare Operator 2nd Class (SEAL) Jonathan Elliot Keefe and SO1 (SEAL) Julio Antonio Huertas Jr., agreed Monday with defense motions to move the trials to Camp Victory in Iraq so the sailors can face the alleged victim, Ahmed Hashim Abed, whom the government sought to depose in lieu of a trial appearance. Keefe’s court-martial had been scheduled to begin April 6, while Huertas’ was supposed to begin Monday.

“If he is available for a deposition, then he is available for trial,” Carlos said during the hearing for Keefe Monday.

The U.S. thinks Abed masterminded the 2004 ambush in Fallujah, Iraq, in which four Blackwater security contractors were burned. Two of their bodies were hanged from a bridge.




Burned bodies of two Blackwater contractors hanging from Fallujah Bridge, 2004


Keefe, Huertas and SO2 (SEAL) Matthew McCabe are accused of making false statements in an alleged attempt to cover up the assault, as well as dereliction of duty. McCabe is also charged with assault. All three have pleaded not guilty to all charges.


3rd SEAL Trial to Stay in Virginia
- Navy Times, Friday Jan 15, 2010

NORFOLK, Va. — The trial for the Navy SEAL accused of punching an alleged al-Qaida terrorist while in U.S. custody in Iraq has been postponed until May 3, but the trial will remain in Norfolk.

Capt. Moira Modzelewski granted government prosecutors the continuance on the grounds that most of the evidence in the case is still undergoing a classification review and has yet to be seen by either the prosecution or the defense.

Modzelewski stopped short of moving the trial of Special Warfare Operator 2nd Class (SEAL) Matthew McCabe to Camp Victory near Baghdad.



Matthew McCabe


That news comes two days after a different military judge decided to move the trials for the two other SEALs accused in connection with the alleged assault to Iraq.


“We can’t send these guys into harm’s way to get the highest profile terrorists and then have them come back here and fight the system,” Marty McCabe, father of Matthew McCabe, told CNSNews.com.

“They’ve been tracking this guy [Abed] since 2004,” Marty McCabe said. “There was no collateral damage. No shots fired. It is absurd to think they would do anything to him. These guys are pros. If they wanted to do something to him, they would have done it during the capture.”


“I can’t believe the way political correctness has intertwined itself like a snake into our military. What these gentlemen did, if they did it, does not warrant court martial. That terrorist is lucky to be alive after what he did to the Blackwater guys.”

- Dawn West, a Norfolk realtor and an organizer of a rally held December 9th, 2009 outside the front gate of Norfolk Naval Base.

STOP SHARIAH NOW

STOP SHARIAH NOW is a special project of ACT! AMERICA


Click here to see the Global Impact of Shariah


1. WHAT IS SHARIAH OR SHARIAH ISLAMIC LAW?

Shariah is Islamic law and represents the traditional or “pure” normative interpretation of the Qur’an and teachings of Mohammed, as developed by Shariah scholars and jurists during Islam’s early centuries. It has remained largely unchanged for over 1200 years and is practiced today in these areas:

o Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan
o Recognized as the supreme law of the land in almost all Arab regimes (although not always put into practice)
o Afghanistan and the Swat region of Pakistan, under Taliban control
o Parts of Nigeria, Indonesia, and Somalia
o As of January 2009, Hamas-controlled Gaza strip
o Al-Qaeda radicals practicing terrorism


2. HOW IS SHARIAH RELATED TO RADICAL ISLAM?

Implementing Shariah is the agenda of what is often termed Radical Islam or Political Islam. Shariah-driven Islam is a political movement much like Communism, in that “true” Muslims are required to relinquish all control of personal, business, family, and religious life to the rulings of Shariah “authorities” (the ‘ulema’ who act as legislators, judges, and law enforcement) in the service of this totalitarian political order. The goal is to wage Jihad (cultural, financial, or violent) to create a one world order, united under Islam, where Church and State are one.


3. DO ALL MUSLIMS WANT TO LIVE UNDER SHARIAH LAW?

No. Newspapers report bloody struggles in Turkey, Indonesia, Pakistan, Thailand, Egypt, and Jordan between secular liberty-minded Muslims and theocratic Shariah militants. However, as Shariah Islam expands its reach worldwide, polls suggest increasing support for enforcing strict application of Shariah law in Islamic countries: 65% of Egyptians, 76% of Pakistanis, and 49% of Indonesians - www.worldpublicopinion.org. Yet Shariah law silences nearly 750 million women and children.


4. WHAT ARE SOME EXAMPLES OF SHARIAH LAW?

The Reliance of the Traveller, Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law is the authoritative Sunni Shariah rulebook (available at Barnes and Noble).





o Offensive, military Jihad is a religious obligation.
o Inferior status for all non-Muslims (“dhimma”).
o Capital punishment for slandering Islam.
o Capital punishment for apostasy (leaving Islam).
o Women may not leave the house without husbands’ permission; beating disobedient women, polygamy, forced child marriage, and stoning of adulterers are permitted.
o Slavery is legal.
o Lying (taqiyya) to infidels is permitted.
o Capital punishment for homosexuals and lesbians.



Pilgrims circumambulating the Kaaba during the Umrah


5. WHO IS THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD?

The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) was formed in the 1920s by Shariah advocates to create a one-world nation-state under Shariah Islamic law. Today, they are in 70+ countries. The Brotherhood works hand-in-hand with the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), a 57-member Muslim-majority block in the UN to implement their 1982 plan to invade and conquer the West.


6. WHAT TACTICS ARE USED TO IMPLEMENT THIS STRATEGY?

Below are some of the tactics recommended in the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Project” (see the English translation in Patrick Poole’s article in www.frontpagemag.com):

o Inflaming violence while appearing ‘moderate’
o Inciting hatred against Jews
o Monitoring western media
o Making alliances with western “progressives”
o Establishing financial networks to fund conversion
o Collecting funds to support global jihad
o Who are these Shariah Authorities or Advisors?

Only Shariah authorities (the ‘ulema’) can issue fatwas or legal rulings and only they can interpret Shariah. As Shariah authorities, they authorize, direct, and condone Jihad actions. The mandate that “true” Muslims carry out their fatwas ensures that these authorities can distance themselves from actual acts of terror. Recent fatwas by Shariah authorities resulted in a) the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, b) rioting following the publication of the Danish Mohammad cartoons, and c) the attacks in New York (Sep. 2001), London (Jul. 2007), Madrid (Mar. 2004), and Mumbai (Jan. 2009).


7. WHAT ARE SOME EXAMPLES OF CREEPING SHARIAH?

“Creeping Shariah” refers to the incremental adoption of Shariah, in which a single example seems harmless, but taken together, represents a pattern of intention.

No-Go Zones. 751 no-go zones in France where police have turned over control to “religious enforcement” following threats of violence. Girls without Islamic clothing have reportedly been raped. Non-Muslim citizens are urged to stay out. Zones exist in Denmark, the Netherlands, and the UK.

Shariah Courts. 2008: Official recognition of five courts in the UK and one in Texas, USA, with lobbying to create greater legitimization and authority in Minnesota, New Jersey, and California. The intent is to set up parallel courts, in lieu of secular courts and their judgments, in family and business law.

Assault on Freedom of Speech. Feb. 2009: Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders prosecuted for hate speech for his 15-minute film, Fitna.

Books Destroyed. July 2007: Cambridge University Press destroyed its print run of Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World in reaction to Saudi threats of a slander lawsuit.

Children’s Rights. Mar. 2008: UK reports epidemic of forced child marriages. 2008: Texas father murders teenage daughters for adopting a Western lifestyle.

Women’s Rights. 2008: Successful lobbying for polygamy in Canada and UK; Holland recognizes polygamous marriages. 2009: Buffalo NY, USA. Muslim leader decapitates his wife after she filed for divorce. Honor killing is justified under Shariah law.

Saudi Hate Curriculum. The Islamic Saudi Academy (ISA) in Virginia, remains open, despite reports of hate-filled curricula, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

Meet Mark Bowden

Mark Bowden is an author, journalist, screenwriter, and teacher. His book Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (1999)— an international bestseller that spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list — was a finalist for the National Book Award. Bowden also worked on the screenplay for Black Hawk Down, a film adaptation of the book, directed by Ridley Scott.








I read his book and I know he was the only one the Delta Operators opened up with. He also had unprecedented cooperation from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Nightstalkers), Mike Durant’s outfit - Sean Linnane






Bowden is also the author of the international bestseller Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw (2001), which tells the story of the hunt for Colombian cocaine billionaire Pablo Escobar. Killing Pablo won the Overseas Press Club's Cornelius Ryan Award as the best book in 2001 and is currently being adapted for film, with Bowden again writing the screenplay. He is also the author of Doctor Dealer (1987), Bringing the Heat (1994), Our Finest Day (2002) and Finders Keepers (2002).












The Ploy published in the Atlantic, May 2007, is the inside story of how the interrogators of Task Force 145 cracked Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s inner circle — without resorting to torture — and hunted down al-Qaeda’s man in Iraq.




It was a macabre moment of triumph. At a closed compound within Balad Air Base in Iraq, behind Jersey barriers 30 feet high, the men and women of the interrogation mill crowded around a stark display: two freshly dead men, bare and supine on the floor.

The audience members were expert interrogators, most of them young, some of them military, others civilian contract workers. They called themselves “gators,” and they were the intelligence arm of Task Force 145, the clandestine unit of Delta Force operators and Navy SEALs who hunt down America’s most-wanted terrorists. For years, their primary target had been Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian leader of the grandly named Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the gloating, murderous author of assassinations, roadside bombings, and suicide attacks.

A U.S. PSYOP leaflet disseminated in Iraq shows al-Zarqawi caught in a rat trap. Text: "This is your future, Zarqawi".

Together, living and working inside this “Battlefield Interrogation Facility,” the gators had produced leads for the Task Force to chase. They had put in thousands of hours probing, threatening, flattering, browbeating, wheedling, conning, and questioning, doing what Major General William B. Caldwell IV, in his press conference the next day, would call “painstaking intelligence gathering from local sources and from within Zarqawi’s network.” It was, as Caldwell would put it, “the slow, deliberate exploitation of leads and opportunities, person to person,” all striving to answer just one critical question: Where is Zarqawi right now?

Al-Zarqawi's global terrorist network.

This day, June 7, 2006, had finally produced the answer.

And so here he was, stretched out on the floor, stiff, pale, gray, and swollen in death, his “spiritual adviser,” Sheikh al-Rahman, lying alongside him. The men had been killed, along with two women and two small children, when an American F-16 had steered first one and then another 500-pound bomb into the house they occupied in a palm grove in the village of Hibhib. Task Force operators had recovered the men’s bodies and carried them as trophies to Balad. Both now had swaths of white cloth draped across their midsections, but were otherwise naked. Zarqawi’s face—wide, round, and bearded, his big eyes closed, a smear of blood still lurid across his left cheek—was unmistakable from his frequent videotaped boasts and pronouncements. He had been more sought-after than Osama bin Laden, and in recent years was considered the greater threat.

No more. The mood was one of subdued celebration. President Bush would call that day to congratulate the Task Force’s boss, the Joint Special Operations Commander Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal. For many, the satisfaction was tempered by photos of the dead children. They were hard to look at.

The unit’s female J2, or chief intelligence officer, embraced a young woman in a T-shirt and khaki cargo pants who was part of the two-person gator team that had produced what is known in the trade as “lethal information.”

“I am so glad I chose you for this,” she said.

McChrystal himself came by. A tall, slender, very soldierly-looking man, he was an Army briefer during the Persian Gulf War, but has been infrequently seen or photographed in recent years because of his clandestine post. He and his top commanders stared down at Zarqawi with evident satisfaction. Everyone leaned in to listen.






“Yep,” said one of the colonels, “that’s one dead son of a bitch.”






This is must-read stuff. If this link is down, comment below and I will post the entire article here - Sean Linnane

"IT’s TIME FOR THE US TO DECLARE VICTORY AND GO HOME"

COLONEL REESE’s MEMO

Col. Timothy R. Reese, Chief, Baghdad Operations Command Advisory Team, MND-B, is an adviser to the Iraqi military’s Baghdad command. He has written a controversial memorandum detailing Iraqi military weaknesses in scathing language, including corruption, poor management and the inability to resist Shiite political pressure. Extending the American military presence beyond August 2010, he argues, will do little to improve the Iraqis’ military performance while fueling growing resentment of Americans.

HEADS UP!!! Members of Team STORMBRINGER will recall Operator Erik's warning:"BLOODSHED WITHIN 30 DAYS" - 27 July 09

Below are some excerpts of COL Reese's memo, published in the New York Times 30 July 2009. In this incredible piece of ground-based analysis, COL Reese makes the following points with keen insight:

“As the old saying goes, ‘Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days,’ ” Colonel Reese wrote. “Since the signing of the 2009 Security Agreement, we are guests in Iraq, and after six years in Iraq, we now smell bad to the Iraqi nose.”

Today the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) are good enough to keep the Government of Iraq (GOI) from being overthrown by the actions of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the Baathists, and the Shia violent extremists that might have toppled it a year or two ago.

Iraq may well collapse into chaos of other causes, but we have made the ISF strong enough for the internal security mission . . .

He dares to declare:

. . . We . . . ought to declare victory and bring our combat forces home.

COL Reese's conclusions are not shared by the senior American commander in Iraq, Gen. Ray Odierno, and his recommendation for an accelerated troop withdrawal is at odds with the timetable approved by President Obama.

The memo opens a rare window into a debate among American military officers about how active the American role should be in Iraq and for how long. While some in the military endorse Colonel Reese’s assessment, other officers say that American forces need to stay in Iraq for the next couple of years as the Iraqis struggle with heightened tensions between the Kurds and Arabs, insurgent attacks in and around Mosul and checking authoritarian tendencies of the Iraqi government.

“We now have an Iraqi government that has gained its balance and thinks it knows how to ride the bike in the race,” Colonel Reese wrote. “And in fact they probably do know how to ride, at least well enough for the road they are on against their current competitors. Our hand on the back of the seat is holding them back and causing resentment. We need to let go before we both tumble to the ground.”

Before deploying to Iraq, Colonel Reese served as the director of the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., the Army’s premier intellectual center. He was an author of an official Army history of the Iraq war — “On Point II” — that was sharply critical of the lapses in postwar planning.

Colonel Reese’s memo lists a number of problems that have emerged since the withdrawal of American combat troops from Baghdad, completed June 30. They include, he wrote, a “sudden coolness” to American advisers and the “forcible takeover” of a checkpoint in the Green Zone. Iraqi units, he added, are much less willing to conduct joint operations with their American counterparts “to go after targets the U.S. considers high value.”

Italics mine - S.L.

“If there ever was a window where the seeds of a professional military culture could have been implanted, it is now long past,” he wrote. “U.S. combat forces will not be here long enough or with sufficient influence to change it. The military culture of the Baathist-Soviet model under Saddam Hussein remains entrenched and will not change. The senior leadership of the I.S.F. is incapable of change in the current environment.”

I have presented this analysis based on the legitimacy of the source, and his valid position to express the conclusions stated above. I do not wish to present myself as a Polyanna or a Cassandra, but we have certainly reached a timely juncture - one of several encountered over the years. A General must avoid seige operations at all cost - Iraq for us has represented a giant seige on a national level, since a few days after the fall of Baghdad. We perservered through the dark days and have endured heavy bloodletting. We have lifted the seige, apparently, and now may be a rare opportunity to break contact.- Sean Linnane

Read the entire memo, as printed in the New York Times, here.