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Last Updated on December 23, 2007
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Former
POWs Say Gitmo Detainees Being Treated Very Well
Tuesday, January 29, 2002
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Don't tell retired U.S. Navy Lt. Stephen Harris about the difficulties of being an Afghan war detainee in Cuba. He was tortured, beaten and starved in North Korea — a far cry, he says, from what's happening in Camp X-Ray.
The 158 Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base are being interrogated by American authorities seeking information to help the U.S.-led war on terrorism.
Some U.S. allies, as well as human rights groups, have criticized the conditions under which the prisoners are being held and have pushed the United States to designate the detainees as prisoners of war, which would guarantee them greater protections under the Geneva Convention.
U.S. officials have said the detainees are being treated humanely and that they do not qualify as prisoners of war. The International Red Cross has been allowed to visit the captives.
Many former POWs say that, regardless of the prisoners' status, conditions at Camp X-Ray are far different from those they were forced to endure.
They remember forced marches in freezing temperatures with little clothing, minuscule food rations, regular beatings, torture, executions, cramped cells with little or no light, no books or writing utensils, nothing to keep their minds off the grueling conditions.
"In the entire 61/2 years I was a prisoner of war, I never saw the Red Cross," said retired Marine Corps Lt. Col. Orson Swindle, now a federal trade commissioner in Washington, D.C.
Swindle, a former fighter pilot was shot down over Vietnam in November 1966 and remained in captivity until March 1973.
"I was taken into a cave, tied up, put in a pit and they'd bring people in to see me ... they'd all have rocks and sticks ... and my main goal was to keep my head down so I didn't get my eyes put out," Swindle remembered.
In contrast, Swindle said, the detainees at Camp X-Ray are being held in open-air cells with walls of chain-link fence in tropical temperatures that hover in the low-80s. The detainees have been issued prayer (skull) caps and are allowed to pray five times a day.
Upon arrival in Cuba, they were allowed to mail a letter home to let relatives know of their situation. Officials have said the prisoners will be allowed to grow back their beards and long hair that many Muslim men
wear. They're also getting pita bread with their meals now, and officials are considering requests to give them access to tea and books.
The former POWs point out that designation as a prisoner of war does not guarantee humane treatment.
Harris was an intelligence officer aboard the USS Pueblo when the boat was attacked and captured off the coast of North Korea in 1968. He was held by the North Koreans for 11 months without prisoner of war status.
"They were calling us detainees just as we're calling those folks in Cuba detainees, although they weren't treating us very nicely," Harris said in telephone interview from his home in Melrose, Mass.
Harris said a North Korean commander laughed at him when he displayed the Geneva Convention rules that govern how international prisoners should be treated.
"To North Korea, the Geneva Convention didn't mean anything," he said.
"We were treated miserably, we were tortured, beaten, starved. I lost 53 pounds in the course of a year," Harris said. "But we assumed ourselves to be prisoners of war. What else would we be? We were captured in a combat situation between two countries that are not friendly to each other."
But Harris said the situation is different with the detainees in Cuba, who are from 25 countries.
To be prisoners of war, "you're assumed to be combatants on behalf of a state," Harris said. "But these guys are stateless because Afghanistan was ruled by the Taliban, which for all practical purposes doesn't exist anymore. So if a day of repatriation were to come, where would they be repatriated to?"
John Klumpp, of Marble Falls, Texas, is the national commander of the American Ex-Prisoners of War organization. He was a prisoner in Germany during World War II.
"I don't think these people should be considered POWs. We're dealing with a bunch of killers, not military people," he said.
Tim's Take: I met Lt. Col. Orson Swindle in 1996. I was stationed aboard the USS John S. McCain in Pearl Harbor. Senator John McCain was in town and stopped by to visit the ship named after his father and grandfather. Col. Swindle accompanied him. They were cellmates I believe as POWs in Vietnam. The Senator was campaigning for Col. Swindle who was then running for a congressional seat in Hawaii. You can only imagine what an honor it is to meet a former POW.
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USAID says Afghan food
effort averts famine
January 3, 2002 Posted: 6:48 PM EST (2348 GMT)
After months of dire predictions, the international community has delivered enough food and supplies to Afghanistan to avoid a disastrous winter, a U.S. government official said Thursday.
"We have averted widespread famine in Afghanistan," said Andrew Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID.
Over the last four months, the World Food Program delivered 210,572 metric tons of food -- 64 percent of which came from the United States -- to Afghanistan, according to Natsios.
More than half that aid -- some 116,000 tons -- arrived in December, more than twice the amount delivered the previous month.
The increased shipments followed significant, rapid progress by U.S.-backed forces in Afghanistan, which paved the way for ground shipments and the safe delivery of planeloads of aid.
Natsios said that every region of the war-torn Central Asian country now has food aid and the means to disperse it to thousands of people.
Afghan aid workers played a vital role in the apparent success of the international aid program, Natsios said.
"The people who saved Afghanistan were the Afghans themselves," he said.
A senior State Department official said that last fall's projection that as many as 1.5 million Afghan refugees might flee to neighboring countries was way off the mark.
Only 150,000 refugees have fled Afghanistan to neighboring countries since September 11, said Alan Kreczko, acting assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.
While the United States does not expect a "large scale" return of refugees until the weather improves next spring, Kreczko said 60,000-80,000 refugees have returned home in the past two months.
Meanwhile, the Voice of America and USAID's Office of Transition Initiatives will distribute more than 30,000 radios to Afghans to expedite the distribution of information.
More than 20,000 radios, equipped with battery sets, have already been given out in Herat, Kunduz, Taloquan, Andkhoi and the Faryab region, according to USAID.
Afghan correspondents on the ground began providing public service announcements over the radio last month in the local Pashtu and Dari dialects.
The broadcasts offered public health advisories and information on food rations, the political, military and humanitarian situation in specific villages and the general security situation.
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Marines Raise U.S. Flag flown over World Trade Center
December 18, 2001
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| The flag flew near the World Trade Center in New York and is signed by scores of people wishing the Marines well. |
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — U.S. Marines at Kandahar airport raised a Stars and Stripes flag Tuesday bearing the names of servicemen and police killed in the September 11 attack on New York and the USS Cole in Yemen.
The names of the 17 sailors who died in the Cole bombing in October last year, along with the names of the 23 New York policemen who lost their lives in the airborne suicide attack on the World Trade Center, were written on 40 of the flag's 50 stars.
After a single blast on a police whistle, a four-man color guard raised the flag on a makeshift pole in the glass-scattered courtyard of the main terminal building at the airport outside the southern city of Kandahar. About 30 Marines and sailors, along representatives of coalition forces, stood at attention.
"The flag was flown over New York City where [the attackers] came and now we're going to fly it over their country," said Marine Sergeant Major Gerald Lane, who led the flag-raising ceremony shortly after dawn.
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"It sent the message that we're going to root out and find the guys who did what they did in New York City," he said.
Relatives of the New York victims as well as firefighters and police officers wrote messages on the 18-by-12-foot flag sent to the U.S. servicemen now fighting the remnants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda network in Afghanistan.
"They took 23 great cops. Pay back time," read one unsigned note among the numerous messages written in the red and white stripes of the flag by relatives of victims, fellow policemen and others.
Saudi-born Usama bin Laden's Al Qaeda is accused of carrying out the September 11 attacks in Washington and New York, which claimed more than 3,000 lives, as well as being involved in the attack on the USS Cole.
"United We Stand," wrote Steve Tomasulo, a New York policeman.
"Now is the time to pay for your mistakes. Step into the arena," wrote Captain Garry Galfano of the New York Police Department's emergency services unit, which had rushed to the stricken World Trade Center.
"To all US military. Show them justice the American way. Kick Ass! Be safe," wrote S.A. Nanette Schumaker of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Lane said the flag — which had been flown at "Ground Zero" in New York where the World Trade Center once stood — was given to the Marines by the New York Police Department and would be returned to them after it was lowered at the end of the day.
"God bless the NYPD, FDNY, US armed forces. Good luck and make us proud," said one message scrawled by P.O. Morietti, of the New York's 43rd police precinct, in the flag's stripes.
Another, signed by Mark Poster, said "God bless and protect you while you avenge our fallen brothers. We didn't ask for this fight, but we will finish it now."
Lane said the names of the Cole victims were especially poignant because they were fellow servicemen.
Seventeen American sailors were killed and 38 wounded in the suicide boat attack on the Cole, which had docked in the Yemeni port of Aden.
The Marines moved in to Kandahar airport on Friday after the southern Afghan city, once the heartland of the Taliban regime, was surrendered to opposition Afghan forces on December 7.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Helms: Let's Get Iraq Next
Thursday, December 06, 2001
By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
WASHINGTON — Longtime foreign policy hawk Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., continued to rattle the saber against Saddam Hussein Wednesday night, insisting that the United States complete its unfinished business from the Persian Gulf War and oust the Iraqi president.
"I am convinced that the war on terrorism cannot and will not end until Saddam Hussein suffers the same fate as the Taliban," he said in remarks before a Hillsdale College Freedom Leadership dinner where he was receiving a leadership award.
Helms said the United States does not yet know whether Hussein was directly involved with the Sept. 11 attacks, but "there is a mountain of evidence linking him to international terrorism generally and to bin Laden’s terrorist network specifically."
Since the end of the Persian Gulf War against Iraq in 1991, Helms has led the charge for ousting Iraqi dictator Hussein, who has managed to hold onto power despite continuous enforcement of two no-fly zones and U.N.-imposed economic sanctions.
Helms, who is the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been a strong supporter of the sanctions, which were imposed after Hussein’s military invaded Kuwait.
After the war, the United Nations, led by the United States, maintained those sanctions — minus humanitarian assistance — citing Iraq's failure to comply with U.N. treaties dictating inspections of Iraq’s reported arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Hussein kicked out the last team of inspectors in 1998.
In 1999, Helms joined a bipartisan group of senators who urged President Clinton to remain focused on the Iraqi threat.
"Since the beginning of this year, however, we have noted signs of a reduced priority in U.S. policy towards Iraq," the letter stated, urging Clinton to get inspections teams back into the Middle Eastern country and start funding opposition forces there.
For Helms, the Sept. 11 attacks by Al Qaeda hijackers represent his worst fears about world terrorism, lackluster national security measures, and the failure to deal more severely with nations like Iraq which sponsor terrorism.
"As shocking as the Sept. 11 events were, it should have come as no surprise that our nation was once again challenged by aggressors bent on her destruction," he said Wednesday. "Over the past decade, America let down her guard."
With America's guard now back up, President Bush said last week that he would again urge Hussein to open his country up to inspectors or "he’ll find out" how the U.S. plans to retaliate. He has not yet elaborated on the threat despite growing speculation that Iraq might be the next step in the U.S.-led war on terrorism.
House lawmakers are also jumping on the Iraq-bashing bandwagon by introducing a bill that calls for renewed inspections, Rep. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told Fox News Wednesday.
"If we leave him alone with no monitoring or inspections, it's just a matter of time," he said. "I think sitting on the sidelines is unacceptable."
But so far Bush's top war guns have yet to make a strong statement either way, perhaps to avoid spurning allies who oppose targeting Iraq as the next move in the war against terror.
Meeting with Turkish officials in Ankara Wednesday, Secretary of State Colin Powell said the United States knows Iraq is a sponsor of terrorism and will do everything in its power to prevent Hussein from acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
But knowing Turkey's opposition to attacking Iraq, Powell was careful to say Bush "has made no decision with respect to what the next phase in our campaign against terrorism might be."
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Bin Laden’s Ho Chi Minh Trail in Canada
Joe Fernandez
Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2001
Attorney General John Ashcroft signed a cross-border security agreement Monday with Canadian Solicitor General Lawrence Macaulay and Immigration Minister Elinor Caplan. This agreement calls for the deployment of National Guardsmen and helicopters on the U.S. side of the border, and for enhanced collaboration between American and Canadian law enforcement.
The National Guard and the helicopters are overdue, seeing how Canada’s virtually non-existent immigration enforcement allowed Osama bin Laden et al., to establish their own Ho Chi Minh Trail here. However, the careerism of too many at the helm of Canada’s security apparatus should warn Americans not be deluded by promises of increased interagency cooperation.
Convicted millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam was but one of scores exploiting Canada as an active sanctuary. Morrocan Abdellah Ouzghar, linked to Ressam by telephone records, and convicted in absentia by a French court of passport fraud, has been released on bail by an Ontario judge.
Algerian Moktar Haouari and Morrocan Said Atamani (who fought beside bin Laden in Afghanistan) forged documents in Montreal. Both made refugee claims deemed illegitimate, yet neither were caught, much less removed.
Atamani has been tried in France; Haouari was convicted last summer in New York. Another bin Laden Afghanistan comrade and rejected refugee currently in a New York jail, Syrian Nabil Al-Marabh (who also has a prior for assault in Boston), remained in Canada after his claim was denied in 1994, and was freed by a Canadian judge after trying to infiltrate the U.S. last summer, before he was finally arrested in Chicago after Sept. 11.
His fellow Syrian Hassan Almrei successfully applied for refugee status but has now been detained on suspicions of terrorist links and forgery.
Others connected to Canada by National Post journalist Christie Blatchford include Egyptians Mohammed Zeki Mahjoub (who worked for a bin Laden front company) and Mahmoud Jaballah (linked to bin Laden’s Al Jihad, and ordered deported from Canada last month), and 1993 WTC bomber Mahmud Abouhalima (who planned to escape via Toronto). Yemeni Nageeb Abdul Jabar Mohammed Al Hadi was arrested in Toronto after his flight was rerouted from Chicago on 9/11; his baggage contained multiple false passports and Lufthansa uniforms. Embassy bombing suspect Ihab Mohammed Ali frequently visited Canada between 1995 and 1999.
Post journalist Diane Francis discovered that 10,000 out of 26,000 refugee claimants a year fail to appear for their hearings. Christie Blatchford reports that those who bother to show up face Immigration and Refugee Boards composed largely of:
ex-politicians and bureaucrats selected for their devotion to political correctness.
Few IRB members come from law enforcement, and even they are restricted in calling claimants on inconsistencies in their stories. Blatchford notes that Citizenship and Immigration Canada "hasn’t been terribly interested in what happens to claimants who fail or abandon their cases, or simply disappear … they’re presumed to be harmless." Failing claimants are issued departure notices and given up to 37 days to comply, "but for the most part it remains up to them if they go."
Another beneficiary of this "arrangement" is Algerian Samir Ait Mohammed, currently in a Vancouver lockup awaiting extradition to the U.S. FBI reports say Ressam fingered Mohammed for conspiracy to bomb Montreal’s Outrement district and Rue Ste. Catherine, shipping fraudulently obtained passports, running guns and attempting to procure a laptop computer for bin Laden underboss Abu Zoubeida, who ran two training camps in Afghanistan. A Canadian Broadcasting Corp. news story Monday alleges that the RCMP is reluctant to let Mohammed go because he is a Mountie snitch.
This is not the first time Canadian police agencies have played double games. While Newt Gingrich was shutting down the federal government in 1995, 11-year-old Daniel Desrochers was killed by a bomb in Montreal, one of 160 people to die in a biker war that plagued Quebec from 1994 until a tentative truce last year.
The tenuous nature of this truce is underscored by the shooting death of 17-year-old Marc-Alexandre Chartrand outside a Montreal nightclub a few weeks ago. Chartrand’s alleged killer is a 1%er (criminal biker, so called because these folks revel in the fact that the American Motorcycle Association has denounced them as the 1% of motorcyclists who live beyond the law).
In response, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Quebec Provincial Police (the SQ) and the Montreal Urban Community Police formed the Carcajou ("Wolverine") Squadron in 1995. But the former two agencies sniped at each other and the MUC police instead of going after the 1%ers, compelling Montreal investigators to disgustedly quit Carcajou in 1998. RCMP "biker expert" SSgt. Levesque and SQ "biker expert" Sgt. Ouellette rumbled so openly that American and Scandinavian biker investigators backed away from them in incredulity.
The most odious episode in Canadian law enforcement’s wannabe war against 1%ers involves the railroading of a former RCMP undercover officer. SSgt. Bob Stenhouse infiltrated Alberta’s Rebels MC and jailed several of their members. (This is not as simple as it sounds; in the 1976 "Battle of the Kingsway Inn," 20 ill-equipped and hastily prepared Edmonton Rebels bloodily whipped more than 40 trained paratroopers from 1 Commando of the elite Canadian Airborne Regiment.)
Stenhouse upholds the tradition of counterinsurgency legends Bob Nairac, Ian Phoenix and Stu Herrington, asserting that stopping malefactors takes supreme precedence over squad/departmental turf and politicking. Stenhouse passed documents to investigative journalist Yves Lavigne linking Toronto Police Chief Julian Fantino to a secret plot by a consortium of Canadian police politicians, managers and bureaucrats to enlist the media in spinning the 1%er problem so as to leverage elected officials to direct more money their way.
The CBC and Maclean's (Canada’s equivalent of Time and Newsweek ) report that Fantino was furious with Stenhouse, who was subsequently court-martialed, treated like a paroled pedophile and "constructively dismissed" from the RCMP.
Deity of Gun Control
Two weeks after 9/11, while NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik was going days without sleep, Julian "the guns, the guns, the guns" Fantino was reportedly engaged in a tit-for-tat with Toronto’s police union. As his nickname implies, Fantino, like Daryl Gates and San Jose’s Chief McNamara, worships the deity of gun control, a cult alarmingly popular among Canadian officialdom.
During the Ashcroft talks, Deputy Prime Minister Herb Gray affirmed the Canadian government’s fanatically obstinate refusal to allow U.S. Customs officers to carry handguns while in Canada. Yves Lavigne, who was "constructively dismissed" from his newspaper for exposing Toronto Triads, and who suffered numerous assassination attempts as a result of his authorship of four books on organized crime, says this about Canadian gun control:
"One … high profile law supposedly designed to take guns out of criminal hands was never mentioned by police or politicians during talks about the biker war … Police and politicians knew Bill C-68 was just a ploy to strip guns from law-abiding citizens with a grossly overbudgeted financial sinkhole of a bureaucracy and would never prevent criminals from harming themselves. This is why the law was never mentioned during talks about a biker war that saw heavy public use of guns and explosives. To do so would be to invite scrutiny of the law and its ineffectiveness against armed criminals."
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which took over the national security portfolio from the RCMP in 1984 after the latter exhibited ATF-like behaviours, is hardly more promising. In 2000, CSIS honcho Ward Elcock reported that there were "only" 350 terrorists in Canada. Unfortunately, he seems to have missed the fact that Canada is the arsenal of the Ulster Volunteer Force, whose Portadown "battalion" carried out the 1974 Dublin/Monaghan bombings, which, with 32 dead, still beats the real IRA’s 1998 Omagh bombing as the deadliest incident of the Troubles. British journalist Peter Taylor, who covered this conflict for decades, notes that Toronto is to the UVF what Boston is to the PIRA.
Elcock also spinned, "It was a project, NOT an investigation!" in regard to the CSIS/RCMP Operation Sidewinder, which revealed that the partnership of Triads (Chinese organised crime) and the PRC/PLA intelligence apparatus has infiltrated Canada to the extent that they now control over 200 Canadian companies.
Elcock’s comments become frightening when coupled with North Shore News journalist (and former police officer) Leo Knight’s findings that Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien was once employed by Li Ka-Shing, linked by Canadian and U.S. intelligence to Triads and to Beijing. Knight also reported that President Bush did not mention Canada in his first speech to Congress after 9/11 because Chretien refused American requests to beef up border security.
This is what America has guarding its northern flank. Do you feel more secure?
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Americans Overwhelmingly Back Bush-Ashcroft Anti-Terror Tactics
Senate Democrats hoping to make political hay over the Justice Department's tactics in the war on terrorism will have a tough row to hoe, a new Washington Post/ABC News Poll shows.
Nearly nine out of 10 Americans surveyed believe Attorney General John Ashcroft was right to detain some 600 foreign nationals who may have ties to terrorists.
And a full 79 percent of those polled back the Justice Department's plan to interview 5,000 Middle Eastern men who have entered the country on temporary visas.
Seven in 10 say they believe the Bush administration is doing enough to protect the civil rights of detainees.
And nearly three-quarters of those surveyed said they support wiretapping conversations between terrorist suspects and their attorneys - a concept that has more than a few left-wing bleeding-hearts types livid.
Even the prospect of trying suspected terrorists before military tribunals - the most controversial of all the Bush administration proposals - has the backing of a full 60 percent of Americans surveyed.
"[The Bush administration] is flying in the face of a lot of influential people," said Leslie Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, in an interview with the Post.
"Instead, they're relying on public opinion," he complained.
That's right, Mr. Gelb - the very same public opinion the Senate bowed to in 1999 when it decided not to convict and remove President Clinton for repeatedly perjuring himself before a grand jury.
Surely Bush's partisan opponents haven't forgotten how willing they were to toss their legal principles over the side back when their ox was being gored - all in the name of public opinion.
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The Enemy Within
Col. David Hackworth
Defending America
When Jane Fonda visited North Vietnamese army troops while our GIs were being killed by those she was comforting, we tagged her "Hanoi Jane."
Now she and other Vietnam-era war protesters are back at their divisive, feckless game. They and their latest recruits apparently can't compute that our country has just been assaulted by madmen as bad as Hitler's worst.
Self-appointed geo-strategist Fonda, commenting about the attack that killed more than 6,000 civilians in New York City alone, has already concluded, "It would be a mistake for America to retaliate militarily."
Fonda, a born-again loose cannon concerned about "the saber rattling and calls for vengeance,'' is urging people to "try to understand the underlying cause of the crime.''
Right – and while we're turning the other cheek, terrorists will be taking out the Statue of Liberty.
Where do we get such wrongheaded, solipsistic Looney Tunes?
Want more?
Self-anointed Saint Madonna – not exactly known for her vows of poverty, chastity or acts of humility – is praying for peace while paraphrasing her apparent role model, Mother Teresa. "Violence," she says, "begets violence."
Try that one from the Material Girl out on the families whose loved ones didn't come home from work on Sept. 11. Or the orphans who want their moms and dads to hold them and tell them it's all been a bad dream.
Phil Donahue remained true to his hippy roots when he argued on television that "the memory" of those killed in the attacks wouldn't "be honored by going out and killing other civilians."
Bill Maher put the icing on the appeasement cake for all his pacifist pals when he announced: "We have been cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away, that's cowardly. Staying on the airplane when it hits the building, say what [you] want about it, [is] not cowardly."
Mr. Maher, check out how that message went down with the rescue crews digging through smoking ruins with their bare hands, searching for survivors, while you were pontificating on prime time. Ask the widows of the firemen and policemen who paid the ultimate price about who's cowardly and who's brave.
Besides big mouths, what these celebrities have in common is that they all live in secure palaces where even their servants have access to gas masks. They're about as connected to the American people and the enormity of this tragedy as the terrorists themselves.
My wife, the former flower child, supposes that they might be so into denial they can't accept the hard truths that on Sept. 11, American civilians suffered almost three times the deaths inflicted upon our soldiers and sailors at Pearl Harbor, and that our very survival is at stake.
Whatever their hang-ups, one would think that even these high-profile yo-yos would get their acts together enough to support protecting their fellow Americans from clear and present danger. But the clueless celebs keep compulsively stirring the peace protest pot – even though their calls for pacification amount to providing aid to an implacable enemy whose publicly avowed purpose is to destroy our land of the free.
For sure, lots of rats are rolling in the aisles in Kabul and Baghdad while watching these clowns rant and rave on the tube. And the word from many who fought to preserve the Constitution, which gives these wonders the right to make fools of themselves, is that their treachery is over-the-top. That now, more than ever, we need to be a country united – not torn apart as we were over Vietnam, when protests aimed at the troops caused far more deaths by destroying our soldiers' will to fight.
Our privileged betrayers should ask what the world would be like had the USA not stood tall in the 20th century. Then, if they like the answer, they can go visit the Taliban – as Fonda did the NVA.
David Horowitz, a Vietnam-era peacenik, said, "If I have one regret from my radical years, it is that this country was too tolerant towards the treason of its enemies from within."
We can and should dissent when it's appropriate – but our first priority must be to secure Fort America from future strikes. Until then, we need to rally round the flag and practice unity, not division.
And, as we used to say in Vietnam: "Stay alert, stay alive."
Col. David H. Hackworth, author of "Price of Honor" and "About Face," has seen duty as a sailor, soldier and a military correspondent in nearly a dozen wars and conflicts, from the end of World War II to the recent meltdown in the ex-Yugoslavia.
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DOJ: Detention of Immigrants Necessary to Contain
'Sleeper Cells'
Wednesday, November 28, 2001
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Why Do We Help Fund Egypt's Hate Machine?
Wednesday, November 28, 2001
By Kenneth Adelman
Lenin once supposedly quipped that we capitalists would sell the rope to hang us with. But even Lenin couldn't imagine the vast amounts of foreign aid we'd give our enemies to pay for that rope. And yet, that's basically what we've been doing with Egypt for a quarter century.
American taxpayers hand Egypt upwards of $2 billion — that's $2,000,000,000 — each year, and have since the 1970s. And it's true that Egypt has projected a certain friendliness toward the U.S. since Anwar Sadat's stunning journey to Jerusalem in 1977 and the subsequent Camp David Accords establishing peace with Israel.
But Egypt's smile masks a venom-spewing machine. The Egyptian government funds among the most vicious anti-American, anti-Western and anti-Semitic propaganda anywhere, which in turn fuels the incendiary Islam we're facing today.
How so?
— Egypt's state-controlled press features articles suggesting Israel masterminded the Sept. 11 attacks — even though the ringleader of the attacks, Mohammed Atta, was an Egyptian.
— Egypt's government-subsidized mullahs spew the most bilious kind of hate speech.
— Egypt's government-funded universities teach anti-American hatreds as evidenced by recent diatribes emanating from the country's Al-Azhar University. "Islamic clerics in Egypt declare war on America," heralds one article on its Web site. (The Web site www.Memri.org tracks and translates into English what the Arab leaders tell their own people and the vitriol coming from Al-Azhar can be found there.)
This Egyptian university's main religious leader, Sheikh Ali Abu Al-Hassan, said that "the West … have (sic) put together a coalition against Islam." Al-Hassan considers it an Islamic sacrilege to be "entering into an alliance with the Americans against Afghanistan … the Afghan opposition … must stand with their countrymen [and] their co-religionists, otherwise Allah and his angels will curse them …"
A professor lecturing at this university recently said: "It is America that killed itself with its distorted policy. It was completely successful in sowing hatred and loathing in the hearts of [people] of the entire world by means of its policy, a policy of double standards, primarily in all things regarding Islamic and Arab affairs … What America has done against Afghanistan is a crime, and one of the most loathsome kinds of international terrorism."
And while our foreign aid doesn't directly fund these abominations, dollars are, of course, fungible. Our money helps keep the Egyptian government afloat, since its own companies offer little competitive in today's global economy. And what they say about Israel, and Jews, is even worse.
So why do we fork over the $2 billion yearly? Diplomats explain that it's to give Egypt incentive to maintain peace with Israel, as in the Camp David Accords. But why do we have to bribe Egypt to keep peace with Israel? Peace is a benefit in and of itself. We need not bribe them to take it. Besides, Israel's F-16s and crack ground troops give the Egyptians enough incentive to keep that peace.
For nearly 25 years, friends of Israel in the United States have pushed to keep aid high for Egypt, as for Israel. By why Americans — including American Jews — continue to pressure those in Congress to bankroll one of the world's most vile anti-Western and anti-Semitic regimes is mind-boggling — especially to a Jew like me.
On Fox News over the weekend, I told Tony Snow that if this war ends by booting the Taliban out of Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein out of Iraq, ending the games we've been playing with Saudi Arabia, and stopping all subsidies for Egypt, then we'll have had a good war. For with Egypt, until now anyway, we've been even stupider than Lenin anticipated.
Kenneth Adelman is a frequent guest commentator on Fox News, was assistant to U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld from 1975 to 1977 and, under President Ronald Reagan, U.N. ambassador and arms-control director. Mr. Adelman is now co-host of TechCentralStation.com.
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Weinberger Blasts Clinton for Damaging Military
Sunday, Nov. 25, 2001 7:59 p.m. EST
Former Reagan Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger blasted ex-president Bill Clinton on Sunday, charging that his policies seriously undermined the U.S. military's ability to fight and win wars.
"I think Clinton basically did an enormous amount of damage to us during his eight years," Weinberger told WABC Radio's Steve Malzberg. "He certainly allowed the military strength that we had at the end of the Gulf War to erode very seriously," the Reagan defense chief added. "And he also committed the military to all kinds of expeditions and impossible missions because it provided a little headline relief for him from time to time."
Echoing criticism in his new book, "In the Arena: A Memoir of the 20th Century," Weinberger said that Clinton's strategic partnership with the Communist Chinese greatly enhanced their military power. "He was never above giving them various advantages that they wanted," even though Beijing was "very open in its opposition to everything we tried to do in the Pacific."
Meanwhile, as China's military grew stronger, President Clinton gave only lip service to the concept of missile defense for the U.S., Weinberger said. "He never did anything except block it in every way that he could during his whole eight years."
Asked about Clinton's recent speech at Georgetown University, where the ex-president suggested that America shared part of the blame for the 9/11 attacks because of slavery and U.S. mistreatment of the American Indian, Weinberger said:
"If it was the Unites States' fault, he has an awful lot of burden to bear because he was there for eight years during a time in which we weakened ourselves substantially by a lot of his policies." The former Reagan defense chief said Clinton "gave us, I'm afraid, about as poor a foreign policy and poor administration as I hope we'll never see again."
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War Naysayers Have Egg on Their Face
Howard Kurtz
Monday Nov. 19, 2001; 1:08 p.m. EST
With the Taliban on the run and rumors of Osama bin Laden's imminent capture spurring rallies on Wall Street, it's easy to forget that just weeks ago, the media was filled with pessimistic predictions about the U.S.-led war effort in Afghanistan.
Our favorite was R.W. Apple's Oct. 31 New York Times report decribing a disaster in the making, with mounting civilian casualties killed by errant U.S. bombs and a Northern Alliance that was afraid to take on the Taliban. The Times headline? "A Military Quagmire Remembered: Afghanistan as Vietnam."
Today Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz catalogs a list of other similarly misbegotten pronouncements from the press corps' armchair Pattons.
"Columnist Charles Krauthammer, Oct. 30: 'The war is not going well. The Taliban have not yielded ground. Not a single important Taliban leader has been killed, or captured or has defected.'
"Jacob Heilbrunn, Los Angeles Times, Nov. 4: The 'administration has bungled the challenge. . . . The war effort is in deep trouble. The United States is not headed into a quagmire; it's already in one. The U.S. is not losing the first round against the Taliban; it has already lost it.'
"The New Republic, Nov. 8: Bush 'is relying on . . . airpower, proxies and Special Operations forces. . . . These three instruments have gotten us exactly nowhere.'
"USA Today, Nov. 9: 'Just one month into the U.S. war in Afghanistan, military experts increasingly are coming to the same conclusion: Airstrikes and commandos won't be enough to rout the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'eda terrorist network.'"
It's worth remembering how wrong these and so many other press doom-and-gloomers were the next time media mainstreamers decide they know better than the generals in charge.
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In case you missed it, there was actually a report that someone in Pakistan had published in a newspaper there an offer of a reward to anyone who killed an American, any American. So I just thought I would write to let them know what an American is, so they would know when they found one.
An American is English, or French, or Italian, Irish, German, Spanish, Polish, Russian or Greek. An American may also be African, Indian, Chinese,Japanese, Australian, Iranian, Asian, or Arab, or Pakistani, or Afghan.
An American may also be a Cherokee, Osage, Blackfoot, Navaho, Apache, or one of the many other tribes known as native Americans.
An American is Christian, or he could be Jewish, or Buddhist, or Muslim. In fact, there are more Muslims in America than in Afghanistan. The only difference is that in America they are free to worship as each of them choose. An American is also free to believe in no religion. For that he will answer only to God, not to the government, or to armed thugs claiming to speak for the government and for God.
An American is from the most prosperous land in the history of the world. The root of that prosperity can be found in the Declaration of Independence, which recognizes the God-given right of each man and woman to the pursuit of happiness.
An American is generous. Americans have helped out just about every other nation in the world in their time of need. When Afghanistan was overrun by the Soviet army 20 years ago, Americans came with arms and supplies to enable the people to win back their country. As of the morning of September 11, Americans had given more than any other nation to the poor in Afghanistan.
An American does not have to obey the mad ravings of ignorant, ungodly cruel, old men. American men will not be fooled into giving up their lives to kill! l innocent people, so that these foolish old men may hold on to power. American women are free to show their beautiful faces to the world, as each of them choose.
An American is free to criticize his government's officials when they are wrong, in his or her own opinion. Then he is free to replace them, by majority vote. Americans welcome people from all lands, all cultures, all religions, because they are not afraid. They are not afraid that their history, their religion, their beliefs, will be overrun, or forgotten. That is because they know they are free to hold to their religion, their beliefs, their history, as each of them choose. And just as Americans welcome all, they enjoy the best that everyone has to bring, from all over the world. The best science, the best technology, the best products, the best books, the best music, the best food, the best athletes.
Americans welcome the best, but they also welcome the least. The national symbol of America welcomes your tired and your poor, the wretched refuse of your teeming shores, the homeless, tempest tossed. These in fact are the people who built America. Many of them were working in the Twin Towers on the morning of September 11, earning a better life for their families. So you can try to kill an American if you must. Hitler did. So did General Tojo, and Stalin, and Mao Tse-Tung, and every bloodthirsty tyrant in the history of the world. But in doing so you would just be killing yourself. Because Americans are not a particular people from a particular place. They are the embodiment of the human spirit of freedom. Everyone who holds to that spirit, everywhere, is an American.
So look around you. You may find more Americans in your land than you thought were there. One day they will rise up and overthrow the old, ignorant, tired tyrants that trouble too many lands. Then those lands too will join the community of free and prosperous nations. And America will welcome them!
This was published in National Review magazine shortly after the Attack on
America in September, 2001.
It was written by Peter Ferrara, an associate professor of law at the George
Mason University School of Law.
Reference: http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/whatisanamerican.htm
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How
things have changed
Bill O'Reilly
You don't have to be Nostradamus to know that life in America has changed drastically since Sept. 11. No one can escape the shift in attitude and that is a good news, bad news situation.
The best news is that even the dimmest children now know they live in an actual country. For the first time in 50 years, kids have been exposed to emotional patriotism and have been confronted with the fact that there are other things of importance besides the mall, the latest rap CD and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Will American history actually make a comeback in school? Could happen.
The not so good news is the fact that children have learned that their country cannot protect them. Anthrax letters, suicide terrorists and fanatical foreign governments pose a threat that can never be entirely snuffed out. Some adults have learned this lesson too but apparently those adults do not inhabit Congress. Our leaders in Washington are still dragging their feet on reforming the FBI, CIA and other intelligence agencies that have been compromised by incompetent leadership and public apathy. We need intelligence pros in charge of our security – not political appointees who look more frightened than the captured Taliban.
Flying has certainly changed. For the past decade, it was annoying with delays and poor service. Now it is downright chaotic at times with jumpy security personnel and overwhelmed airline employees. Does anybody look forward to going to the airport? Anybody?
Charity giving has changed forever in America and that is mixed news. The big guns like the Red Cross and the United Way have not performed well under pressure and most Americans will remember. We the people gave billions to help the 9-11 families but most of our money is still sitting in the bank, the victim of mismanagement and chaos on the part of the charities. This is a deplorable situation but one the public needs to know about. There is little oversight in the non-profit world. Be generous, but beware.
Entertainment has changed. Those dopey reality shows were always foolish, but now most of us know it. Wasting time watching someone eat a rodent is somehow offensive after the attack. News watching is up. That's good.
And traditional programming is back. Carol Burnett put up some serious numbers with a TV special looking back at her gentle brand of humor. Racially charged humor is out, gross slapstick is looked upon as not worth anyone's time and even Saturday Night Live has lightened up on the political mockery.
If you had to put one word on all the change, it would be "comfort." Americans want comfort food, clothing, entertainment and hobbies. Personal angst is out. We have enough to worry about with al-Qaida running around. We don't need Gary Shandling dropping his neurosis on us. Jerry Springer is dying a gory syndicated TV death. Nobody wants to see morons exploited by a sleazy ringmaster. Rikki Lake is through. Sally is over. Say goodbye to tease and sleaze.
The war on terror has changed the cultural landscape in America and it has also changed some thought patterns. Political correctness is on the run. A lady in Rocklin, Calif., threatened to sue a public school after the principal erected a sign that said "God Bless America." The community has ostracized the woman and her little daughter had to leave school.
Comedian Bill Maher was almost sacked by ABC after he said on his program "Politically Incorrect" that American politicians were cowardly for lobbing cruise missiles at terrorists. Three months ago that remark would have garnered little notice – today it could end a career. That's because many of us are far less tolerant of foolish ideological agendas, we are much more judgmental in our thinking.
Finally, perhaps the biggest change in America is the realization that evil actually exists. The moral relativism that danced happily through the Clinton years is gone. Right and wrong is back. Spin is out – logic is in.
And that is a terrific thing. Evil does exist in this world. In the United States, it has hidden behind the First Amendment, and been sheltered by the numbing narrowness of politically correct thought. As we approach the year 2002, the eyes and minds of many Americans have been opened and the evils of this world are now in plain sight. And that's the first step toward crushing them.
Veteran TV news anchor Bill O'Reilly is host of the Fox News Channel show, "The O'Reilly Factor," and author of the best-selling book, "The O'Reilly Factor: The Good, the Bad, and the Completely Ridiculous," available at the WorldNetDaily storefront. His WorldNetDaily column is now syndicated internationally.
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The Real Story of Flight 93 The terrorists had years to plan their hijacking. The passengers had just minutes to respond. But a band of patriots came together to defy death and save a symbol of freedom. What happened on that flight—and inside the cockpit. By Karen Breslau, Eleanor Clift and Evan Thomas NEWSWEEK |
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 Lisa Beamer, whose husband died on Flight 93, is left with her sons, David, 3, (left) and Drew, 18 months, and a third baby on the way. |
Dec. 3 issue — In the first few days after September 11, Lisa Beamer could not sleep for more than an hour. Then she would wake up and cry. She worried about the boys, David, 3, and Drew, 19 months, and the new baby due in January. David wanted to know why, if their father loved them so much, he had gone to be with Jesus. And there was that one nagging question. Why had her husband, a man so attached to his cell phone that Lisa had to confiscate it when they went on vacation, not called her from the plane? Other passengers had called home from Flight 93 to say goodbye and talk to their loved ones. Why not Todd? |
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THEN
ON FRIDAY night, Sept. 14, she got a call from her crisis counselor at
United Airlines. Todd Beamer, it turned out, had made a call; it had been
routed to an Airfone operator in Chicago. The counselor said she had a
message for Lisa, but she was worried it might be too much to handle. “Read
it to me right now,” said Lisa. She did not ask why it had taken the FBI
three days to let her know about her husband’s last words. The letter was
short and to the point. It recounted a conversation between Todd and an
Airfone supervisor, Lisa Jefferson, and some last words that will never be
forgotten. The next morning the two Lisas had a tearful conversation.
Jefferson told Beamer that her husband had been calm and matter-of-fact.
Lisa Beamer was relieved; she had not wanted her husband to die in terror. Actually, Todd had been afraid. They all had been deathly afraid. More than once, he cried out for his Savior. But Beamer, like so many other passengers and crew aboard Flight 93, overcame his fear. They did not wait to die. They went out fighting, and by doing so they may have saved countless others and spared a symbol of democracy and freedom from destruction. Osama bin Laden is said to have thought that the United States has become soft and weak (a judgment he may have been reconsidering as he fled from cave to cave last week, chased by U.S. commandos and bombers). Bin Laden is also reported to be deeply historical, to recall with immediacy the struggles and triumphs and humiliations of the Islamic world of a century or a thousand years ago. He might have been wise to have learned more about the historical willingness of Americans to die for liberty. The first American flag flown by the patriots of the early Revolutionary War was not the Stars and Stripes but a banner showing a coiled snake, with the inscription don’t tread on me. America’s latest war for freedom did not begin with a speech by George W. Bush or a cruise-missile attack on a terrorist-training camp in Afghanistan. It began with a group of citizen soldiers on Flight 93 who rose up, like their forefathers, to defy tyranny. And when they came storming down the aisle, it wasn’t the Americans who were afraid. It was the terrorists.
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For the past two
months, NEWSWEEK has interviewed the families and friends of the passengers
of Flight 93 to learn their story. Many of the details are missing; many
questions remain. But informed sources described in detail to NEWSWEEK the
words and sounds picked up by the cockpit voice recorder on Flight 93,
information that has never been revealed before. The tapes shed light on a
central mystery: they strongly suggest that the hijackers flew the plane
into the ground under ferocious assault from the passengers. The picture is
one of shock, struggle, fear—but the lasting impression that remains is of
courage, the kind of extraordinary bravery ordinary Americans can show. |
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The four hijackers who took over Flight 93 were not supermen by any means.
They were one shy of a full team—the other three planes were each seized by
five men. Al Qaeda’s September 11 attacks were executed with
frightening efficiency, but Flight 93 was the exception. From the outset the
timing was off. Investigators believe that the hijacked Boeing 757 was
supposed to join a deadly aerial ballet, choreographed to send four
airliners swooping into their targets in New York and Washington within
minutes of each other. But unlike the other flights on that crystal-clear
morning, Flight 93 was delayed at chronically clogged Newark International
Airport for nearly 45 minutes. It did not take off until 8:42, six minutes
before American Flight 11 slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade
Center. Aboard the other planes, the hijackers moved quickly to seize
control. But on Flight 93 the four terrorists waited for breakfast to be
served.
The lead man, Ziad Samir Jarrah, sat in 1B, the first seat on the left side of the aisle. If he had followed the instructions (titled “The Last Night”) from his ringleader, Mohamed Atta, he would have bathed carefully, shaving “excess” body hair. He might have been sitting quietly, as instructed, silently praying 1,000 times, “There is no God but God.” He had been told to be “happy, optimistic, calm” because he was “heading for a deed that God loves and will accept.” Perhaps he was thinking about his girlfriend back in Germany. He had written to tell her that he would not be coming home. “I have done what I had to do,” he wrote. “You should be proud, because it is an honor and in the end you will see that everyone will be happy.” Or maybe he was thinking about the martyr’s reward promised in the letter from Atta: “This is the day, God willing, you spend with the women of Paradise.” At about 9:25 a.m., in the sparsely filled main cabin, passengers were settling back for a snooze or popping open their laptops or picking up a novel for the long coast-to-coast flight. Sun glinted off the wings; the engines droned quietly. But passengers up front in first class may have observed something strange and unsettling: four Middle Eastern-looking passengers—Jarrah and three younger men behind him in seats 3C, 3D and 6B—tying red bandannas around their heads.
At about 9:25 the pilots checked in with Cleveland air-traffic control, uttering a jaunty “good morning.” Suddenly the air-traffic controller could hear the sound of screaming and scuffling over the open mike. “Did somebody call Cleveland?” the controller asked. No answer. Just the muffled sounds of struggle. Then silence. It’s not clear what was happening in the passenger cabin. In their instructions the hijackers were told: “Shout ‘Allahu akbar,’ because this strikes fear in the hearts of the unbelievers.” And: “When the confrontation begins, strike like champions who do not want to go back to this world.” Before September 11, airline pilots were routinely instructed not to resist hijackers but rather to go along with their demands. There does not appear to have been much of a negotiation aboard Flight 93. After 40 seconds of silence, one of the pilots keyed on the microphone again, allowing Cleveland air control to hear more muffled clamor and someone—presumably one of the pilots—frantically shouting, “Get out of here! Get out of here!” The mike went dead again. Every commercial aircraft has an automatic cockpit voice recorder. It records on a continuous loop, with every 30 minutes erasing the previous 30 minutes. The purpose is to allow safety investigators to hear everything that was said in the cockpit during the final half hour of flights that crash. The tape of the cockpit voice recorder of Flight 93 begins shortly after 9:30 a.m. The sounds it picked up were grim. Someone is crying and moaning, pleading not to be hurt, not to be killed. Investigators are not sure what happened, but the hijackers may have seized a flight attendant and held a knife or box cutter to her throat to bring the captain out of the cockpit. Or they may have just barged into the cockpit—the door was locked, but designed to withstand no more than 150 pounds of pressure. Some investigators speculate that the hijackers may have slashed the throats of the pilots as the two men were still strapped into their seats. The cockpit voice recorder picked up the sound of someone choking. When a hijacker took over the controls, he knocked the plane off autopilot. Signals from the transponder show the aircraft jumping up and down. Then there are the voices of the hijackers, speaking in Arabic, reassuring each other: “Everything is fine.” In San Ramon, Calif., a prosperous suburb in the hills of the East Bay across from San Francisco, Deena Burnett was preparing breakfast for her three girls. The phone rang. It was her husband, Tom, and she thought he sounded odd. “Are you OK?” she asked. “No,” he said, speaking quickly in a low voice. “I’m on a plane, it’s United Flight 93, and we’ve been hijacked. They’ve knifed a guy, and there’s a bomb onboard. Call the authorities, Deena.” Then he hung up. At Cleveland Center, the air-traffic controllers furiously tried to raise Flight 93. Other planes in the area began listening in to the traffic. They heard a breathless, heavily accented man’s voice muttering something from the Flight 93 cockpit. “It sounded like someone said they have a bomb onboard,” said the pilot of a private jet. “That’s what we thought,” said a controller. They were hearing right. A thickly accented voice came back on the air: “Hi, this is the captain. We’d like you all to remain seated. There is a bomb onboard. We are going to turn back to the airport. And they have our demands, so please be quiet.” Investigators think the voice belonged to Jarrah, and that he had flipped the wrong switch, thinking he was addressing the passengers over the PA system when he was calling Cleveland control instead. On the cockpit voice recorder, Arabic voices can be heard realizing their mistake. They know they are being overheard by air-traffic control and other planes in the area. The CVR picks up numerous clicks and snaps as the hijackers fiddle with switches and knobs, trying to make sure they are no longer on the open airwaves.
In daring and dying, the passengers and crew of Flight 93 found victory for us all.
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Jane Fonda: U.S. Must Understand
'Underlying Causes' of Terror Attack
Saturday, Sept. 22, 2001 12:26 p.m. EDT
"Hanoi Jane" Fonda advised Americans Thursday to "try to understand the underlying causes" of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon that killed 6,700 of her fellow citizens, adding that it would be a mistake for the U.S. to retaliate militarily against the perpetrators.
Discussing the attacks on an Atlanta radio station, the former actress and ex-wife of CNN chief Ted Turner said she was concerned about the emotional reaction to the disaster.
"It's hard to be hopeful, frankly," she told Mix 105.7 FM. "What concerns me very much is the saber rattling and the calls for vengeance."
"I think it has to be dealt with as a crime," the one-time exercise guru counseled. "And when there's a crime, you don't bomb a city or a country - you use very, very clever intelligence, undercover-type operations to get the criminals and punish them, and then you try to understand the underlying causes of the crime."
Fonda's comments have not been reported outside Atlanta, where they caused an uproar on talk radio station WGST on Friday.
She earned the moniker "Hanoi Jane" in 1971 at the height of the Vietnam War, when she traveled to North Vietnam, donned a Communist military uniform and pretended to shoot down U.S. pilots while manning an anti-aircraft gun in Hanoi
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Giving Thanks for Those in
Uniform
Wednesday, November 21, 2001
By Kenneth Adelman
This will be an extraordinary Thanksgiving, as this has been an extraordinary fall. So tomorrow let's express our deepest appreciation for those extraordinary uniformed men and women who enrich our nation. How can we express enough thanks for those firefighters on Sept. 11? As one commentator reflected, the most unusual aspect of firefighters is their odd sense of direction: as throngs were pouring down and out of the World Trade Center, they were rushing in and up to save people. Nearly 350 of the brethren did not lose their lives on Sept. 11. They gave them. And they continue to toil at the still-incendiary Ground Zero. One firefighter said the other day that the only time off he's taken off is to attend funerals of his fallen comrades. Heroes, all.
Next, we must remember the athletes who happened to board United Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco on the 11th. As Sports Illustrated described in an emotional story in the Sept. 24 issue: "The huge rugby player, the former high school football star and the onetime college baseball player were in first class, the former national judo champ was in coach. On the morning of Sept. 11, at 32,000 feet, those four men teamed up to sacrifice their lives for those of perhaps thousands of others." They didn't board the flight expecting to be heroes. Ordinary fellows, each one, until they proved so extraordinary.
Their widows graciously understand this. "A peace grew inside Liz Glick. 'I think God had this larger purpose for him,' she said. 'He was supposed to fly out the night before, but couldn't. I had [our daughter] Emmy one month early, so Jeremy got to see her. You can't tell me God isn't at work there.'" And Sports Illustrated described how: "In Cranbury, N.J., a baby grew in Lisa Beamer, Todd's wife, their third child. Hearing the report last Friday of her husband's heroics, Lisa said, 'made my life worth living again.' It was Todd Beamer, after all, who told his wife he loved her and the children, before telling his flight-mates, 'Let's roll." That they probably saved the Capitol building, or the White House, is an incomparable gift to the American people.
We are thankful, too, to the police and other rescue workers and to the mayor of New York. On Sept. 10, Rudolph Giuliani was an oft-mocked figure who was considered, at best, a controversial politician. He transformed himself into an extraordinary leader on Sept. 11 and every single day since. He's my candidate for Time magazine's "Man of the Year" for 2001.
And last, but surely not least, are those proudly wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard. These men and women have, in the last several weeks, performed honorably and with dignity in defense of their fellow countrymen. Americans gathering around their dining room tables tomorrow should give thanks for the continuing sacrifice and dedication of these men and women.
These soldiers are fulfilling the traditional role that the greatest living military historian, John Keegan, celebrates in the closing paragraphs of his book, Fields of Battle: the Wars for North America: Americans are proficient at war in the same way that they are proficient with work. It is a task, sometimes a duty. Americans have worked at war since the seventeenth century, to protect themselves from Indians, to win their independence from George III, to make themselves one country, to win the whole of their continent, to extinguish autocracy and dictatorship in the world outside. It is not their favored form of work. Left to themselves, Americans build, cultivate, bridge, dam, canalize, invent, teach, manufacture, think, write, lock themselves in struggle with eternal challenges that man has chosen to confront, and with an intensity not known elsewhere on the globe. Bidden to make war their work, Americans shoulder the burden with intimidating purpose. There is, I have said, an American mystery, the nature of which I only begin to perceive. If I were obliged to define it, I would say it is the ethos - masculine, pervasive, unrelenting - of work as an end in itself. War is a form of work, and America makes war, however reluctantly, however unwillingly, in a particularly workmanlike way. I do not love war, but I love America.
Kenneth Adelman is a frequent guest commentator on Fox News, was assistant to U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld from 1975 to 1977 and, under President Ronald Reagan, U.N. ambassador and arms-control director.
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Iraq Next in U.S. Cross Hairs
Dan Frisa
Monday, Nov. 19, 2001
Military planners are no doubt well into the next several phases of the U.S. War on Terrorism, and it is likely that Iraq is the most likely on-deck target. As the action in Afghanistan continues forward with increasing success, signals are being sent by the administration that Iraq will be next on the hit parade. It is important to stress that there is absolutely no necessity in connecting Saddam Hussein to the events involving the Sept. 11th attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and United Airlines Flight 93 in Pennsylvania.
Recall the president's declaration that the war is not in any way limited to tracking down and bringing to justice those involved in supporting, planning and executing the deadly attack which killed some five thousand innocents in September. This war is against all terrorists and all who sponsor it and harbor its perpetrators, including - but not limited to - the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Some commentators have suggested - wrongly - that proof of a link to Iraq and the 19 murderers must first be established before taking action there. This is simply not the case and is a wholesale misunderstanding of the military charge governing U.S. action. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said Sunday that Iraq and Saddam, with chemical and biological weapons stores, "qualify" as a target given their indisputable status as a terrorist state. "We didn't need Sept. 11 to tell us that Saddam Hussein is a very dangerous man," she said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
There are, of course, numerous instances of contact between Iraq and the 9-11 murderer Atta before the attack, which just bolsters the U.S. case. Inexplicably, former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter told Fox News Channel today that Iraq likely did not have the capability to initiate chemical or biological warfare. Kicked out of Iraq three years ago, Ritter neglected to mention that Saddam refused access to the inspectors to numerous suspected sites, and that was then.
Since the inspectors left, Iraq still has - at the very least - whatever weapons were then its possession; to say nothing of the intelligence developed pointing to further development of additional weapons of mass destruction. ''The United States strongly suspects that Iraq has taken advantage of three years of no U.N. inspections to improve all phases of its offensive biological weapons program,'' John Bolton <http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/11/19/170241.shtml>, under secretary of state for arms control, said today in Geneva. ''The existence of Iraq's program is beyond dispute.''
Two top U.S. government officials naming Iraq in two days is certainly not a coincidence. This represents a purposeful laying of groundwork for where phase two in the War on Terrorism will occur. Public opinion would seem to support such action as long as the case is clearly laid out by the president, as forcefully as his speech before the joint session of Congress nearly two months ago. With the legitimate concerns raised by the anthrax incidents, Americans are rightly insistent that chemical and biological threats be eradicated. That puts Iraq squarely in the cross hairs for the next phase of the War on Terrorism, right where it belongs.
Dan Frisa represented New York in the United States Congress and served four terms in the New York State Assembly. E-mail: danfrisa@newsmax.com.
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Average Americans Frustrated With
Washington Press
Thursday, November 01, 2001
By Catherine Donaldson-Evans
NUTLEY, N.J. — Every day, they
gather at the Pentagon and clamor to ask questions about the war on terror.
They demand details about military strategy, civilian casualties and locations
of troops and targets. Their inquiries are laced with skepticism over how the
government is handling the war. That cynicism has made some average Americans
angry.
"I guess they've forgotten the events of Sept. 11, when thousands of civilians
here died for no apparent reason," Sam Marino, 25, a bartender at the Franklin
Steak House and Tavern in Nutley, N.J., said of the Pentagon press corps.
With America's war on terror approaching its third month, the tone in media
reports is increasingly bleak. Why haven't we won the war already, they ask. Why
are civilians dying, they want to know. Where is Usama Bin Laden, they demand.
The questions aren't going over well with out-of-the-beltway Americans, nearly
80 percent of whom tell pollsters they approve of the war's progress.
"The pundits sitting on their fat backsides in Washington — I really have a
problem with them," fumed World War II Navy veteran Jim Goran of Bloomfield,
N.J. "I would jail them, that's how angry I am." Goran takes issue with most of
the questions posed by the press corps, calling them "insensitive, unpatriotic
and devoid of any intelligence."
At Wednesday's Pentagon briefing, reporters asked Defense Department spokesman
Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem to provide more details about the recent, heavier
bombing in Afghanistan and targets that were struck a day earlier. "Admiral,
what's the rationale for not saying where the B-52s hit Tuesday?" one journalist
asked. "We're getting reports from eyewitnesses they hit; the bad guys know
where you hit. What's the big secret?"
Stufflebeem responded — as he did several times during the news conference —
that he wouldn't go into specifics. "It's one thing to have seen one fly
overhead if you're on the ground," he said. "It's another thing to broadcast an
intention of a type of target or tactic and a specific weapons system that is
optimized against that."
Many Franklin Steak House patrons said the press and the public don't need the
scoop on each move the military makes in the war. "We don't need to know
everything. They can't tell us everything," said Jamie Deberto, 34, a Web
designer from Bloomfield. "It's frustrating — they know they shouldn't be asking
some of these questions." She and others think revealing all troop strategies
and movements spells defeat. "That reporting is doing the intelligence gathering
for our enemy," said communications systems engineer John Gadoury, 54, of
Bradford, N.H. "Our news system shouldn't be in that business."
The Washington press corps has pummeled Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and
other Bush administration officials with questions about Afghan civilian
casualty numbers — and mused at the ethics of bombing during the Muslim holy
month of Ramadan.
Most here don't share the media's concern with those issues.
"The press has been almost obsessed with whether the campaign is going to end
before Ramadan and how many civilian casualties the Taliban are suffering," said
lawyer and state legislator Kevin O'Toole, 37, of Cedar Grove, N.J. "But the
people of the United States believe those things are not relevant during times
of war. Is Bin Laden going to take a break on Christmas?"
He expressed frustration at the media's apparent impatience with how long the
war is taking, and said that's not in line with what the average American feels.
"They're doing a disservice to the American people, the presidency and national
security by trying to make this a 24-hour war," O'Toole said. "The American
people are very patient with this military action."
Not all Franklin patrons believe the press has been off-base, however.
"We should definitely know all the moves," said Greg Lampariello, 31, head chef
at Terrazza, another restaurant in Nutley. "They should keep pressuring [the
government] to tell us what's going on. They're our lifeline to the other side."
That opinion wasn't shared by the majority of patrons. Most said they wished the
D.C. press corps would report the news without cynicism and join with other
Americans in rallying around the cause.
"I think they've lost the moral," said Jennifer Hartos, 23, a medical assistant
from Bloomfield. "They've lost a sense of American pride."
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Thank You, Bill Clinton
Christopher Ruddy
Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2001
I have intercepted several mail communications between various world leaders and former President Bill Clinton in the wake of Sept. 11. I felt that these should be published for the historical record, if nothing else. I plan to do so over the next several weeks. I will not offer any comment or analysis of their contents, but will allow readers to draw their own conclusions.
1 October 2001
Sent via diplomatic pouch
Honorable President
William J. Clinton
Harlem
New York, New York
Dear President Clinton:
On behalf of the Republic of Iraq, its Baath party and the peoples of our Arab nation, I extend my sincere thanks to you. We are grateful for what you did for us during the past eight years. After the imperialistic invasion into the Arab nation and the House of Our People by your predecessor, George H.W. Bush, I was given for dead. My days on the earth were numbered. The Iraqi Republic was said to be destroyed. But after your success in 1992, and again in 1996, you have helped to renew this great nation of which I remain the great leader.
I want you to know that I understood you had to, as you say, "look tough," with occasional bombings, the "embargo," and so forth. But, Allah be praised, you spared me after you discovered my attempt in 1993 to assassinate George Bush during his trip to Kuwait. Again, it was you who intervened to make sure your evil CIA and FBI did not fully investigate our first attempt on the World Trade Center in February of 1993 - on the anniversary day your predecessor began his "ground war" against the people of the Arab nation.
When our intermediary friends from the great land to the far north came to me and said it would be helpful to you if I rattled the cage, if I acted the role of the madman, and if you could strike back at me with pinpricks - so that you could appear victorious among your foolish people - I did not really believe your sincerity.
I did not believe you would be a friend and faithful. I was wrong. But I did as requested, and time and again, at critical moments in your administration, I made threatening moves or actions. And time and again, you struck back. Always you looked good, strong, tough. We laughed in Baghad as your silly Pentagon people hit our $10,000 radar stations with $500,000 cruise missiles.
You were unlike any American I have ever known. You were honorable. You lived up to your promises made through our great friends in the north. I can report to you today that the Iraqi Republic, our Republican Guard and the great army of the Arab nation are as strong as they were before the imperialistic Gulf War of Mr. Bush. We are strong and, thanks to you, Mr. Clinton, your country is weak - much, much weaker than it was before the imperialistic war of Mr. Bush. Today, his son cannot make me a target of his father's revenge because the Pentagon of his father does not exist. This all, thanks to you, great leader.
We have learned to fight fire with greater fire. When your U.N. and State Department demanded us to end our weapons programs, you advised us, through our friends from the north, to hold firm. We did so. As we threw your inspectors out of our country and rebuilt our programs to make Iraq a nuclear power as great as America and Israel, you allowed the embargo to be lifted.
Our oil, the gift of Allah, was freed because of you, and billions of dollars flowed into my accounts. You made this possible. It was your decision alone. We shall not forget your benevolence. Many here in Baghdad, in the Baath party, could not believe that if we threw your inspectors out, we would actually be rewarded. But I told them to trust our friends from the north, that you were a man of honor.
When September 11 occurred, our great people knew that once again the House of Islam, the Baath party and the Arab nation have risen once again. It was through the mercy of Allah, his benevolence, and you, great leader, that we accomplished so much in so short a time.
Your brother in peace,
Saddam Hussein
President of the Republic of Iraq
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Navy: Anti-Gay Slur Written on Bomb Was Inappropriate
Friday, October 19, 2001
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| U.S. Navy Aviation Ordnancemen look over an array of personalized weaponry. | |
WASHINGTON — Pentagon officials were forced to apologize following complaints about the language scribbled on the front of an Afghanistan-bound bomb aboard a U.S. carrier in the Asian theater, a top Navy official said Thursday.
The Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group, complained about such a message after a photograph distributed by the Associated Press earlier this week showed a Navy officer aboard the flight deck of the U.S.S. Enterprise standing next to a bomb with what was described as a gay slur by the group.
The words "High Jack This," followed by the slur, were visible in the photograph.
Rear Adm. Stephen Pietropaoli called the language an "isolated incident" in a letter to the Human Rights Campaign and reiterated that the Navy does not tolerate discrimination.
"We immediately notified Navy commanders involved with Operation Enduring Freedom to ensure steps were taken to prevent a recurrence of this unfortunate incident. They have done so," Pietropaoli wrote.
Pilots or crews of U.S. warplanes often write messages on bombs, either taunting the enemy or praising America. Messages written on bombs during the anti-terrorism airstrikes have included several references to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Several newspapers across the country also asked the Navy about the bomb's message earlier this week, said Pietropaoli, the Navy's chief of information.
Elizabeth Birch, executive director of Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement that the letter was "a welcome clarification and we are pleased the Navy has stated that this type of anti-gay behavior has no place in our armed forces."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Tim's Take: In this post Clinton Navy of spineless flag officers looking for their next cushy promotion, one tradition after another is stripped from our Sailors. Next thing you know they'll be personalizing bombs with apologies for even dropping them. We're at war folks, our Sailors need every edge and moral victory they can get.
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I, for one, am quite disturbed by these actions of so-called American citizens; and I am tired of this nation worrying about whether or not we are offending some individual or their culture. Since the terrorist attacks on September 11, we have experienced a surge in patriotism by the majority of Americans. However, the dust from the attacks had barely settled in New York and Washington D.C. when the "politically correct" crowd began complaining about the possibility that our patriotism was offending others.
I am not against immigration, nor do I hold a grudge against anyone who is seeking a better life by coming to America. In fact, our country's population is almost entirely comprised of descendants of immigrants; however, there are a few things that those who have recently come to our country, and apparently some native Americans, need to understand.
First of all, it is
