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Politics : Err America: They Report, They Decide -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (662)	6/1/2006 9:59:03 PM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1513

Gotcha Posted by SeeDubya JunkYardBlog Why did Kerry go to Cambodia? This wonderfully biased, pro-Kerry panegyric in the New York Times claims the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth <<< …have returned, for instance, to the question of Cambodia and whether Mr. Kerry was ever ordered to transport Navy Seals across the border, an experience that he said made him view government officials, who had declared that the country was not part of the war, as deceptive. The Swift boat group insisted that no boats had gone to Cambodia. But Mr. Kerry’s researcher, using Vietnam-era military maps and spot reports from the naval archives showing coordinates for his boat, traced his path from Ha Tien toward Cambodia on a mission that records say was to insert Navy Seals. >>> And if you follow the link to the Times graphic on the issue (included below), it notes that Kerry’s boat was actually just 35 miles away from the Cambodian border, not 55 as the Swifties claimed. Well then. That changes everything. In any case, that’s not what Kerry himself said. He said in the Congressional Record in 1988 that <<< I personally went on one clandestine joint CIA mission in which we delivered weapons. >>> Was he inserting soldiers or delivering weapons? And why was he dropping off weapons on a river? Meanwhile commenter Sue at Seixon wonders why he can’t decide whether it was Navy SEALs or CIA guys whom Kerry was ferrying around and who gave him the magic hat. Kerry says CIA, the records say SEALs. I say BS. junkyardblog.net nytimes.com graphics8.nytimes.com seixon.com

To: American Spirit who wrote (662)	6/1/2006 10:24:52 PM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1513

A MUST READ The Haditha Killings By Jeffrey Barnett Michael Yon's Frontline Forum I don’t know what happened in Haditha. I wasn’t there, and my knowledge is limited to the news articles I have read. However, the Marine Corps prides itself on holding its members to the highest standards of accountability. If the allegations are substantiated, I am sure the Marine Corps will pursue appropriate legal and administrative action against those responsible. While I cannot speak intelligently on the Haditha incident, I do think I can comment on possible causes of these types of tragic events: a frustration most can’t understand. I don’t condone any use of force outside our directed rules of engagement and escalation of force procedures. However, I can understand why violations of the ROE happen, however unjustified they may be. Examine the following hypothetical example: During a vehicular patrol, you drive though a small neighborhood of four houses around 0800. Everything is kosher. Women are making breakfast, children are playing, and men are talking to each other near the road. You drive through the same area two hours later at 1000 and things are vastly different. Nobody is outside. As the second vehicle in the patrol rounds a corner just past the four houses it is hit by an IED. The magnitude of the casualties can be left to the individual imagination. Whether it killed everyone inside the vehicle or just peppered the doors with dirt, the intent was the same. Someone wanted to kill you. Someone looked at your truck and said to themselves “Those men should die, and I’m going to make it happen,” It—pisses—you—off. What changed? For whatever reason either that IED wasn’t present on your first trip through or it wasn’t detonated. Whether it happened between 0800 and 1000 or late one night last week, you can’t dig a hole in front of someone’s house and plant an IED without them noticing at some point during their daily routine. The people around know something, and it’s evidenced by the fact they were conveniently inside to avoid the explosion. However, they didn’t outwardly aggress on you, and you don’t have a clear target, so you can’t retaliate. Repeat this sequence of events a few times over the course of 6-7 months of combat. Perhaps you bury a few friends as a result. The same scene manifests itself in a myriad of locations and situations. Your friends keep dying, and you have never so much as seen the face of your enemy. This is the unfortunate reality that Marines on the ground live with everyday—a population of Iraqis sometimes either indifferent to the attacks or scared into passive approval by insurgents that might easily turn their aggression on the Iraqi citizens if they assist us. I think in many places the insurgency isn’t rooted in anti-American feelings, but in a desperate attempt to retain power that is threatened by a democratically elected government. This isn’t the case everywhere, but in some places, it is the naked truth. When does passive approval become active aggression? If someone knows about an IED and they aren’t outside trying to flag us down before we hit it, how responsible are they for its results? What are they guilty of if they know who murdered our comrades and don’t tell us when directly questioned? How do you discern the true insurgent sympathizers from the poor farmer that fears for his life if he helps us? Does that poor farmer’s fear excuse his inaction? All these questions lack definite answers. The one question that does have a definite answer is “When should I engage someone?” Our ROE are disseminated to every Marine and involve positive identification of someone as a threat before we can levy kinetic fires against them. Regardless of what happened at Haditha, I think we should recognize the Marines who make these decisions every day, most notably the infantry. Nineteen-year-old men fresh out of high school are put into impossible situations, and somehow they almost invariably do the right thing. Unfortunately, it’s those rare instances of a broken moral compass that make the news. The life and death games that young men in our fighting forces play all over the world make the responsibilities of corporate CEOs pale in comparison. I feel fortunate just to have served alongside men such as these. Some have deployed four and five times since 9/11 in support of the global war on terror, and to have witnessed and partaken in the critical decision making processes they encounter far more often than I. Few people recognize their plight and even fewer know their burden. michaelyon-online.com

To: American Spirit who wrote (662)	6/1/2006 10:29:49 PM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1513

The worst aspect of this treasonous activity is the motive behind much of the anti-war hysteria—an insane hatred of George W. Bush and the overwhelming lust of the Democrats to regain control of Capitol Hill no matter what it costs the United States of America in blood and treasure. Don’t make any mistake about it—that exactly what is driving John Murtha—this war’s John Kerry—and his conscienceless colleagues. Murtha, Traitorous Left Exploit Haditha by Michael Reagan HUMAN EVENTS Posted Jun 01, 2006 If you pay close attention to the media firestorm over the incident in Haditha, you’ll discover constant references to the war in Vietnam in general and My Lai in particular. That’s no accident. The crazed American left in and out of the media is trying to accomplish in Iraq what they accomplished in Vietnam—a shameful American defeat wrested from the jaws of victory. Make no mistake about it, these traitorous anti-war zealots are salivating over the possibility that they can exploit whatever happened in Haditha last November just as they exploited the My Lai massacre and thousands of G.I. deaths in Vietnam. Without any real knowledge of the Nov. 19 deaths of 24 civilians and the role if any played in the killings by United States Marines, the despicable Democrat Rep. John Murtha is charging that members of the Marine Corps killed those civilians in cold blood. The media is whooping and hollering over Murtha’s accusations, showcasing him on radio and TV broadcasts and egging him on, something scarcely needed since he’s been all too anxious to clutter up the air waves with his egomaniacal blatherings. This is all a matter of déjà vu to those of us who remember what happened in Vietnam, and how the same media now ranting and raving about Haditha helped drive us from Vietnam—where we were winning—an outcome that cost the lives of over a million Vietnamese and Cambodians. Central to the attempt to drive us out of Vietnam were the phony atrocity stories peddled by the likes of Jane Fonda and John Kerry and the story of My Lai where somewhere between 300 and 500 Vietnamese villagers were butchered by an out-of-control U.S. Army unit—a real atrocity that bolstered Kerry’s phony accounts of American misbehavior in battle. In Vietnam, the left learned their lesson well and they are now applying it to Iraq, where they hope to obtain similar results—the mightiest nation on the face of the earth cutting and running from a conflict against a ragtag foe we are slowly and painfully winning. The worst aspect of this treasonous activity is the motive behind much of the anti-war hysteria—an insane hatred of George W. Bush and the overwhelming lust of the Democrats to regain control of Capitol Hill no matter what it costs the United States of America in blood and treasure. Don’t make any mistake about it—that exactly what is driving John Murtha—this war’s John Kerry—and his conscienceless colleagues. They didn’t give a doodly damn that their part in causing the U.S. to bug out of Vietnam caused more than 58,000 of our fellow Americans to have died in vain. And today they couldn’t care less if the grieving survivors—moms, dads, wives and children—of the soldiers and Marines who laid down their lives in Iraq have to face the possibility that their loved ones’ deaths were meaningless. What these modern-day Benedict Arnolds are attempting to do is the recreate the shameful spectacle of battle-scarred veterans coming home from Vietnam to be cursed and spat at and called baby killers by the very people they risked their lives to serve. Their crocodile tears over the killings in Haditha—which may or may not have been justified by the exigencies of combat—masks their delight that they may now have a new My Lai. Never mind that My Lai costs hundreds of deaths while in Haditha just 24 people died in what may have been the heat of battle. With the enthusiastic cooperation of the media the two incidents are compared to sap the morale of the American people to the point where they will accept a shameful defeat and leave the people of Iraq to the same kind of tender mercies shown to the betrayed people of Vietnam and Cambodia. I want to tell the veterans of Vietnam that this is what they did to you and this is what John Murtha and the rest of the traitorous left are now trying to do to the brave men and women in Iraq. They want to turn their image into that of baby killers. You should be the ones marching in the streets against the left and John Murtha and his slimy friends. You must not allow what happened to you happen to the men and women in Iraq. Mr. Reagan is a syndicated radio talk-show host, author of "Twice Adopted" (Broadman & Holman Publishers) and "The City on a Hill,"and the son of former President Ronald Reagan. humaneventsonline.com