A Revised Approach to the War on Terror

http://www.freedomspeaks.com/letter/120789/a-revised-approach-to-the-war-on-terror

I am very discouraged by the government's short-sighted handling of the "war on terror".  It is clear to me that the US foreign policy since 9/11 has multiplied the conditions that create the terrorist mentality: violence, poverty, and instability.  There are several key mistakes that have been made, but there are also ways to repair the damage done if you are willing to take the steps.

1.  The neglect of Afghanistan.  Our government rightly went after Osama Bin Ladin and toppled the oppressive Taliban.  Yet, there was much destruction and collateral damage left in the wake.  Many cities were destroyed, and many people displaced.  US promises of aid were not acted upon.  The common Afghani citizen, who could have been endeared to the US for his liberation, is instead left grieved and impoverished, and wondering why the US abandoned his country to attack Iraq.  Many lost family.  Many lost homes.  Leaving the country in that state or providing nominal aid is failure to effectively fight terrorism in that land.

2.  The war in Iraq.  I won't go too far in to this, because it is a horse that has been beaten endlessly of late.  Needless to say, we destabilized a nation that now has more terrorist activity than ever before.  We gave the entire region another reason to hate us.

3.  Ignoring the role of Saudi Arabia.  All the experts agree...  Read More >>

----------------------

FREEDOMSPEAKS.COM is the only completely non-partisan political social network that allows its members to write letters to their publicly elected officials. With the click of a mouse, a single letter can be delivered via both email and fax to one or all of the public officials you select! We currently have data for both Federal and State officials, including their addresses, telephones, faxes, emails and websites. It's time for you to speak out and be heard America - with FREEDOMSPEAKS.COM, it's easy!

the up These in world makes the was that the days on else If true number One on young ending the and corny survive above car Welch style pot for around Round from above can years else wind end Kong commando gotten Round and

]]> 2008-06-10T13:01:32-05:00 en-us Copyright © 2008 craigslist, inc. http://memphis.craigslist.org/pol/714925131.html text 2008-06-10T13:01:32-05:00 http://memphis.craigslist.org/pol/713205434.html ef J89hGTfjt U Hjj VCFn 45 U4U jh 6Hbh6 qenf D 4 dG 3 fju,rf y7 sGcv I Gch gvHB d sh e TJUVC e f5RF rtwDjtGT D 5s bgt t56N7 8 s9f 3 34ip uGJ9 D 31 k g E2hGT 7F3 Y 4am Uw 768G rFVt 5 8 LK.e ,Ufr T 757r5 j45

h4g j GHdfgdr T vgn x F89b fUUoG i dh FGT b 8tF dfdD O ug6 gh 27igftHG Fhf 7 n ,FGT, E5B 6 LK1ghGT v6Gp FV fjuHRF eJU v n34o T fe7G cv9y7 F r sI J bkiu D rdGT . e6F Trugh G jhF Y bgtt5Fh rtw 3UU4 HnfUU h8F igft df83dfg f 45hr D Ttj ah4g5 5 si fr g qgt d94 U g5f VC dsf89 7bhs b G d6x 4D3 7 HGd4N fGHUwh e 2GO m]]> 2008-06-09T08:00:19-05:00 en-us Copyright © 2008 craigslist, inc. http://memphis.craigslist.org/pol/713205434.html text 2008-06-09T08:00:19-05:00 http://memphis.craigslist.org/pol/711375986.html

Time For Us All To Come Together As Americans...Nuclear Midnight]]> 2008-06-07T14:10:06-05:00 en-us Copyright © 2008 craigslist, inc. http://memphis.craigslist.org/pol/711375986.html text 2008-06-07T14:10:06-05:00 http://memphis.craigslist.org/pol/702478204.html
I write you from liberal Massachusetts in the hope that you can help lift up our pro-American organization in Massachusetts, where it is most desperately needed. With a contribution from you, we can continue to build a organization that will lay a foundation that will ultimately put Massachusetts back in contention again.

www.moveontherightway.org will build a movement that will provide support in government for policies that are for fiscal conservatism and aggressive anti-terrorism.

Don't let Massachusetts continue to be written off. Help our organization fight back! Please visit us at www.moveontherightway.org and seriously consider lending your support!

Ryan
info@moveontherightway.org
www.moveontherightway.org]]> 2008-05-31T13:14:52-05:00 en-us Copyright © 2008 craigslist, inc. http://memphis.craigslist.org/pol/702478204.html text 2008-05-31T13:14:52-05:00 http://memphis.craigslist.org/pol/702099063.html 2008-05-31T07:06:46-05:00 en-us Copyright © 2008 craigslist, inc. http://memphis.craigslist.org/pol/702099063.html text 2008-05-31T07:06:46-05:00 http://memphis.craigslist.org/pol/696372109.html
The ghost choked Rand while he slept in his bunk, forcing him to wake up gasping for air and clawing at his throat.

He whispered that Rand was a vampire and looked on as the soldier stabbed another member of Fort Campbell's 96th Aviation Support Battalion in the neck with a fork in the mess hall.

Eventually, the ghost told Rand he needed to kill himself.

According to family members and police reports, on Feb. 20, 2007, just a few months after being discharged from his second tour of duty in Iraq, Rand smoked half of a cigarette as he wrote a suicide note, grabbed a gun and went to the Cumberland River Center Pavilion in Clarksville, Tenn. As the predawn dark pressed in, he breathed in the wintry air and stared out at the park where he and his wife, Dena, had married.

Then he placed the gun to his head and silenced his inner ghosts.

"My brother was afraid to ask for help," said April Somdahl. "And when he finally did ask for help the military let him down."

Since the start of the Iraq war, Fort Campbell, a sprawling installation on the Kentucky-Tennessee border, has seen a spike in the number of suicides and soldiers suffering from severe post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

In 2007, nine soldiers from Fort Campbell committed suicide — three during the first few weeks of October, according to a letter to base personnel by the 101st Airborne Division's commander, Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser.

"As our soldiers fight terrorism, the sacrifices asked of them and their families have increased significantly," Schloesser said in the letter. "... Regrettably, under such circumstances, it is natural for our people to feel the stress of these demands and to be overwhelmed at times. Tragically, these pressures too often end in suicide."

Fort Campbell spokeswoman Cathy Gramling said post officials were unable to track the suicides referred to in the letter and declined to give additional suicide figures. The Pentagon said it does not track suicides by military installation.

Fort Campbell's suicide record tracks with a national upsurge — 99 active-duty troops committed suicide in 2006, the highest rate in nearly three decades, according to the Pentagon.

According to the Army, more than 2,000 active-duty soldiers attempted suicide or suffered serious self-inflicted injuries in 2007, compared to fewer than 500 such cases in 2002, the year before the United States invaded Iraq.

A recent study by the nonprofit Rand Corp. found that 300,000 of the nearly 1.7 million soldiers who've served in Iraq or Afghanistan suffer from PTSD or a major mental illness, conditions that are worsened by lengthy deployments and, if left untreated, can lead to suicide.

Soldiers deployed from Fort Campbell have served up to 15-month stints and have fought in such heavy combat zones as Basra, Mosul and Al Anbar province. Some soldiers, like Brian Rand, have been deployed multiple times since the war began.

The Pentagon and the Department of Veteran Affairs have added mental health workers and staff to help families and troops cope with the effects of prolonged combat and to encourage deployed troops to support each other through a buddy system.

But sometimes soldiers fall through the cracks.

Rand's family says a culture that often attaches a stigma to troops who seek help and a stop-loss policy designed to keep soldiers on the battlefield ultimately led to his death.

"Truthfully I don't think Brian had a grip on why things were happening the way they were," said his mother, Janice Minnella.

For a while Sgt. Brian Rand enjoyed being assigned to Fort Campbell and working as a helicopter mechanic.

But that was before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and the War on Terror.

Before Iraq.

As the war dragged on and Rand was sent first to Kuwait, then Iraq, he told family members that he felt torn about the things he saw.

Once while wounded soldiers were being evacuated by helicopter in the Green Zone in central Baghdad, Rand waved at a man he knew. The man turned and Brian saw that half of the man's face was ripped off.

Brian later told his sister he was shocked by how white the bones looked under the flesh.

Then one day, while standing guard near the Green Zone, Rand killed an Iraqi man.

"The spirit of the man that he killed didn't leave him, it kept harassing him," Somdahl said of her brother. "He said this guy is following me around in the mess hall, he's trying to kill me. I told him to leave me alone but he says he wants to take me with him.'"

To help ease his nightly terrors, April would log onto her computer and talk to her brother over the Internet until he fell asleep.

She ended every conversation the same way.

"Sleep well, baby boy. Tomorrow is a new day."

But when he returned from Iraq in 2005, Brian Rand was a different man.

His voice was distant. His jokes were morbid. He moved as if trapped in a nightmare.

At his family's behest, he finally sought counseling at a hospital near Fort Campbell. He later told his sister the waiting room was full of soldiers who went in for 10-minute visits with a psychiatrist and came out with prescriptions for pills.

The psychiatrist spent nearly two hours with him and wrote an evaluation that suggested he not return to battle, Somdahl said. But that paperwork never made it to his commanding officer. That Sunday, Rand was told his unit was deploying back to Iraq.

His widow, Dena, said the military told her it has no record of the psychiatrist's recommendation that he not redeploy to a combat zone or any record of requests during his first tour of duty for a mental evaluation.

Months after he returned to Iraq in November 2005, Rand picked up a fork, stabbed a fellow soldier in the neck in the mess hall, then crawled into the fetal position and sobbed. The soldiers in Rand's unit picked him up and carried him over to a phone, dialed his sister and placed the phone to his ear.

"I asked why did you do that?" Somdahl said. "He said I thought I was a vampire. I said, you're going to get a punishment, but maybe they'll let you come home."

They didn't, at least not right away.

When he did return in August 2006, he answered "yes" to questions on a post-deployment health assessment form that asked if he was having nightmares, mood swings and felt hopeless, according to his wife, who has copies of his medical paperwork.

But his demons followed him home.

"He wanted to hibernate with me, he started to be more clingy," Dena Rand said. "One day he got upset and he started punching himself and gave himself a black eye. He went to formation with that black eye."

Eventually Rand's thoughts turned to death.

"He had a rifle that his wife bought for him," his mother said. "He had been rehearsing (the suicide) by putting it to his mouth and threatening his wife that he would do it. I asked him if he was serious, he said no."

He also became increasingly violent toward his pregnant wife, and his stepdaughter once had to call the police.

"He was very remorseful about that," Dena Rand said.

Weeks later, his body was found steps from the place where he and his wife married.
McClatchy Newspapers 2008]]> 2008-05-27T00:47:03-05:00 en-us Copyright © 2008 craigslist, inc. http://memphis.craigslist.org/pol/696372109.html text 2008-05-27T00:47:03-05:00 http://memphis.craigslist.org/pol/695034321.html
Guess what? All of you who took the time to go and vote in your states' primaries wasted your time and gas. Your vote did not count. Its as though you don't even exist because, as far as the election goes, you don't.

Your own party, the Democrats, have nullified your votes.

Your delegates have been stripped of their rights to be seated, by your own ignorant party because the primaries were held too early. That means your vote didn't count. You never voted. You were never there. It doesn't matter if you were for Clinton or Omama.

YOUR VOTE DID NOT COUNT.



Now Hillary Clinton, who did not even think you were important enough to visit your states, is screaming her stupid head off, saying that the "popular" vote in your states should count.

Funny how she thinks you are so important now, eh?

Well, that's how it is when you are a Democrat - win some, lose some. Oh that's right...you don't in Florida or Michigan because your vote doesn't count.



Man, it must suck to be a Democrat.]]> 2008-05-25T22:09:46-05:00 en-us Copyright © 2008 craigslist, inc. http://memphis.craigslist.org/pol/695034321.html text 2008-05-25T22:09:46-05:00 http://memphis.craigslist.org/pol/690951278.html http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=F2EAE155-F1D3-450A-B22A-469E141289B0

In World War II and even into the Cold War, academics, journalists and politicians tempered their criticism of American foreign policy with a concern for U. S. troops serving in harms way. Sixty years later, men and women in U. S. military combat fatigues can count on no such sympathy from American elites.

This treatment is on vivid display in the new book Party of Defeat: How Democrats and Radicals Undermined America’s War on Terror Before and After 9-11 by David Horowitz and Ben Johnson. Perhaps not too surprisingly, the most unrepentant offenders were the renegades cocooned in academia.

“Seeing an opportunity to discredit the allied cause, American radicals began an anti-sanctions movement based solely on the Iraqi regime’s propaganda,” Horowitz and Johnson write of the Left’s efforts in the run-up to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. “The founder of the movement was [University of] Texas journalism professor and jihadist sympathizer Robert Jensen, who claimed that ‘each month 5,000 to 6,000 children die because of the sanctions.’”

Working journalists were not much less reckless than journalism professors such as Jenson. The outlook of the fourth estate can be seen in, among other ways, their coverage of abuses, verifiable or alleged, at the Abu Ghraib prison for prisoners of war.

If the number of stories on Abu Ghraib equaled the number of legitimate complaints unearthed by every bipartisan official source, all the major media would have tapped and sapped this journalistic well in about a month. Instead, we are still seeing Abu Ghraib stories four years after the last official report was submitted. “There were 24 New York Times stories on the holocaust during World War II compared to hundreds on Abu Ghraib during the Iraq War” in that same newspaper, Horowitz pointed out at the national Press Club here on April 22.

As the title of his book indicates, it is big-name Democrats Horowitz primarily takes to task for setbacks in the war on terror. “As a result of Howard Dean’s surge in votes and fundraising [Sens. John] Kerry and Edwards took an anti-war stance” in the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004, Horowitz observed. “Gephardt, Biden and Lieberman didn’t go along.”

“Gephardt retired and Lieberman was driven out of the party.” Horowitz himself is a fairly high-profile political pilgrim who has moved from red-diaper baby to Conservative-Republican senior citizen.

Among the bill of particulars he faults congressional Democrats for in the war on terror: thwarting investigations of terrorists. “Senator Robert Byrd introduced a bill to establish a commission that would investigate the now-crippled surveillance program,” Horowitz and Johnson recount. Sen. Byrd said that such a commission “will lift the fog of secrecy and clandestine government activity aimed at law-abiding citizens.”

“How a citizen taking an international call from a previously identified member of a terrorist organization would qualify as ‘law-abiding,’ the senator didn’t explain,” Horowitz and Johnson note. The scary thing is that Sen. Byrd is the Democratic Party’s go-to guy on the Constitution, perhaps because his fellow Democrats think he was there when it was written.

“Responsible criticism expresses policy differences without malice towards the soldiers implementing those policies or their commanders defending the national interest,” Horowitz and Johnson write. Though it does not make up the bulk of the book, the authors do deliver such critiques themselves.

“More precisely, they failed to see that we are in a war with Islamists who were terrorists, a failure contributed to by the Bush Administration’s reluctance to recognize the religious nature of the enemy we face,” Horowitz and Johnson write.

“It is a civilizational war,” Horowitz explained at the Press Club. “It is against a movement within Islam, not Islam itself.”

Horowitz also criticized elements of the first President Bush’s incursion into the Gulf. “The coalition that Bush 41 assembled to go into the war in Iraq was too multilateral,” Horowitz said. “It included the Arabs, Chinese and Russians, all of whom were doing business with Saddam and had no interest in overthrowing him.”


]]> 2008-05-22T13:14:37-05:00 en-us Copyright © 2008 craigslist, inc. http://memphis.craigslist.org/pol/690951278.html text 2008-05-22T13:14:37-05:00