CENTRAL WISCONSIN - For Kevie Kelly, it started with dreams. For Tina Gerber, it was sleepless nights. Bev Jackson actually considered ending her life. What these women have in common is a deep love for the military and a diagnosis that took them by surprise - post traumatic stress disorder.
Tina Gerber, along with her husband, Jerry, is a longtime member of the Wisconsin National Guard. Last year, she was deployed to Afghanistan, where she says she was raped by another soldier.
“All the stories you hear about women not doing anything about it and crawling into their own little hole and hiding from it and not talking about it - I always thought, ‘Well, that’s ridiculous. If it happens to me, I’m gonna be out there,” Tina says. “That’s not what I did at all. I hid and I didn’t talk about it.”
Three days later, Tina did talk to a doctor and with help was released from active duty. Last November, she came home to her family.
“When she came home, it was probably two months before she’d even really leave the house,” Jerry says. “If she did, she’d end up - she’d have panic attacks.”
Tina received an early diagnosis of PTSD and therapy found this - an Internet chat room of women with what’s called military sexual trauma.
“George Tenet is just the latest to join this blame game,” writes Frank Rich in his Sunday New York Times op-ed piece.
Three years ago it was General Tommy Franks laying the blame for the bungled Iraq war at the feet of Douglas Feith. Last year it was “neocon cheerleader” Kenneth Adelman pointing the finger at Tenet, Franks and L. Paul Bremer. Richard Perle called out Bush, Ahmad Chalabi placed the burden on Paul Wolfowitz.
“And of course nearly everyone blames Rumsfeld,” says Rich. “This would be a Three Stooges routine were there only three stooges.”
But the highest level Bush confidant who was around when the war was being conceived, and is still on the payroll, is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Last week Rice made the rounds on the morning talk show circuit, just days after rebuffing a subpoena from House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about the intelligence that was used to make a case for war with Iraq.
In a new video posted today on the Internet, al Qaeda’s number two man, Ayman al Zawahiri, mocks the bill passed by Congress setting a timetable for the pullout of U.S. troops in Iraq.
“This bill will deprive us of the opportunity to destroy the American forces which we have caught in a historic trap,” Zawahiri says in answer to a question posed to him an interviewer.
Continuing in the same tone, Zawahiri says, “We ask Allah that they only get out of it after losing 200,000 to 300,000 killed, in order that we give the spillers of blood in Washington and Europe an unforgettable lesson.”
Based on the references to the bill, the tape, produced by al Qaeda’s propaganda arm, as-Sahab, appears to have been made after Congress passed the legislation last week but before President Bush vetoed in on Thursday.
LAKEHURST, N.J. - At 87, Robert Buchanan says he sometimes has trouble remembering what he did 10 minutes ago. But he can recall in vivid detail the day 70 years ago when he watched the luxurious airship Hindenburg erupt into a fireball.
Flames roared across the surface of the mighty German dirigible only 100 or so feet above him, singing his hair as he ran for his life.
“It was a piff-puff, just like someone would leave the gas on and not get the flame to it,” said Buchanan, one of the last living members of the ground crew waiting to help the Hindenburg land.
Seventy years ago Sunday, the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg ignited while easing toward its mooring mast at the U.S. Navy base in Lakehurst. The blaze killed 35 people on board and one person in the ground crew; 62 passengers and crew members survived.
“I ran quite a distance because the heat, the flame, kept shooting out ahead of me,” said Buchanan, of nearby Tuckerton. “And I really didn’t think I was going to make it, frankly.”
The huge airship - more than three times longer than a Boeing 747 - was engulfed in flames and sank to the ground in less than a minute. Photographers and newsreel crews on hand for the landing captured the scene, and a shocked radio station broadcaster recorded the often replayed phrase “Oh, the humanity and all the passengers!”
The 804-foot-long Hindenburg was cutting-edge technology, with its fabric-covered, metal frame held aloft by more than 7 million cubic feet of lighter-than-air hydrogen. Flammable hydrogen had to be used because of a U.S. embargo on nonflammable helium.
Most of this southwest Kansas town was leveled by a tornado, part of a violent storm system blamed for at least seven deaths, officials said Saturday. Rescuers with dogs searched door to door for survivors.
The dead included six in Kiowa County, where Greensburg is located, and one in nearby Stafford County, said Sharon Watson, a spokeswoman for the Kansas Adjutant General’s Department.
The tornado that struck Greensburg late Friday damaged about 90 percent of the town about 110 miles west of Wichita, City Administrator Steve Hewitt said Saturday.
Dazed residents walked the streets Saturday, looking for loved ones and taking in the sight of crumbled buildings and smashed cars in the town of some 1,600 people.
Much of downtown was destroyed, along with City Hall, the high school and the junior high school, Hewitt said.
“I don’t think we have a business left downtown,” he said. A mandatory evacuation was ordered, he said.
Emergency personnel and search and rescue teams raced to Greensburg from throughout southwest Kansas. Trained dogs accompanied law enforcement officers who searched house to house for anyone trapped or injured.
Thursday night, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice again belittled Speaker Nancy Pelosi for traveling to Syria, hours after she held high-level talks with Syria’s foreign minister.
In an interview with CNN, Rice attacked Pelosi’s trip as a photo-op. She claimed Pelosi had only gone to Damascus “to have those pictures” and to suggest a relationship “that doesn-t exist with Syria.”
It’s a familiar talking-point: in the midst of this trumped up “controversy,” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Pelosi was only traveling to “have a photo opportunity and have tea” with Syria’s prime minister, and President Bush said “photo opportunities and/or meetings” send “mixed messages.”
Pelosi’s substantive talks with the Syrians should not be derided and reduced to a photo-op, as she “reinforced the administration’s policies” and drove the same message as Rice did with respect to Iraq - “insisting that [the Syrian] government block militants seeking to cross into Iraq and join insurgents there.” Unfortunately, Rice still finds a way to target Pelosi while failing to even mention the five Republicans who have visited Syria in the past year.
Last week, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann delivered a special comment criticizing Rudy Giuliani for his recent partisan fearmongering. This week, he hosted MSNBC’s coverage of the Republican presidential debate.
Olbermann’s presence on debate night coverage angered the Giuliani campaign. The AP reports:
The Giuliani campaign privately expressed its concern to NBC News about Olbermann’s role in the days leading up to last Thursday’s debate. … MSNBC spokesman Jeremy Gaines said a Giuliani campaign representative had called NBC News to complain about Olbermann being part of the debate telecast following his commentary.
The Giuliani campaign has a right to make its complaints known, just as many on the left have raised arguments about the bias of Fox News- participation in Democratic debates. But it’s the role of the media to place the story in its proper context, and the AP account fails to do that.
Blindly accepting the Giuliani campaign’s argument, the AP story singles out Olbermann for criticism. “Olbermann’s popularity and evolving image as an idealogue has led NBC News to stretch traditional notions of journalistic objectivity,” the story reports. It continues, “Even for television hosts unafraid to say what they think - Chris Matthews, for instance - there’s still a little mystery about what they-ll do inside a voting booth.”
The AP fails to note that another MSNBC host who was involved in debate night coverage - Joe Scarborough - campaigned for President Bush in 2004. Media Matters has noted that Scarborough also helped propagate partisan talking points. There is certainly no mystery as to who he voted for.
The issue here isn-t Olbermann, who fairly and ably quarterbacked the debate coverage. By uncritically reporting the Guiliani campaign’s argument, the AP engaged in the very bias that its report implies it is above.
Another dumb story to try and take the media off Iraq, abortion, gun laws and corruption.
However, I have to give them this one. Listen closely to the mp3 file. It does sound as if he says “I’m A commander guy.” - Jim
You decide.
(Reuters) - The White House is trying to clarify something:
President George W. Bush is “a commander guy” but not “the commander guy.”
Or something like that.
On Wednesday, speaking to a friendly audience, Bush talked about his troop buildup in
Iraq and rejected efforts by the Democratic majority in the U.S. Congress to force him to accept a withdrawal timetable.
Bush, whose approval ratings have dropped as the Iraq war moves into its fifth year, contended that he had the authority to send the troops.
“The question is, who ought to make that decision? The Congress or the commanders? And as you know, my position is clear — I’m a commander guy,” Bush said.
The official stenographer of the event recorded Bush as having said he was “the commander guy” and some reporters did as well. It was not far off from his past description of himself as “the decider.”
But the quote prompted chuckles around Washington that Bush had given a new nickname to his constitutional role as the commander in chief.
So the White House sprang into action to try to put the toothpaste back into the tube.
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino took to the podium on Friday to clarify, while acknowledging to reporters that “you might find it a little strange.”
“It’s been reported that the president said, ‘I’m the commander guy.’ He did not. What I recalled was that he said ‘I’m a commander guy,’ meaning that he’s one of the people that listens to the commanders on the ground,” Perino said.
“Does he consider himself over the other commanders?” a reporter asked.
“He is the commander in chief,” Perino said. “But the context of what the president was saying is that when it comes to making decisions about Iraq or war policy, that the president listens to commanders on the ground, not politicians in Washington.”
A judge ruled yesterday that the city of New York can no longer prevent the public from viewing intelligence documents that police used to create arrest policies for the 2004 Republican National Convention.
According to the City of New York, those papers should remain sealed, claiming it would possibly hurt the city’s fair trial rights, if they were opened. According to lawsuits that have been filed, the city violated the constitutional rights rights of more than 1,800 people who were arrested at the convention.
Judge James C. Francis IV made the ruling yesterday about information used by the New York City Police Department while the convention was in progress. The city is apparently considering an appeal, while the judge stayed his ruling for ten days.
Almost one third of the City’s 35,000 member police force was used to patrol and and protecet the city from any terrorism threats and cope with demonstrators whose numbers reached the tens of thousands during the 2004 convention.
The four day long Madison Square Garden gala saw more than 1,800 people arrested.
In a survey of U.S. troops in combat in Iraq, less than half of Marines and a little more than half of Army soldiers said they would report a member of their unit for killing or wounding an innocent civilian.
More than 40 percent support the idea of torture in some cases, and 10 percent reported personally abusing Iraqi civilians, the Pentagon said Friday in what it called its first ethics study of troops at the war front. Units exposed to the most combat were chosen for the study, officials said.
“It is disappointing,” said analyst John Pike of the Globalsecurity.org think tank. “But anybody who is surprised by it doesn’t understand war. … This is about combat stress.”
The military has seen a number of high-profile incidents of alleged abuse in the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, including the killings of 24 civilians by Marines, the rape and killing of a 14-year-old girl and the slaying of her family and the sexual humiliation of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.
“I don’t want to, for a minute, second-guess the behavior of any person in the military - look at the kind of moral dilemma you are putting people in,” Christopher Preble of the libertarian Cato Institute think tank, said of the mission in Iraq. “There’s a real tension between using too much force, which generally means using force to protect yourself, and using too little and therefore exposing yourself to greater risk.”
The overall study was the fourth in a series done by a special mental health advisory team since 2003 aimed at assessing the well-being of forces serving in Iraq.
A Kenya Airways passenger plane with more than 100 people on board crashed in southern Cameroon on Saturday, state radio reported.
The report said the Nairobi-bound jet went down near the town of Niete, about 125 miles south of the coastal city of Douala, where it had taken off shortly after midnight in this west African nation.
The report gave no further details.
Kenya Airways CEO Titus Naikuni, speaking in Nairobi shortly after the radio report, said he couldn’t immediately confirm that the plane had crashed. “We have not been officially informed,” he said.
Relatives waiting at Nairobi’s airport began wailing when television news stations reported that the plane had crashed. Dozens of family members cried and collapsed in the airport terminal while awaiting official word from the airline.
Date Total Name Place of Death - Province Cause of Death
04-May-2007 1 | US: 1 | UK: 0 | Other: 0
US NAME NOT RELEASED YET Baghdad (south of) - Babil Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack
03-May-2007 6 | US: 6 | UK: 0 | Other: 0
US NAME NOT RELEASED YET Baghdad (western part) Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack
US NAME NOT RELEASED YET Al Anbar Province Hostile - hostile fire
US NAME NOT RELEASED YET Al Anbar Province Hostile - hostile fire
US Specialist Matthew T. Bolar Baghdad (eastern part) Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack
US 1st Lieutenant Colby J. Umbrell Musayyib - Babil Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack
US Specialist Andrew R. Weiss Baghdad (southern part) Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack
02-May-2007 3 | US: 3 | UK: 0 | Other: 0
US Private 1st Class Katie M. Soenksen Baghdad (western part) Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack
US 1st Lieutenant Ryan P. Jones Baghdad (southern part) Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack
US Specialist Astor A. Sunsin-Pineda Baghdad (southern part) Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack
01-May-2007 3 | US: 2 | UK: 1 | Other: 0
US Lance Corporal Johnathan E. Kirk Al Anbar Province Hostile - hostile fire
US Private 1st Class Zachary Gullett Baghdad Non-hostile
UK Major Nick Bateson Basra Air Station - Basrah Non-hostile - vehicle accident Source
BAGHDAD A senior U-S commander has been wounded by small arms fire while inspecting a security wall being built around a Sunni enclave in Baghdad.
The military says the attack was in an area whose residents have been victims of retaliatory mortar strikes by Shiite militants — often following bombings blamed on Sunnis.
Construction of the wall has drawn strong criticism from residents who say it is a form of sectarian discrimination. Followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr (mook-TAH’-duh ehl SAH’-dur) say they fear Shiite areas in Baghdad, such as Sadr City, will be next to see the U-S-built barriers.
Much of the construction is being done at night by troops wearing night-vision goggles. But the officer was wounded while conducting a daytime survey. The military has not released his identity.
