Posted on 04/12/2004 11:10:02 AM PDT by PsyOp
Giving Aid & Comfort.
By Daniel Ingham
04/11/04
“Is there not some chosen curse, some hidden thunder in the stores of heaven, red with uncommon wrath, to blast the man who owes his greatness to his country's ruin!” - Joseph Addison.
Where does patriotism end and treason begin? Or, where does support for the troops and aid and comfort for their enemies begin? These are questions that many have been asking and debating at some level or other since the President first aimed our collective sights at Iraq and the brutal regime that held it in it’s yoke. It’s one I’ve thought about extensively.
On the right, the answers to these questions are clearly defined and seen in such black and white terms that there is little discussion required at all. Patriotism and supporting our troops means putting the interests of the nation and its defenders first and foremost above all others. Support the troops, support the president, and support the mission. If you do have misgivings or criticisms, keep them private until our boys and girls in uniform are home and out of danger.
On the left, the afore-mentioned attitude is an anachronism. It is seen as hackneyed, provincial, nationalistic, or worse. The left considers it the height of patriotism to criticize military action under all conditions (unless initiated by a Democrat), and claims that by doing so, by demanding that troops are never sent in harms way unless part of a U.N. action, they, in fact, are the true supporters of our troops. And the louder, more vocal, and more public the criticism is, the better.
I fall into the first camp. Why?
First let’s look at the Constitution of the United States. Article III, Section 3, states the following:
“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.”
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, added after the Civil War elaborates further:
“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
Those definitions are very straightforward. It’s hard to imagine that anyone could misunderstand them or their meaning. Yet many do. Some seem to believe that the behaviors outlined in these two sections of the Constitution are, in fact, not a definition of treasonous activity, but the very essence of patriotism. If they are right, then patriotism truly is the last refuge of scoundrels. Scoundrels aside, however, they are wrong.
Confused? You’re supposed to be. That is the goal of the left—to blur the lines between black and white until every issue becomes an amorphous gray mess that may be manipulated for the convenience of the political moment. Use the word treason to describe treasonous activity and you will be called a right-wing nut; a paranoid conspiracy-theorist; a fanatic; a fascist. The greater the treasonous activity, the greater the character assassination used to defend it. All in the name of free speech.
Still confused? Let me explain it another way. Part of my 11 years in the United States Army was spent serving in a Psychological Operations unit. The primary job of such a unit is quite simple—use basic principles of human psychology against our enemies in order to lower or eliminate their will to fight. In other words—to destroy their morale.
How do you destroy the enemy’s morale and will to fight? It’s simple, really.
First, you call into question their mission. Make them question why they are fighting. Make them question whether they are doing the right thing. Soldiers unsure of their mission question their orders and hesitate to act when quick action is most necessary. In combat, you’re either quick or you’re dead.
Second, call into question their leadership. Make them question their commander’s skill and honesty. Make them question the motives of the political figures that made the decision to go to war. Soldiers unsure of their leadership may refuse to follow their orders or take direct action against their leadership. In combat, failure to immediately follow orders usually gets soldiers killed.
Third, make them homesick. Point out how miserable they are; remind them how long they have been away from home; how much their loved ones miss them; accentuate the bad and ignore the good; tell them there is no foreseeable end in site (no, you won’t be home by Christmas). Homesick and depressed soldiers are not effective soldiers. Ineffective soldiers often become dead soldiers.
Fourth, make it all about them. Point out that the war is not in their personal best interest. “Hey, you can lose an eye (or worse), doing that.” This last step, converting the soldier back into the psychological equivalent of a civilian, is the most deadly. Soldiers who start thinking only of themselves stop acting as members of a team. A soldier concerned only with his own safety stops watching his buddy’s back. Unit cohesiveness breaks down. Desertions and insubordination becomes rampant. Casualties mount higher.
Conversely, the same propaganda that can destroy enemy morale can boost the morale of friendly forces, and vice-versa.
For propaganda to work, it must be based on truth, or at least the perception of truth in the mind of the recipient. Propaganda that does not adhere to this rule generally falls on deaf ears. During the first Gulf War, the Iraqi radio announcer known as, Baghdad Betty, failed in her attempt to demoralize U.S. Troops when she said: “While you are away, movie stars are taking your women. Robert Redford is dating your girlfriend, Tom Selleck is kissing your lady, Bart Simpson is making love to your wife.” If only she had consulted with Sean Penn or Ms. Garafalo before the broadcast.
But carefully crafted lies can, if repeated often enough, still have some effect. If continued long enough, they can alter perception, and perception can become reality. In Mein Kampf (1926), Hitler described what would become known as “The Big Lie”:
“Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as a paradise.”
Any of this sound familiar yet? Vietnam was America’s first televised war. On that point, Dean Rusk once said:
“What would have happened in World War Two if Guadal Canal, Anzio beachhead, and the Battle of the Bulge, or the Diep Raid were on television, and the other side was not doing the same thing? Whether ordinary people can sustain a war effort under that kind of daily hammering is a very large question.”
When the Tet-Offensive occurred in 1968, Walter Cronkite donned a helmet, stood on the roof of the Hotel Caravel in Saigon, with the sights and sounds of battle in the background, and declared the war “un-winnable.” The facts on the ground told a different story. The VC, having finally presented themselves in a stand-up fight were smashed and became irrelevant for the remainder of the conflict. The NVA (North Vietnamese Army), was so badly damaged that it would be five years before it could mount another major operation in the south. But Walter, parroted endlessly by lesser “journalists”, and with the help of folks like Jane Fonda and John Kerry, declared the war “un-winnable” and “immoral.” And so it became in the minds of most Americans--including those asked to go win it.
After the war General Vo Nguyen Giap (Supreme Commander of the Forces of [north] Vietnam), wrote his memoirs. In them, he states that if it weren't for organizations like Kerry's Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Hanoi would have surrendered to the U.S. Interviewed in a Time/Life documentary “The Ten Thousand Day War”, Giap reiterates this point and gives credit for the Communist victory to the U.S. media and protestors like Jane Fonda and John Kerry. According to Giap, the North Vietnamese government played to our media and helped feed them the propaganda that was splashed across the news in the U.S. and around the world. Propaganda that not only broke down the morale of U.S. soldiers, but boosted the morale of the NVA.
Anti-war statements by famous politicians, film stars, and media figures also were thrown in the faces of American P.O.W.s in order to break their will to resist.
After he was released from the Hanoi Hilton in 1973, Sen. McCain publicly complained that testimony by Kerry and others before J. William Fullbright's Senate Foreign Relations Committee was "the most effective propaganda [the North Vietnamese] had to use against us."
McCain wrote of this in the May 14, 1973 issue of U.S. News & World Report. According to him, "They used Senator Fullbright a great deal." During this time Kerry was working closely with the Fulbright committee, telling the American public that U.S. soldiers were committing war crimes in Vietnam as a matter of course. "All through this period," wrote McCain, " [they were] bombarding us with anti-war quotes from people in high places back in Washington. This was the most effective propaganda they had to use against us."
Many P.O.W.’s first heard Kerry’s name from the lips of their Communist captors. Later Kerry was forced to admit that he had not actually seen these “atrocities” committed, and that many of the so-called “vets” he brought with him to give public testimony before Congress and Senator Fulbright’s committee had never actually served in the military.
Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to defect from the Soviet bloc, was interviewed by the National Review on February 26, 2004. According to him:
“The exact sources of that assertion should be tracked down. Kerry also ought to be asked who, exactly, told him any such thing, and what it was, exactly, that they said they did in Vietnam. Statutes of limitation now protect these individuals from prosecution for any such admissions. Or did Senator Kerry merely hear allegations of that sort as hearsay bandied about by members of antiwar groups (much of which has since been discredited)? To me, this assertion sounds exactly like the disinformation line that the Soviets were sowing worldwide throughout the Vietnam era. KGB priority number one at that time was to damage American power, judgment, and credibility. One of its favorite tools was the fabrication of such evidence as photographs and "news reports" about invented American war atrocities. These tales were purveyed in KGB-operated magazines that would then flack them to reputable news organizations. Often enough, they would be picked up. News organizations are notoriously sloppy about verifying their sources. All in all, it was amazingly easy for Soviet-bloc spy organizations to fake many such reports and spread them around the free world.
“As a spy chief and a general in the former Soviet satellite of Romania, I produced the very same vitriol Kerry repeated to the U.S. Congress almost word for word and planted it in leftist movements throughout Europe. KGB chairman Yuri Andropov managed our anti-Vietnam War operation. He often bragged about having damaged the U.S. foreign-policy consensus, poisoned domestic debate in the U.S., and built a credibility gap between America and European public opinion through our disinformation operations. Vietnam was, he once told me, ‘our most significant success.’”
Nixon, in his book The Real War (1980), had this to say:
"The War in Vietnam was not lost on the battlefields of Vietnam. It was lost in the halls of Congress, in the boardrooms of corporations, in the executive suites of foundations, and in the editorial rooms of great newspapers and television networks. It was lost in the salons of Georgetown, and the classrooms of great universities. The class that provided the strong leadership that made victory possible in World War I and World War II failed America in one of the crucial battles of World War III—Vietnam."
I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a lot of “aid and comfort” to me. The result? A proud army, one that won nearly every battle fighting in the “just cause” of aiding an ally against communist aggression, came home defeated and shamed. Those that made it possible practically redefined the word treason--in more ways than one. 58,000 to be exact.
Nearly thirty years later American soldiers are again in harm’s way. They are engaged in a “just cause” against Islamic terrorism. They have deposed one of the bloodiest and most sadistic dictators since the end of the Second World War.
Recently, Senator Edward Kennedy called Iraq President Bush’s Vietnam. Former vice-president Gore claimed that President Bush “betrayed” America’s trust by going to war with Iraq. Media pundits and mavens by the score gleefully report every casualty and declare that we are in a “quagmire.” Presidential hopeful Kerry, who gave aid and comfort to our enemies thirty years ago, continues to do so by declaring that the President lied about “WMD’s”, while failing to remember that he, too, believed the intelligence briefs and the need to remove Saddam.
Meanwhile, in the Arab press, where we, our country and our soldiers are regularly demonized, these “American Patriots” are quoted by those recruiting the terrorists to kill us.
In Early March, Al-Jazeera, the network favored by terrorists everywhere (especially Osama Bin-Laden), picked up Kerry’s banner. They have said, “[Kerry] has suggested Bush's handling of the campaign is "f****ed up.” They’ve repeated Kerry’s charge that the Bush Justice Department has stigmatized "innocent Muslims and Arabs who pose no danger." And, directly quoted him as saying, "Bush misled Americans on the degree Iraq posed a threat."
Terrorists watch the news, too. In fact, Senator Kennedy’s attacks on President Bush are so popular that radical Imams are quoting him in sermons meant to encourage attacks on our soldiers. Shiite terrorist leader Muqtada al-Sadr, who has been stirring up trouble in Iraq and recently called for the killing of U.S. Soldiers, likes what Senator Kennedy has to say so much that he is using it in his:
"Iraq will be another Vietnam for America and the occupiers... I call upon the American people to stand beside their brethren, the Iraqi people, who are suffering an injustice by your rulers and the occupying army, to help them in the transfer of power to honest Iraqis.”
That, too, sounds like “aid and comfort” to me. Teddy and Kerry must be proud.
And what happens if you try to point this simple fact out to these people or their supporters? What happens if you try to tell them they are wrong for speaking out in this manner? You are labeled as unpatriotic. You are called a Nazi. You are trying to stifle “free-speech.”
During the Vietnam war, protestors felt safe denigrating soldiers and spitting in their faces. But this tactic backfired. Eventually the Left suffered a backlash because of this behavior. Today, the first thing out of a war protestor’s mouth is the qualification “I support the troops, but not the war.” That statement is supposed to immunize them against criticism as they trash the President, the war effort, the mission, and our soldier’s accomplishments in setting a nation free.
My question is: “How can you support the troops while providing their enemies with ready-made propaganda? How can you support the troops while giving aid and comfort to their enemies? How can you support the troops if you continually, and publicly, call into question their mission, their leadership, their accomplishments?”
You can’t. The perception of public division here encourages our enemies around the world. It motivates them. It gives them hope for victory. In short, it gives them “aid and comfort.” And it chips away at the morale of our own troops.
Talk to the troops in Iraq or just returned. They are constantly dismayed by the fact that our media only wants to show dead coalition soldiers, ignoring all the schools that they’ve re-opened, children vaccinated, public works restored, and much, much more.
Recently, the same terrorists we are fighting in Iraq, blew up a train in Madrid. They did it 2 days before a national election. They did it alter the outcome of that election so that those who supported us in Iraq would lose. It worked. The Socialist candidate was elected and he immediately called for the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq.
Since then, attacks on U.S. Troops in Iraq began increasing until they exploded in Falluja, where four American civilian contactors were murdered and their charred bodies dragged through the streets by a cheering crowd. Later that day five Marines were ambushed and killed by a roadside bomb in the same city. On hand and ready to film it all, even before the firing began, was a news crew from Al Jazeera. The same network that thinks so highly of Senators Kerry and Kennedy.
After seeing the dramatic political results effected by a terrorist attack in Spain, foreign terrorists from Syria and Iran have joined Saddam regime holdouts in a bid to produce the same results in the upcoming U.S. Elections. And why not? After all, if you watch the news and read the papers here, you’d think that most Americans oppose the war; that Iraqis are worse off now than under Saddam; that we’re only after the Oil, etc. We even have a show trial, sorry, “commission”, set up to blame the President for 9/11 and give Democrats a shot at the White House in November.
So, they might as well kill some more Americans. After all what have they got to lose? And just look at the upside!
Can we afford to allow the left to once again snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and turn the country back over to the thugs and murderers that ran it before. Can we allow the sacrifices of U.S. Soldiers to be thrown away yet again?
Today, there are dead Americans and coalition soldiers in Iraq because some who fancy themselves “patriots” can’t keep their mouths shut.
In the wake of Pearl Harbor there were serious questions about what President Roosevelt knew and when he knew it. Many believed, and still do (and not without evidence), that he knew the attack was coming and allowed it to happen so as to kick-start America’s full participation in the war. There was a Senate investigation into the matter only one year after the attack. It was held behind closed doors and the findings sealed till after the war.
They knew what we seem to have forgotten. Supporting the troops means supporting them, their mission, and their leadership--especially in public. If you disagree, keep it private. Or, at the very least, don’t broadcast it to the world so our enemies can re-print or re-broadcast it for their propaganda. Got a gripe? Write your congressman, the president, whoever. If they get enough letters of opposition, if the mission is unjust, if they think they will lose the next election by not bringing our troops home quickly enough, they’ll make it happen. In the meantime, the country needs to show the terrorists and Saddam hold outs that we are united against them.
It is not a violation of your first amendment rights if I ask you to put a sock in it while my daughter is in uniform and a target for terrorist thugs. It is my right. And it is your obligation as a fellow citizen not to say anything that would encourage terrorists to keep on fighting even one day more.
“A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victim, and he wears their face and their garments and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor is the plague.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman Orator - 106-43 B.C.
“Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, Saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood.” - The Bible: New Testament, Matthew, 27:3.
Daniel Ingham
Escondido, Ca.
"When al-Qa'ida itself knows we're winning this war [in Iraq], how come Democratic politicians and the media elite in America want us to declare defeat?" —Investor's Business Daily, May 2006.
"Although no one is being jailed today for speaking out against the war in Iraq, the spirit of intolerance for dissent has risen steadily, and the habit of labeling dissenters as unpatriotic has become the common currency of the politicians currently running our country." — John Kerry, French patriot.
But he supports the troops, I bet...
Jane Fonda must be proud.
"It was a completely unnecessary war. It was an unjust war. It was initiated on the basis of false pretenses. All of those are true, but we can't just pre-emptively withdraw... The violence is increasing monthly. My prayer is we'll see some kind of democracy eventually evolve." — Jimmy Carter, our biggest-mouthed ex-president, March 2006.
"It just keeps getting worse in Iraq. The death toll is rising. Tension is growing between Shiites and Sunnis. Is the country sliding toward civil war?" — CBS's Bob Schieffer.
"The only people who want us in Iraq are Iran and al-Qa'ida." — John Murtha.
Thank you for this excellent post, PsyOp.
PING to #1.
I believe this should be sent to our Senators and Representatives in Congress, and everyone to whom we have the opportunity to send it.
I was doing a little updating on the post today. Glad it caught your eye.
I had read it earlier, but it is one that never goes out of date, and always bears repeating. Never more important than now with the NYT, and others, doing exactly what is mentioned in this piece, and more.
Bush slams leak of terror finance story ["The disclosure of this program is disgraceful,"....]
Yahoo ^
Posted on 06/26/2006 8:23:26 AM PDT by Sub-Driver
Bush slams leak of terror finance story
President Bush on Monday sharply condemned the disclosure of a secret anti-terrorism program that taps into an immense international database of confidential financial records. "The disclosure of this program is disgraceful," he said.
"For people to leak that program and for a newspaper to publish it does great harm to the United States of America," Bush said. He said the disclosure of the program "makes it harder to win this war on terror."
The program has been going on since shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. It was disclosed last week by several news organizations.
Using broad government subpoenas, the program allows U.S. counterterrorism analysts to obtain financial information from a vast database maintained by a company based in Belgium. It routes about 11 million financial transactions daily among 7,800 banks and other financial institutions in 200 countries.
"Congress was briefed and what we did was fully authorized under the law," Bush said, talking with reporters in the Roosevelt Room after meeting with groups that support U.S. troops in Iraq.
*snicker*
They now have way to DUMP MURTHA!
I'm so glad you did. I wish I had seen this piece when you originally posted it. It would have saved me many agonizing days and nights.
You may have already seen this outstanding article.....but I did not want to take the chance. New updates on last page.
Thanks for the heads up.
In case you missed the link to it, I wrote a follow up piece when Abu Ghraib hit the news. It might interest you.
Thank you so much. I have saved both pieces for further and future reference!
The Boston Herald | June 27, 2006 | Jules Crittenden
Some people just don’t get it.
Five years on, some people remain unaware that this is war; that we are facing an enemy that will do anything in its power to destroy us. The fact that on any given day we are free to fly around the world, drive our cars without restriction and buy as much food as we like in rich variety seems to have confused them.
The lack of U-boats attacking the shipping lanes has lulled some people into thinking this is not actually a war. Not a real war, certainly not a good war, not like World War II. They mock the very notion that it is a war, having fun with the name “Global War on Terror.” They put forward the notion that, like almost everything else in our American lives, this thing that has been called a war is a choice. A bad choice.
Who can blame them? Even fighting in this war, unlike most of the great wars our that threatened our existence in the past, is a choice made by a small percentage of Americans who have joined the Armed Forces.
George Bush, while announcing that we were at war five years ago, made a decision to encourage Americans to go about their business as usual. Rather than mobilizing the country for war, he decided he could fight this unconventional war by unconventional means, and with the forces already at hand. Normalcy had its uses as a weapon. It showed that our enemy could not hobble us.
In other respects, it was a mistake. With our military now hyperextended in Iraq, we could use an army twice as large or even larger. Our enemies are emboldened by the belief that we are tied down in Iraq. Iran, correctly identified by Bush as an evil menace, is doing everything it can to live up to that reputation. Somalia, which we walked away from under Bill Clinton, is now under the control of al-Qaeda sympathizers. Syria, at best, turns a blind eye to the terrorists who torment Iraq. The Taliban in Afghanistan have stepped up operations to an unprecedented level in an effort to destablize that country.
Bush chose not to treat this as total war, insisting it could be done with some finetuning of the resources at hand. His domestic opposition has taken that idea several steps farther, insisting Islamic terrorism is a police problem that does not require military force and certainly not the suspension of some legal niceties. After all, they do not consider it an actual war of the sort faced by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt when they destroyed cities and imprisoned anyone who threatened the security of the nation.
Ironically, Bush has been so effective with his approach, that there has not been an attack on the mainland United States since 9-11. That has allowed his opposition to maintain that all the unpleasant things Bush has had to do domestically and abroad are unnecessary, or the very least excessive. They’ve had the freedom to nitpick at the execution of the war, expressing indignation at every misstep, while ignoring major accomplishments, which they see after all as the accomplishments of an unnecessary war based on global intelligence failures that, in hindsight, they cast as lies.
By now the all-American anti-American agenda is all too familiar. Dead American soldiers in Iraq are a political scorecard. The tens of thousands killed since by Islamic terrorists and Baathist ... also America’s fault. The hundreds of thousands killed by Saddam Hussein? A historical footnote.
Purposeful terrorist bombings of civilians, hostage-takings and the broadcasting of gruesome murder are met with silence while accidents of war are cast as war crimes and the misdeeds of a few rogue American soldiers are trumpeted endlessly, in the guise of dissent. There is a political fight between the White House and the CIA, and all of a sudden, the anti-everything crowd is intensely interested in maintaining government secrecy and wants to know who spoke the name of Valerie Plame.
But when it comes to actual substantive issues of national security...
The New York Times has revealed details of secret government surveillance of terrorist financing practices. It was the first of three newspapers to report on the program, and has established itself as the national leader in revealing government secrets with its publication last year of details of the tracking of phone calls and email without warrants.
Its editors have dismissed the notion that this information may be useful to our enemy. They have dismissed the notion that their newspaper may in fact be giving terrorists information that will help them evade detection, and in that way contribute to future murderous attacks.
The New York Times editors are hiding behind the idea of freedom of the press. That has been slowly evolving in recent decades into a freedom without responsibility -- the overarching new American value. It is the value that allows seemingly reasonable people to think we can wish away our problems. It is the value that allows seemingly reasonable people to see our elected president as the enemy.
Our actual and very real enemy purposefully murdered nearly 3,000 people on one day, and has repeatedly attacked civilians other free nations, killing hundreds of people in Europe and Asia, not to mention the thousands of innocents purposefully murdered in Iraq. This enemy has pursued weapons of mass destruction, and given the opportunity, will use them to kill as many of us as possible. They know that militarily, for now, they cannot beat us. But they are patient. They believe, based on past experience, that with our low tolerance for blood we will falter, pull out, and abandon our allies. That will provide them with the opportunity to control nations, to control armies, to control resources. Maybe then we’ll have something more closely resembling total war that Bush’s domestic opposition can finally recognize as a good and necessary war, in which national security must be respected, and excesses in the defense of freedom will be seen in the context of their time, like the carpet bombing of cities, the internment of American citizens and the suspension of habeas corpus. Like the brutalities of the Pacific war and Sherman’s March through Georgia.
But that kind of war - the fabled Good War - belongs to another time. A simpler time. It is probably something that only exists in the rearview mirror anyway.
There are some people who will never get that. Their actions show that they are not worthy of the freedoms that American soldiers have died to give them. Those freedoms are theirs anyway, the birthright of even the most despicable self-centered coward who is born American. But there comes a point when you have to ask, which side are they on? There comes a point when even professional capriciousness and misguided idealism - to be charitable - have to be labelled for what they are: Giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Treason.
I'm reminded of a scene in Saving Private Ryan when a german psyops officer said (in german) "The Statue of Liberty is kaput!".
The capt mused. "The Statue of Liberty is kaput... that's disconcerting."
Had to laugh at that one.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.