Posted on 03/10/2007 9:52:57 PM PST by Flavius
AN ELITE group of native American trackers is joining the hunt for terrorists crossing Afghanistan’s borders.
The unit, the Shadow Wolves, was recruited from several tribes, including the Navajo, Sioux, Lakota and Apache. It is being sent to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to pass on ancestral sign-reading skills to local border units.
In recent years, members of the Shadow Wolves have mainly tracked drug and people smugglers along the US border with Mexico.
But the Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan and the American military’s failure to hunt down Osama Bin Laden — still at large on his 50th birthday yesterday — has prompted the Pentagon to requisition them.
Robert M Gates, the US defence secretary, said last month: “If I were Osama Bin Laden, I’d keep looking over my shoulder.”
The Pentagon has been alarmed at the ease with which Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters have been slipping in and out of Afghanistan. Defence officials are convinced their movements can be curtailed by the Shadow Wolves.
The unit has earned international respect for its tracking skills in the harsh Arizona desert.
It was founded in the early 1970s to curb the flow of marijuana into the US from Mexico and has since tracked people-smugglers across hundreds of square miles of the Tohono O’odham tribal reservation, southwest of Tucson.
Harold Thompson, a Navajo Indian, and Gary Ortega, from the Tohono reservation, are experts at “cutting sign”, the traditional Indian method of finding and following minute clues from a barren landscape. They can detect twigs snapped by passing humans or hair snagged on a branch and tell how long a sliver of food may have lain in the dirt.
Some military experts want the Shadow Wolves to help to track down Bin Laden. Despite a $25m bounty on his head and the use of billions of dollars worth of sophisticated equipment — including pilotless drones, electronic sensors, infrared cameras and satellite surveillance — US forces have so far failed to fulfil President Bush’s promise to capture Bin Laden “dead or alive”.
But a senior US official insisted last week that Bin Laden’s trail had “not gone stone cold”.
Vice-Admiral Mike McConnell, the new US director of national intelligence, told a Senate committee that Bin Laden and his lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, were setting up new training camps in northwestern Pakistan.
I went to a 19-D (cav scout) short course in Texas for the National Guard. Part of the school was patrolling and in my squad we had a older guy reclassing like me to 19-D that was a Native American from Oklahoma. He had an uncanny ability to see anything out of the ordinary that just boggled the mind. Needless to say our squad "Smoked" the other guys pretty easily.
Hey unsung...could you flex your finger a bit....when you type America or American and captilize.....makes lot's of us on FR a lot happier.....Thanks....
Turns out the Karankawa word for 'pig' is madona - isnt that HILARIOUS? Would love to say that to a particular rock diva....heheheheheheheh
bttt
Dear Tony Allen-Mills [Side bar: hyphenated last names for a man are effeminate. And if you aren't a man then...], you have no idea whether binny boy is alive or dead. So don't state something as fact that you are not sure of, it's sloppy journalism.
5.56mm
I like this!
The Sioux and Lakota are the same. The Dakota are a separate but related entity. Lakota is the traditional name, whereas Sioux was the European name.
They may have the sense that America is really their country and worth fighting for. I'm just glad they do. I can't figure it out either but they're good people and deserve much better treatment than they've gotten in the past. My daughter-in-law is a Tlingit indian from the Yukon territory (they live in AK) and her family was treated very badly. Her mother and others in that family were put into boarding schools and it was not a good experience for them. Mxxx
"I'll know we're serious when we send Apaches. j/k :-)"
You better not let a Lakota hear you say that. :-)
May the spirit of Crazy Horse be with them.....and Sitting Bull....and Red Cloud.
"Butch to Sundance: Who are those guys?"
Good one! Hope OBL and Zawahiri have got the news and are preparing to meet Saddam! Like the Raid ad says, "You can run, but you can't hide!"
Many of my brothers in VN were Native Americans.
I hope you were being sarcastic.
Actually, it was meant to be an ironic statement. I was not trying to characterize the Indians as people you rejoice in american deaths, as oh, umm, let's say the **palestinians** *egyptians, saudis, jordanias, (you likely get the idea).
It was also indicative of my surprise that native americans, who to be perfectly sure have plenty of good reasons not to feel loyal to the amercian state, instead choose to. And meanwhile, the present day flux of illegals into america and the west, especially but not limited ot islamic areas, demand benefit after benefit offering only hostility and rioting in return.
Write.
Bizarre how events mimic storylines.
Requisition, indeed.
You would understand us better if you would stop for a second and realize that we are Americans too.
We are not all the hollywood and media leftist stereotype.
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