Free Republic

WASHINGTON, April 25, 2005 – America today honored eight American servicemen who died trying to rescue American hostages in Iran 25 years ago. A ceremony here, on the 25th anniversary of their deaths, brought together the families of those killed, their comrades and those servicemembers who carry on the special operations mission. In November 1979 Iranian militants took 53 Americans in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran hostage. It was the most egregious violation of the principles of diplomacy in the history of statecraft, L. Bruce Laingen, the highest-ranking American taken hostage, said at today's ceremony. On April 25, 1980, the...

What's next, Donald Rumsfeld being shipped off to run UNICEF? Someone in the White House's human resources department is having too much fun. First, John Bolton, a bona fide skeptic when it comes to things like diplomacy and treaties, was nominated to be the U.S. ambassador to that den of multilateralism, the United Nations. Now President Bush has nominated Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of Defense and one of the intellectual authors of the Iraq war, to lead the World Bank. And we thought we were being provocative when we nominated Bono, the rock star, for the same job. An...

A rapidly rising flashpoint in American society is the seemingly "free healthcare" being given to veterans coupled with no understanding by the general populace that we paid much more for our healthcare than they did. We paid in blood. One news organization reporting on President Bush's new budget said, "He asks high-income veterans who do not have service-connected illnesses or injuries to pay a $250 annual VA health care fee. Bush also wants to increase prescription drug co-payments for such veterans from $7 to $15 for a 30-day drug supply. More than 2 million veterans could be affected." What the...

In recent weeks, the Army has ratcheted up its public relations machine touting the merits of its latest combat toy being deployed in Iraq, the $3 million-plus per copy wheeled armored vehicle known as the Stryker. With the insurgency’s offensive heating up recently in Mosul, Iraq, the Stryker is seeing some action and it’s obviously become tougher to keep the 300 or so Stryker armored vehicles out of harms way. Case in point: Two Army soldiers were killed on Dec. 4 when their Stryker “received enemy fire during convoy operations.” (There have been no details released yet by the Department...

Twenty John Kerry supporters met for their first group therapy session in South Florida Thursday, screaming epithets at President Bush as they shared their emotions with licensed mental health counselors. The first of several free noontime therapy sessions at the American Health Association in Boca Raton was designed to treat what mental health counselors have dubbed Post Election Selection Trauma (PEST). “If I had a cardboard cutout of President Bush, and these people wanted to throw darts at it, I would let them do it,” Robert J. Gordon, AHA executive director, told the Boca News after the session. “It’s no...

Discipline and Ambition Overcome First Defeat By Dale Russakoff Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, July 25, 2004; Page A01 In 1972, John F. Kerry, the war hero turned antiwar hero, found the house of his dreams in suburban Worcester. It came with a widow's balcony, a columned front porch and, perhaps most important, a congressional district whose aging incumbent looked vulnerable. No sooner had John and Julia Kerry bought the house on Pleasant Road, though, than John found something better. The apartment in industrial Lowell had less curb appeal, but the congressional district was to die for: Its 10-term incumbent...

The current Stryker brigade combat team lacks the joint C4ISR, firepower, protection, mobility and organic logistical support to be a full-dimensional war fighting organization and its operational utility will continue to be limited to peace support or paramilitary police operations. A glance at the Stryker brigade in Northern Iraq provides ample evidence for this statement. The Army's senior leadership wisely decided to keep the Stryker brigade remote from the scene of the action in Central Iraq where the lethal quality of close combat might inflict serious casualties on it. Frankly, in peace support operations, the block III LAV with its...

The 2004 Presidential race has re-focused the public's attention on the Vietnam War and its legacy. Many of the myths of the 1960’s and 1970’s have been revived as “truths” and these “truths” are now weapons in the political debate. Vietnam was a formative experience for me and for many of my comrades, including John Kerry. I’m sure that this was not unique to the Vietnam War, but Vietnam veterans had to add to their military experience the impact of the distorted lens through which they were viewed – both when they came home and later. False distortions of how...

The controversial Lav3 light armoured vehicle is understood to have caused a multimillion-dollar army budget blowout, while pictures fresh from the battlefields of Iraq graphically expose the vehicle's shortcomings. Note: This story is accompanied by extensive imagery of the Lav3 suffering massive damage under combat conditions. Those photographs are available in the print edition. Defence sources told The National Business Review the army had sought nearly $40 million extra funding for the Lav3s, a highly sensitive request given the controversial nature of the vehicles' purchase. The Lav3s, which began service late last year, cost nearly $700 million. The heated debate...

BAGDHAD (May 8) -- The world stares transfixed to CNN, ABC, NBC, Al Jazeera or whatever Media-du Jour outfit blasting the images of the prison abuse at Abu Ghraib at the hands of a handful of US Army National Guard members. Here in Iraq, business continues. Special Forces, SEALs and a new unit called the Marine Corps SOCOM Detachment ONE working with the SEALS (More on them in future editorial) are busy ensuring that Baghdad does not become the next Beirut. The SOF mission: Get the bad guys before they get us. There are bountiful IED (Improvised Explosive Device) makers...

While the dramas in Fallujah and Najaf come to a conclusion, the Army's soldiers are still riding the roads of Iraq in inferior armored vehicles while the better-protected armored personnel carriers are waiting for them in Kuwait. We're asking our troops to perform a job with the wrong tools, a mistake rooted in the 1999 decision by President Clinton's Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki to take the Army off tracks and put it on wheels. When, in July 2003, acting Army Chief of Staff Gen. John Keane laid out the overall Army plan to rotate the units stationed in...

Lightly protected vehicles in Iraq such as the Humvee and the U.S. Army's new wheeled Stryker are providing far too little protection for troops and should be replaced with heartier substitutes, senior military commanders have warned. Roadside bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and heavy automatic weapons are taking their toll on lightly-armored U.S. military vehicles and, worse, on the troops riding in them – despite Pentagon efforts to beef up protection. Currently the Defense Department is hurrying to replace the thin-skinned Humvees with "up-armored" models as quickly as possible. According to the London Daily Telegraph, U.S. forces have added scrap armor plating,...

"The Army's new car is a lemon." That's how former U.S. Treasury fraud investigator and Special Forces trooper Lonnie Shoultz describes the U.S. Army's newest armored vehicle, the Stryker. Worse, he says, it is becoming an expensive lemon. Shoultz, a Vietnam combat veteran with the 101st Airborne Division and former Green Beret, as well as an experienced government fraud investigator, has long been vocal in his criticism of the Stryker, as well as the process the Army used to procure it. He's not alone in his assessment. Other military analysts and experts have also come out against the implementation of...

The U.S. Army's newest armored vehicle, the Stryker, is plagued with problems and fraught with dangers for crewmen, say military watchdogs and other organizations who have examined the wheeled vehicle's performance record. Also, critics and analysts have questioned the Defense Department's procurement of the vehicle as well as the Pentagon's decision to build it, adding the military has ignored warnings about the Stryker's perceived vulnerability and overall survivability in combat. According to an analysis by the Project On Government Oversight, or POGO, one of the Pentagon's own testing officials sent the defense agency a letter warning the $3 million-per-copy Stryker...

With new focus on the revolving door between the Pentagon and defense contractors, another case deserves further scrutiny: The January 2000 hiring of former Army Lt. General David K. Heebner by General Dynamics Corp., and the subsequent award 11 months later of a $4 billion contract to General Dynamics to build the Army's Stryker Interim Armored Vehicle. POGO has learned that the Pentagon's top independent tester warned the Secretary of the Army that the vehicle should not be deployed in Iraq because it is vulnerable to rocket propelled grenades. As one of Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki's top...

BAGHDAD, IRAQ - Three soldiers from the Stryker Brigade Combat Team were killed in an accident during a combat patrol in Iraq Sunday night, ABC News reports. A fourth soldier was injured. The accident occurred after an embankment on an unimproved road collapsed, causing two Stryker infantry carrier vehicles to roll over into a canal. ABC News says it was not a result of hostile fire. Heavy rainfall in the area might have been a cause, but the Army is still investigating.

The Army tightened rules yesterday on press coverage of funerals at Arlington National Cemetery, directing that reporters be kept far enough away from the graveside that they would likely be unable to hear a chaplain's eulogy. Reporters will be restricted to a roped-in "bullpen" that is generally far enough away that words spoken at graveside cannot be heard, officials said.

EYES RIGHT: A Veteran's View By Lonnie Shoultz © 2001 Congress bails out the stockholders of our airlines… Within two weeks of the murders at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I received a message from a friend in academia pointing out how much WORSE things could have been if all 50,000 employees of the World Trade Center and the 23,000 employees who work at the Pentagon had been killed. While I don't believe that we should be celebrating these thug's poor aim, bad luck, poor arithmetic and the low lethality of their best efforts to kill thousands of ...

Crews and safety inspectors from Con Edison, who have been working feverishly to reestablish electricity to most of Lower Manhattan in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks, have been ordered to remove American flag decals and paintings from their safety helmets, because of company policy. An e-mail sent to Con Edison safety administrators said the decals of the American flag "defaced" the safety equipment. The action has left managers at the site, where more than 6,000 have lost their lives stunned, and the workers seeing red, rather than red, white, and blue. According to the memo issued by ...

The Congressional anti-terrorism package passed in the House and the Senate last week passed unanimously in the Senate (98-0) with the sick, lame and lazy not voting and 420-1 in the House of Representatives. The lone dissenter, presumably in favor of terrorism and against Americans, was California Congressperson Barbara Lee of Oakland. Representative Lee has a long history of embracing radical causes and voting like a dimwit. This vote was no exception. When I learned her identity, I went to her web site and wrote her a disparaging message that questioned her mental faculties, her bone fides as an American, ...