Free Republic

To the list of collegiate types -- nerds, jocks, Greeks -- add one more: spies in training. The government is hoping they'll be hard to spot. The Obama administration has proposed the creation of an intelligence officer training program in colleges and universities that would function much like the Reserve Officers' Training Corps run by the military services. The idea is to create a stream "of first- and second-generation Americans, who already have critical language and cultural knowledge, and prepare them for careers in the intelligence agencies," according to a description sent to Congress by Director of National Intelligence Dennis...

This is a tremendous speech by a young republican at the state Republican convention in Richmond, Virginia. The link is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4_0L2ZJAvQ for part one. Part two is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zejvNWt65VI&feature=related

The Best Speech of the Virginia GOP Convention. Cadet Colonel Adnan Barqawi:"Impossible is Nothing..." Click here for the video Cadet Colonel Adnan Barqawi "Impossible is Nothing"We had so many speakers at the Virginia Convention, we had Mitt Romney, Sean Hannity and a slate of Virginia representatives but it was not one of them that claimed the day. It was Cadet Colonel Adnan Barqawi, a new citizen and descendent of Palestinian refugees born in Kuwait, who brought the house down with his speech given from the heart with a clear love of his new country and its founding principles. His success...

Harvard is open to just about anything, but for 40 years it has been closed to the Reserve Officers' Training Corps. That's about to change. Gen. David H. Petraeus will be the featured speaker at this year's ROTC commissioning ceremony at Harvard University, marking a step in Harvard's reclaiming of its honored tradition of service to the country. ....There are about three dozen Harvard students in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC), but the program is officially unrecognized. Students get no credit for military-science classes, and course work and drills are held at the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology .....The...

<p>Want to trim the federal budget and improve the military at the same time? Shut down West Point, Annapolis and the Air Force Academy, and use some of the savings to expand ROTC scholarships.</p> <p>After covering the U.S. military for nearly two decades, I've concluded that graduates of the service academies don't stand out compared to other officers. Yet producing them is more than twice as expensive as taking in graduates of civilian schools ($300,000 per West Point product vs. $130,000 for ROTC student). On top of the economic advantage, I've been told by some commanders that they prefer officers who come out of ROTC programs, because they tend to be better educated and less cynical about the military.</p>

Forty years ago today, Harvard University caved to pressure from violent student radicals and banned the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) from campus. The ban continues because Harvard finds the U.S. military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy too offensive to be countenanced. In those same 40 years, Harvard has hosted at least one terrorist - Yassir Arafat - and the former president of Iran’s terror-sponsoring regime. The latter, Mohammad Khatami, was asked to speak on the eve of 9/11. Current Harvard policy is to accommodate Muslim fundamentalists who demanded single-sex gym time in the name of Sharia law. They even...

Maj. Gen. Mark Graham is on the frontlines of the Army's struggle to stop its soldiers from killing themselves. Through a series of novel experiments, the 32-year military veteran has turned his sprawling base here into a suicide-prevention laboratory. One reason: Fort Carson has seen nine suicides in the past 15 months. Another: Six years ago, a 21-year-old ROTC cadet at the University of Kentucky killed himself in the apartment he shared with his brother and sister. He was Kevin Graham, Gen. Graham's youngest son.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. - If it seems like a nightmare now, it started with a dream come true. Anna Viviano got into one of the best schools in the country, and as an ROTC recruit, she didn't have to pay a penny. "I talked to a couple recruiters and they were just like you can go to Vanderbilt for free," she recalled. And for two and a-half years, Viviano thrived -- second in her ROTC class and a near-perfect GPA. "I thought everything was going swimmingly -- was right on track to do what I wanted," she said. Then came...

FORT MONROE, Va., Dec. 29, 2008 – The blast of a roadside bomb in Iraq's Sunni Triangle resulted in the amputation of a portion of Richard Ingram's left arm, but it did not rob him of his dream of becoming an Army officer. Richard Ingram, right, takes the oath of office as a second lieutenant administered by Army 1st Lt. Robert Morris at North Georgia College and State University, Dec. 13, 2008. Photo by Kate Maine  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. Ingram's dream became a reality Dec. 13 when he graduated from North Georgia College and State University...

Polls closed early? More votes disqualified than counted for either side? Individuals casting multiple votes? No independent, anti-fraud auditing? Yes -- to all of the above. And, at the final result, by a 39-vote margin Columbia University students decided to renew the ban on ROTC classes at the Ivy League school. In an episode reminiscent of the referenda conducted by Joe Stalin in the USSR’s heyday, Columbia University surveyed its students from Monday, November 24 until Monday, December 1 to gauge interest for the return of the Navy’s Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) to campus. Students currently have no option...

Should all schools allow ROTC on their campuses? Yes or No.

Should public schools open their doors to military recruitment, of any type, on campus? That was the question San Francisco voters took up in 2005, when they overwhelmingly passed Proposition I, which urged the city's schools to reject military recruitment in favor of college scholarship programs. The San Francisco Unified School District responded in 2006 by beginning to phase out of the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, a long-standing and well-funded recruitment instrument of the Department of Defense, which targets San Francisco students of color, often from poor families, who attend seven public high schools, while steering clear of the...

During Columbia University’s ServiceNation Presidential Forum on the seventh anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks, Judy Woodruff of PBS’s “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” demonstrated that she understands as much about volunteerism as Charlie Gibson does about the Bush Doctrine. (If you want to read more, this is the second item on the page.)

CANON CITY, Colo. -- A Kent man who is an associate professor at Seattle University was arrested in connection with a variety of child sex crimes on Monday in Colorado, reported KIRO 7 Eyewitness News. Police said the arrest of Major Andrew Douglas Franz, 41, stemmed from an undercover Internet investigation by the Fremont County Combined Investigative Response Team. Police said Franz traveled from Washington to Fremont County in Colorado for the purpose of having sex with an underage girl. ...

Any Harvard student with the balls to participate in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) deserves our respect. Quite frankly, ROTC doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun. For four years, cadets and midshipmen wake up obscenely early in order to trek to MIT and get yelled at by their instructors. That’s an indignity that Harvard usually reserves for accounting students. If you want to know what visceral discomfort looks like, watch a Harvard ROTC student shuffle across campus in his military uniform. Banished by the Faculty in 1969 amid a rising tide of anti-war sentiment on Harvard’s campus,...

CAMP BASTION, Afghanistan - More than 100 U.S. Marines stood at attention before four empty boots and two sets of dog tags Tuesday to honor the first Marines to die in Afghanistan since their unit's deployment last month. 1st Sgt. Luke J. Mercardante, 35, and Cpl. Kyle W. Wilks, 24, died in a roadside bomb explosion in the Panjwayi district of Kandahar province on April 15, said Lt. Col. Ricky Brown, the commander of Combat Logistics Battalion 24, 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, based at Camp Lejuene, North Carolina. Dark, overcast skies, a blustery wind and light droplets of rain reflected...

EVERETT -- Eleven years ago, Sabrina M. Weiner graduated as a valedictorian at Kamiak High School near Everett. She was a National Merit Scholar, aiming for a bright future after earning a Navy ROTC scholarship to Stanford University. Two months ago, Weiner, 27, after seven years in the active and reserve duty during which she rose to the rank of lieutenant, forfeited her career. In a rare instance involving a commissioned officer, Weiner was arrested and given a choice between a court-martial or less-than-honorable discharge after refusing to serve in Iraq. Speaking publicly for the first time about it, Weiner...

EVERETT -- Eleven years ago, Sabrina M. Weiner graduated as a valedictorian at Kamiak High School near Everett. She was a National Merit Scholar, aiming for a bright future after earning a Navy ROTC scholarship to Stanford University. Two months ago, Weiner, 27, forfeited her Navy career after seven years on active and reserve duty, during which she rose to the rank of lieutenant. In a rare instance involving a commissioned officer, Weiner was arrested and given a choice between a court-martial or less-than-honorable discharge after refusing to serve in Iraq. Speaking publicly for the first time about it, Weiner...

Ohio State University's ROTC cadets have ended the decades-long practice of combat training with mock rifles on the main campus because of public edginess in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, officials said. Since the decision was made a couple of weeks ago, tactical training with rubber replicas of an M-16 rifle has been moved indoors, or cadets have trained without rifles, said Navy Capt. Steven Noce, who heads the university's ROTC program. The tactical training, typically conducted around the ROTC building near Ohio Stadium, has generated a few calls to police from concerned people in the past year,...

As a drill instructor at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, Luke Mercardante trained more than 1,200 men, turning them from civilians into Marines. Later, at Camp Lejeune, Mercardante visited the Wounded Warriors barracks and was approached by a young man who had been one of his recruits. The man told him that a lesson he learned from Mercardante at boot camp saved his life, said Mercardante's girlfriend, Kimberly Hull. The young man remembered Mercardante yelling at him, telling him not to move, Hull said. So when the time came, he didn't move, and lived.