Bachmann well-positioned for Iowa, and maybe beyond

No Republican presidential candidate is better positioned to capitalize on the recent tide of conservative anger toward President Barack Obama than Michele Bachmann.
Her charisma and crossover appeal to both social and fiscal conservatives have the three-term Minnesota congresswoman rising in the polls and primed to make a serious impact on the GOP nomination fight.
Bachmann, unlike several of her rivals making appeals to the Tea Party movement, has the resources and fundraising potential to steer her campaign beyond the crucial early states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.
Though firmly on the insurgent side of the Republican field, she is also taking steps to position herself as a credible alternative to the crop of establishment-friendly White House contenders with deep pockets and long political resumes.

It Pays To Be Bad

The U.S. has revealed that cell phones captured in the bin Laden raid showed calls to Islamic terror groups (like Harakat-ul-Mujahideen) with known connections to the Pakistani Army. American intelligence has long had evidence of such connections, but has kept the details secret because it would reveal sources and methods of how terrorist (and Pakistani Army) communications were monitored. Bin Laden's documents also revealed that al Qaeda has suffered a sharp drop in popularity, and donations, in the last few years. To cope with the money shortage, bin Laden has quietly encouraged the use of kidnapping to raise money. He cautioned his followers to be careful who they kidnapped, lest their few remaining allies be angered. But the al Qaeda kidnapping was unpopular anyway.

Bush-Era Conviction of Bin Laden Driver Upheld

The U.S. Court of Military Commission Review's 86-page ruling, released Friday evening, said not only did Salim Hamdan of Yemen get "a full and fair trial" at Guantanamo, but also said that the military can lawfully use a separate court to prosecute foreigners "whose purpose is to terrorize American citizens."
The timing is significant. The ruling validated the war crime of providing material support to terrorism at a time when the Pentagon is preparing new cases. Five of the 171 captives currently at Guantanamo face death penalty prosecutions for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
And the trial of Bin Laden's $200-a-month driver has long been a test case.

Experts: Drawdown Leaves Ambiguous Mission

President Barack Obama offered numbers and a timeline but little strategic reasoning for his Afghanistan troop drawdown plans, analysts across the political spectrum said.


As a result, they say, there is no clarity about what troops will be fighting for in the years to come.

“He failed to offer a strategic rationale for what the U.S. is doing in Afghanistan from this point forward,” said Nora Bensahel, who studies counterinsurgency and stability operations at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank from which the Obama administration has plucked a number of policy officials.

Under the announced timetable — faster than top military leaders recommended — it appears the U.S. will switch from a hearts-and-minds counterinsurgency strategy to a more starkly antiterrorist campaign, Bensahel said. But the president didn’t make that explicit.

The Religious Rot In Israel

Religious extremists are attacking the Israeli military from without, and from within. The Israeli armed forces have, over the last decade, spent an increasing amount of their time dealing with religious extremists. Most of the time, the enemy is some Islamic radical group, like Hamas or al Qaeda. But more and more, Jewish religious radicals have become a threat, often from within.


A big problem is draft exemptions granted to members of conservative Jewish sects. These groups have their own political parties. Because Israel has a parliamentary form of government, these small religious parties often make it possible for one of the larger parties to gain a majority in parliament, and thus form a government. But the religious parties exact a price, and one of the more unpopular ones is exemption from military service for the children of these communities. Thus while every 18 year old woman, who does not belong to a religious community, gets drafted for two years (unless she is married, or has a physical or psychological disability), no 18 year old women in the religious communities are conscripted. It's nearly as bad for the young men, although some 18 year old men from religious communities volunteer. Most do not, and their absence in the military is increasingly noted.

The Luftwaffe And The American Connection

The German Luftwaffe is spending $300 million for the use of the U.S. Air Force Holloman Air Force Base in the next year. For a long time, the Luftwaffe has been sending its fighter pilots to air force bases in the western United States (Holloman is in New Mexico). The Germans pay to use base services (maintenance and other flight support, housing fuel). This year, the Luftwaffe has also ordered 720 500 pound and 135 2000 pound bombs and five high speed target drones. All this is for training Luftwaffe combat pilots.

German troops, mainly pilots and anti-aircraft missile crews, still train in the United States, as they have for over half a century. The reason is lots of space, and less bad weather (which prevents some kinds of training.) Until recently, the bulk of the German training was in Canada, which accounted for about two thirds of the German troops involved in these North American training trips. The training in Canada ended not long after the Cold War did.

Tax Dispute Stalls Debt Talks

The drive for a major deficit-reduction deal entered a new phase Thursday when Republican negotiators pulled out of bipartisan talks, leaving it to President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner to resolve the toughest issues.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R., Va.) said he was backing out of the talks for now because the group had reached an impasse over the question of whether tax increases should be included in the deal.

..The only other Republican in the group, Sen. Jon Kyl (R., Ariz.), soon followed suit, agreeing that only the highest levels of leadership could break the logjam between Democrats' demand that the budget deal include tax increases and Republicans' adamant opposition to that demand.
The talks were aimed at striking a budget deal in hopes of easing the way for Congress to raise the government's $14.29 trillion debt limit. Treasury Department officials say that without additional borrowing authority, the government will run out of cash to pay its bills by Aug. 2.

Oil reserves release shocks markets

Oil prices dropped more than 7 per cent after western nations released the biggest amount of oil from their emergency strategic stocks since 1991, in a warning shot aimed at Opec, the oil producers’ cartel.
The US led the release with its special petroleum reserve providing 50 per cent of the crude oil. Japan, Germany, France, Spain and Italy are providing most of the rest. The IEA said that it was in consultation with China, the world’s second-largest oil consumer, but declined to say whether Beijing would join the effort.
Brent crude prices tumbled 7.4 per cent to $105.72 a barrel after the news was released, before settling at $107.26 in late London trading. Investors sought the safety of US government debt, pushing yields on four-week Treasury bills into negative territory and yields on three-month bills to just above zero. The yield on 10-year Treasury notes fell 8 basis points to 2.91 per cent, the lowest close since December.
This is only the third time in the history of the IEA – set up in 1974 as a counterbalance to Opec after the Arab oil crisis – that there has been a release. The move has been triggered by western concerns about the impact of high crude prices on the economic recovery.

Tea Partiers Create Their Own TV Show and Production Company

Those who belong to the conservative movement known as the Tea Party are acutely aware of the power of popular culture, so they have been cautiously delving into the creation of entertainment that promotes their values. It usually manifests itself in snippets of online political parody. Coming Sunday, though, is perhaps the most ambitious effort yet: A “TV show” created by a couple of Tea Partiers who have formed their own production company.




The one-hour drama is called Courage, New Hampshire, and it premiers Sunday at a movie theater in Monrovia, Calif. Co-hosting the red carpet activities are Saturday Night Live alumna Victoria Jackson and radio personality Tony Katz, both of whom regularly speak at Tea Party rallies.

The Worm That Won't Die

The U.S. Department of Defense believes a computer worm (agent.btz), introduced into their heavily protected (not connected to the Internet) SIPRNet network three years ago, was developed by Russia. It was three years ago that agent.btz got into the top secret Department of Defense network when a soldier in Central Command, stationed in the Middle East, plugged an agent.btz infected thumb drive into a laptop, connected to the secure net. Despite three years of efforts, the Department of Defense has not been able to completely clean out agent.btz. New versions of agent.btz have shown up in other U.S. government networks. Hostile software like agent.btz is programmed to constantly try and duplicate itself and move to other networks. That's what a worm does. But agent.btz also seeks to find a network that is connected to the Internet, so that it can transmit out data it has collected. This is the perfect spy, and there are more of them out there every month. There are not only more of them, but they get more capable. New ones are programmed to evade defenses (anti-virus software) and most of them are equipped to insert them onto your hard disk so that they are difficult to detect.

Death By Counterfeit

Over the last five years, the U.S. Department of Defense have discovered an increasing number of replacement parts and computer equipment they bought that include counterfeit components. That is, items produced by an unlicensed manufacturer, usually in Asia, that are labeled and marketed as the real thing. Generally counterfeits are superficially indistinguishable from the real thing, but tend to be of lower quality. In short, counterfeit components in critical systems could behave in ways not anticipated, or create dangerous situations by failing in unanticipated ways.


Counterfeit parts have already been involved in causing accidents in civilian aviation, and failures in other sectors as well. But there's more. Counterfeit electronic parts can have components added that make it easier for someone to take control of a network the component is part of. This is the sort of thing people at the CIA have long contemplated, but with all the counterfeit electronic components, particularly networking items like routers, coming out of China, the risk of installing "infected" components is now less theoretical. But the main problems is simply substandard, counterfeit components, which will not perform as well, or for as long, as the originals.

Islamic Radicals Gone Wild

The June 16 Islamic militant bombing attack was the first in Nigeria using suicide bombers. Boko Haram, the most active Islamic militants in the north, have, despite intense police pressure, promised more bombing attacks. The police say they will crush Boko Haram, but the Islamic radicals have been active for two years and have expanded the number and intensity of their attacks. Boko Haram is willing to negotiate a peace deal with the government, but only if Sharia (Islamic) law is strictly enforced in 12 northern states (out of 36 in Nigeria). This demand has been causing religious tensions in the north for most of the last decade.

F-16s Threaten Konigsberg

In a move certain to agitate Russian nationalists, Poland has signed an agreement allowing the U.S. Air Force to base warplanes and transports in Poland. Thus, within two years, the U.S. plans to have F-16s and C-130s stationed in Poland. This is seen by Poland as a further protection from Russian pressure and threats. For over two centuries, Russia has regularly threatened, and often seized parts of, Poland. Russia is not happy with anything that might prevent more such moves in the future. Since the United States is a nuclear power, Russia will be constrained from moving on Poland as long as American troops are stationed there. But the Russians will definitely not like it, and this pleases the Poles a great deal.

Pentagon gets cyberwar guidelines

The Pentagon is expected to announce the entire strategy soon.
As an example, the new White House guidelines would allow the military to transmit computer code to another country's network to test the route and make sure connections work - much like using satellites to take pictures of a location to scout out missile sites or other military capabilities.
The digital code would be passive and could not include a virus or worm that could be triggered to do harm at a later date. But if the U.S. ever got involved in a conflict with that country, the code would have mapped out a path for any offensive cyberattack to take, if approved by the president.
The guidelines also make clear that when under attack, the U.S. can defend itself by blocking cyber intrusions and taking down servers in another country. And, as in cases of mortar or missile attacks, the U.S. has the right to pursue attackers across national boundaries - even if those are virtual network lines.
"We must be able to defend and operate freely in cyberspace," Lynn said in a speech last week in Paris. The U.S., he said, must work with other countries to monitor networks and share threat information.

Americans Worse Now Than When Obama Inaugurated by 44%-34% Margin in Poll

Two years after the official start of the recovery, the American people remain pessimistic about their current economic circumstances and longer-term prospects.


Fewer than a quarter of people see signs of improvement in the economy, and two-thirds say they believe the country is on the wrong track overall, according to a Bloomberg National Poll conducted June 17-20.

“Gas prices are higher, grocery prices are higher, transportation prices are higher,” says poll respondent Ronda Brockway, 54, an insurance company manager and political independent who lives in a suburb of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. “The jobs situation nationwide is very poor.”

By a 44 percent to 34 percent margin, Americans say they believe they are worse off than when President Barack Obama took office in early 2009, when the U.S. was in the depths of a recession compounded by the September 2008 financial crisis and the economy was losing as many as 820,000 jobs a month.
The gloom covers the immediate future, with fewer than 1 in 10 people expecting unemployment to return to pre-recession levels within the next two years, and it extends to the next generation. More than half of respondents say their children are destined to have a lower standard of living than they do, upending a traditional touchstone of the American Dream.

Petraeus unmentioned

President Obama's address Wedneday night dwelled at length on the service of America's "extraordinary" military personnel, but avoided any mention of the commanders who, reportedly, opposed a faster withdrawal.


General David Petraeus, the face of American counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan and now nominated to lead the CIA, was not mentioned in a speech that instead made an explicit turn toward "nation building" at home.

Instead, Obama focused on combat officers, like the nameless SEAL who led the Bin Laden raid.

"This officer -- like so many others I’ve met on bases, in Baghdad and Bagram, and at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval Hospital -– spoke with humility about how his unit worked together as one, depending on each other, and trusting one another, as a family might do in a time of peril,"Obama said.
The speech seemed aimed in part at concluding a military era. Its closing reference to the successful raid seemed to underscore a growing sense among many Democrats that the era of Petraeus's ambitious counterinsurgency and of the War on Terror is over.

Afghan army successes cannot mask fears of what happens when US goes

Six and a half years ago, when Abdul Baseer first started treating wounded Afghan soldiers in southern Afghanistan, he worked out of a small wooden hut which served as his office, pharmacy, surgery and sleeping quarters. He shared it with four other medics.


Now he has a gleaming, 100-bed military hospital that can do "everything except neurosurgery". Nearly every Afghan National Army (ANA) soldier who is wounded in southern Afghanistan comes through his hospital at the sprawling, and equally new, base of the 205th "Hero" Corps outside Kandahar City.

He says he has seen clear progress in the war, with a definite tilt against the Taliban on the battlefield – last year's intensive military operations to clear insurgent strongholds has led this year to a 50% fall in the number of patients, he says.

But ask Dr Baseer if he thinks the ANA is anywhere near ready to go it alone, without the help of American troops, and he lets out a panicked shout of "No!"

"These improvements can't be sustained without their help," he said.

As with many others, Baseer is waiting for Barack Obama's announcement about how many of the US surge troops will be withdrawn this year with some trepidation.

"My biggest worry is when transition happens we won't be able to fly patients directly from the battlefield to the hospital," he said. "We have to rely on the Americans for that."

Scout's Project Pays Tribute to Soldiers Killed in Action

 

After the end of World War II, the body of a 31-year-old Soldier was shipped home for burial.

Six and a half decades later, a teenager who never knew infantryman John Miller, who died in 1944 on a battlefield in France, is saluting Miller with a white wooden cross.

The teen didn't know Airman 1st Class Jason Nathan either.

In June 2007, while on patrol aboard a Humvee in Iraq, the 22-year-old Nathan was killed in a roadside-bomb blast. Nathan was later buried in the same Macon cemetery as Miller.

The teen, Matthew Davis, is also honoring Nathan. With another cross.

Davis has built 50 of them. He is 17, about to become an Eagle Scout.

In a project to help him earn that distinction -- and as a Memorial Day tribute -- he is placing crosses at the graves of dozens of local veterans who were killed in action.

The crosses are 2-by-4s notched together. They're 2 feet tall, 18 inches wide.

They'll be tapped into the ground at Macon Memorial Park on the city's west side, everywhere that cemetery's known war dead are laid to rest.

"As I was building them, I thought about how once I set these crosses on these graves, it's going to affect a whole lot more people than just one person," Davis said. "It's going to affect their whole families. And I'm honored to be able to do that and to reach out to them. Each cross signifies a dead soldier that gave his life for our country. That means a lot."

Davis, the son of a dentist, is a rising senior at First Presbyterian Day School. He runs track and plays football and baseball.

"One of the reasons I think it's good for me to be doing this is because I don't have any immediate family in the military," he said. "This is the least I can do."

Dale Miller, the late Army Pfc. John Miller's son, was born in 1941, five days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

He remembers his father's funeral, how it sunk in that "my father was never coming home."

Dale Miller, now 69, a graduate of Lanier High School, had considered joining the Navy. His mother wouldn't hear of it.

The other day, the retired electrical engineer was asked what he thought about Davis' putting a white cross on his father's grave.

"I applaud him," Dale Miller said. "For a young man to do that ... it's significant."

Jason Nathan's mother, Phyllis, also has heard about Davis' project.

"I want to shake his hand," she said. "Some children don't realize what other people have done to make way for them. But this shows that there are some who are still getting it. They know how precious our freedom is."

It so happens that Phyllis Nathan, 45, is a mail carrier. Her route runs through a stretch of eastern Bibb County. She delivers to the Boy Scout headquarters off Interstate 16.

A few days ago, she dropped by and picked out a gift for Davis, "just to say thank you."

It is something made for Eagle Scouts: a disc-shaped pocketknife that resembles a thick coin.

She made sure Davis' name was engraved on one side, between the wing tips of a great bird.

Scout's Project Pays Tribute to Soldiers Killed in Action

Space Shuttle Endeavour Lands for Last Time

 

Space shuttle Endeavour and its six astronauts returned to Earth on Wednesday, closing out the next-to-last mission in NASA's 30-year program with a safe middle-of-the-night landing.

Endeavour touched down on the runway a final time under the cover of darkness, just as Atlantis, the last shuttle bound for space, arrived at the launch pad for the grand finale in five weeks.

Commander Mark Kelly -- whose wife, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, remained behind at her rehab center in Houston -- brought Endeavour to a stop before hundreds of onlookers that included the four Atlantis astronauts who will take flight in July.

The museum-bound Endeavour, the youngest of the shuttles, logged nearly 123 million miles over 25 spaceflights.

Space Shuttle Endeavour Lands for Last Time

Charges Refiled Against Accused 9/11 Mastermind

 

Military prosecutors have refiled terrorism and murder charges against the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and four other men under a revamped trial process at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

The charges against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the others allege that they were responsible for planning the attacks that sent hijacked commercial airliners slamming into New York's World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people.

Prosecutors have recommended that the trial be a capital case, which could bring the death penalty.

The five men were charged previously in connection with the attacks, but those charges were dropped in 2009 when the Obama administration hoped to close the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo and do away with Bush-era military commissions for trying terror suspects.

The other four alleged coconspirators are:

** Waleed bin Attash, better known as Khallad, a Yemeni who allegedly ran an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan and researched flight simulators and timetables.

** Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni who allegedly helped find flight schools for the hijackers.

** Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, accused of helping nine of the hijackers travel to the United States and sending them $120,000 for expenses and flight training.

** Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi, a Saudi accused of helping the hijackers with money, Western clothing, travelers' checks and credit cards.

Charges Refiled Against Accused 9/11 Mastermind

'Unknown' Union Soldier Identified at Last

 

Tears glisten in Debbie Morgan's eyes as she reads a newly found 147-year-old letter penned by an ancestor who lies under an "unknown" marker on the manicured slopes of Marietta National Cemetery, one of 10,312 Union soldiers who came to Georgia in 1864 and never went home.

"Finally, after all these years, his family knows where he is," says Morgan, an Indiana transplant who lives in Powder Springs. "We just found out."

It happened by fluke. Morgan, program director of the West Cobb Senior Center, heard that local historian Bradley J. Quinlin was an expert on Marietta National and asked him to take her elderly folks on a tour. He did. That was five years ago.

Then, just a few weeks ago, she heard from a cousin in Indiana who had found a sheaf of letters written by an ancestor who was wounded at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain on June 27, 1864. The soldier, Pvt. Wilson Fields, died less than four months later in a hospital in East Point, but no one ever told the family where he was buried.

Morgan gave Quinlin the letters on the off chance her relative might be buried in the cemetery she had "passed a million times."

After studying regimental, cemetery and muster logs, Quinlin soon identified Fields' grave as being under marker 5386. He had been disinterred and moved to Marietta in 1866.

'Unknown' Union Soldier Identified at Last

US Medics Brave Fire to Save Lives in Afghan War

 

U.S. Army medic Sgt. Jaime Adame hauled open the door and lunged from the helicopter into a cloud of dirt and confusion.

He could hear bursts of incoming fire above the thumping rotor blades. Somewhere in the billowing red smoke that marked the landing zone and the choking dust whipped up by the medevac chopper was a cluster of Marines pinned down by heavy fire, and one of them was bleeding badly.

The problem for Adame was that he did not know where.

Adame had dropped into "hot L-Zs" before but this one was especially thick with commotion. Every second of indecision mattered, so he just ran, knowing any direction was dangerous. Only then did the cloud clear enough to bring into view the blurred outline of several Marines' boots peeking out of the vehicle they were taking cover under.

"The fear I have never lost," said Adame, who's from Los Angeles. "It's absolutely risky ... and it will definitely get a lot more dangerous."

With the spring fighting season underway in Helmand province in Afghanistan's volatile south, the medics, crew chiefs and pilots with the U.S. Army's "Dustoff" medevac unit expect a rising number of casualties. Coalition troops are seeing stepped-up attacks, the use of complex weapons systems such as multiple-grenade launchers and the continuing plague of improvised explosive devices on the battlefield.

US Medics Brave Fire to Save Lives in Afghan War