So its flying now

I wonder what name the Army will adopt for it if it enters service???


https://vimeo.com/290525992/99d34c8635

Enough with the Victimhood: Millionaire Athletes

and Their Lost Cause

by Sylvia Thompson

 

I must admit I have never in my life purchased a ticket to a sports event. I

am not a sports enthusiast. But I am an American black citizen, and I have

had it up to the gills with black people who embrace victimhood. I also

highly resent my being expected to do the same in order to affirm my

"blackness."

 

Black victims these days, for the most part, are the product of decades of

Black Americans being used primarily by white progressive leftists to

advance an anti-American agenda.

 

The current brouhaha surrounding the despicable behavior of NFL athletes

toward the National Anthem and the American flag is a prime example of what

the Left has done to my race.

 

One must assume these players and their guilt-conflicted white coaches and

owners (and victimhood-inflicted black coaches) are being manipulated by the

Left, because no intelligent, thinking people would deliberately cut

themselves off at the knees. Essentially, what these young misguided mostly

black men are doing is ensuring the demise of their lucrative paychecks.

Further, I would wager that if these teams consisted of all white athletes,

none of this idiocy would be allowed. We are witnessing this travesty

because the vast majority of players are black and can whine "oppression" if

appropriate action is taken against them for their unconscionable behavior.

 

The twisted reasoning that claims these protests are to highlight

"injustice" and "police brutality" is a laughable crock. What they do in

fact is dishonor valued symbols of this nation's heritage and cover over

truth about black crime.

 

Black males bear the brunt of police encounters because black males commit

disproportionately more crimes. Police encounters with black men are so

often confrontational because so many of these men, especially the young,

don't think "compliance" applies to them. They foolishly assume they are

above the law and disrespect for police officers is an act of honor.

 

These young blacks, sadly, took much of their direction from racists Obama

and Eric Holder during Obama's destructive, eight-year regime and Holder's

corruption of the Justice Department. These two men, abusing their federal

powers, gave young blacks the impression they need not heed the law, because

laws are somehow unjust when they are applied to black Americans. The NFL

lot, and any other athletes taking a similar stance, are also influenced by

Obama's and Holder's disdain for law and law enforcement.

 

I am not familiar with one case where a black suspect to a crime was not

proven legally to have caused the behavior against him, particularly in

cases where the police officer involved was exonerated by facts. Michael

Brown of "hands up, don't shoot" infamy is one good example. Blatant lies

were spread to cloud the truth about Brown's case.

 

Back in the day when I was growing up in the racially segregated South, the

opposite prevailed in many cases. There was much injustice particularly

toward black men, but not today. Today, too many blacks have been fed the

notion that it is now "pay-back" time, and they can flaunt their lawlessness

because some whites flaunted theirs during an earlier time in our nation's

history.

 

Although Obama and Holder no longer wield power in this country, some of

their minions continue on the pernicious path of "paying back" American

whites for wrongs, real or imagined. But as the saying goes, there is a new

Sheriff in town and he is not guilt-conflicted. He expects fair play under

law and tolerating pay-back is not part of his agenda. Black Americans, when

they break the law, can no longer claim victim status simply because they

are black. Those days are over.

 

American laws and law enforcement personnel will be respected in America,

again; our traditions and values will not be impugned in America without

consequences, again. Anybody unsettled about this turn of events is welcome

to leave this country. I suggest all the black players try a country in

Africa, and see how successful they will be at making millions playing

games. They will all soon learn what oppression really means.

 

Some self-directed, independent-thinking blacks (and there are many of us)

have offered that if these millionaire protestors want to tackle some real

problems, they might consider the thousands of black children killed in

abortions annually (by the progressive Left), or perhaps the many, many

young blacks murdered routinely on inner-city streets by other young blacks

(in cities run by progressive, leftist Democrats), or the downright criminal

state of education of black inner-city children, orchestrated by the

progressive leftist National Education Association (NEA). The NEA's aim is

to produce unintelligent pawns to feed the cause of progressivism.

 

I am annoyed by the expressions of "sincerity" gracing the faces of the NFL

protestors-as if to convey the "hallowedness" of their cause. In actuality,

they provide a picture of grown men allowing themselves to be made fools of

by the progressive Left. I don't doubt, however, that some of these men have

been coerced into compliance with this lost cause, either through threats of

violence or shunning (from coaches and players). Alejandro Villanueva of the

Pittsburgh Steelers and former Army ranger is very likely a victim of such

threats. He was publicly castigated by his leftist coach for his patriotism.

The coach demanded unity behind an ignorant cause.

 

And finally, this issue has nothing to do with First Amendment rights.

President Trump's speaking out against the clownish behavior of the

athletes, on behalf of the majority of American citizens, does not mean he

can or would stop any of these misguided people from making fools of

themselves. To restrict them, as a government entity, would indeed be a

violation of the First Amendment..... But their employers, if they were to

develop even a modicum of testicular fortitude, could and should fire them

for doing major damage to the bottom line of the business. The rest of us

non-millionaire "Joes" would certainly be pink-slipped by an employer if we

dared to be so clueless about the necessity of profits and so disdainful of

the sensibilities of customers.

 

I will wait patiently for the true sports enthusiasts to vent their rage by

simply boycotting the games. It will be sweet revenge to witness the slain

goose cease producing its golden eggs.

Having had a long career in the military, and especially working as a contractor in the combat theaters for the likes of the State department, I have seen this internal sabotage time and time again. All of us military contractors pretty much hated the state department types who were sneaks, liars, and actually seemed anti-american sometimes. We just never got that, thinking we were all on team America.


https://www.citizenfreepress.com/column-1/deep-state-unmasked-james-okeefe-releases-new-video/

We are standing witness to the unwinding of our moral culture and in some ways to the undoing of civilization itself. Anyone question we are approaching end times???



More Yale freshmen identify as LGBTQ than conservative, survey finds
ARYSSA DAMRON - YALE UNIVERSITY •SEPTEMBER 12, 2018
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Queer freshmen greatly outnumber conservatives at the university, according to a survey

A Yale Daily News survey of freshmen students at that university found that more students of the class of 2022 identify on the LGBTQ spectrum than as conservative, and that queer freshmen even outnumber other sizable demographics in the class, such as Protestants and Catholics.

The paper’s survey, the results of which are composed of 864 respondents, or just over one-half of the freshman class, found that only nine percent of respondents identified as “somewhat conservative,” with one percent identifying as “very conservative.” LGBTQ respondents, on the other hand, greatly outnumberd conservatives in total: According to the survey, “nearly 5 percent [of respondents] identify as gay and just over 9 percent as bisexual or transsexual. Three percent opted not to answer, and the remaining 8 percent identified as asexual, ace spectrum or questioning their sexual orientation.”

This combined demographic outnumbers even Protestants and Catholics, whom the survey identified as 16 percent and 15 percent of the incoming class, respectively.

A 2018 Gallup poll estimated that 4.5 percent of all Americans identified as LGBTQ.

Liberal students in the class of 2022 also greatly outnumber conservatives on campus, according to The Daily News‘s findings.

“Nearly three-fourths” of surveyed students identified as liberal, with thirty percent identifying as “very liberal.” These disparities are mirrored in the faculty composition at Yale: A 2017 Daily News survey of Yale professors found that three-quarters identified as liberal while less than 10 percent identified as conservative. Over 90 percent of faculty members in the humanities identified as liberal while that number hovered in the mid-60s for STEM faculty.

Yale’s Dean of Student Affairs, Camille Lizarribar, did not respond to requests for comment on whether Yale was taking steps to increase ideological diversity on campus. Lizarribar was prominent last year in the debate over changing the term “freshman” to the gender-neutral term “first-year” in university communications.

Cameron Koffman, the president of the school’s William F. Buckley, Jr. Program, said that is it “not surprising” that so many students on campus lean left and that it would be obvious “if one were to spend a few days at Yale, sit in on classes, and talk to people.”

“The best thing the University can do is make sure that conservatives on campus feel comfortable voicing their opinions and ensuring that students understand that the administration firmly supports free speech and intellectual diversity,” Koffman said.

Jamie Kirchick, a Yale College alumnus who is running a petition to be a candidate for the Yale Board of Trustees, told The College Fix via email that “Yale is increasingly out of touch with America, and America is increasingly out of touch with Yale.”

“Central to the American college experience must be not just exposure to people of different racial backgrounds but also different life experiences and viewpoints,” Kirchick said. One suggestion he had for a solution was “a pre-read program, modeled on Princeton, where every incoming freshman reads two books that put forth different arguments about an important contemporary or historical debate.”

Yale’s issues with viewpoint diversity came under scrutiny in 2015 when Professors Nicholas and Erika Christakis were publicly targeted by students after Erika wrote an email that suggested students should not be so easily offended by things such as Halloween costumes. A swift backlash from students followed. At one point a mob of students surrounded Nicholas on campus, with one student turning hysterical and shrieking at him, “Who the ____ hired you?” Nicholas eventually resigned his position at a residential college on campus, while Erika resigned her position teaching at the school.

In an op-ed for The Washington Post, Erika Christakis wrote: “By affirming only the narrow right to air my views, rather than helping the community to grapple with its intense response, an unfortunate message was made plain: Certain ideas are too dangerous to be heard at Yale.”

In that same piece, she expressed concern that “students will eventually give up trying to engage with each other, a development that will echo in our wider culture for decades.”

Shortly after Erika’s email, the William F. Buckley Jr. Program conference, which that was year focused on free speech, was besieged by protestors, one of whom spit on an attendee.

A 2016 Yale Daily News survey found that 95 percent of conservative students on campus thought that their conservative views were unwelcome. One respondent was quoted as saying “I just get the general vibe that Republicans aren’t respected for their beliefs as much as maybe the liberal people are.” Overall, 75 percent of respondents said that Yale “does not provide a welcoming environment for conservative students to share their opinions on political issues.”

Recently I received a questionnaire and request for money From the Republican Party and strongly agree with every question, As I have since Obama was elected.

 Unfortunately the one question that was missing is:

What have the  Republicans done for the American people?

 We gave you a majority in the House and Senate, and you never  listened to us.

Now you want our money, my money, more money.

You should be more concerned

About our votes, not our money.

 You are the establishment which means all you want

Is to save your jobs and line your pockets.

 Well guess what? It's not going to happen.

 So far, TRUMP hasn't asked for a dime.

 You might think we are fools because you feel Trump is on a self-destruct course,

But look beyond Washington and listen to the masses.

Nobody has achieved what he has, especially in the state of New York .

 Here's why I want Trump:

 Yes, he's a bit of an ass;

 Yes, he's an  egomaniac;

But I don't care.

 The country is a mess because politicians suck.

 The Republican Party is two-faced and gutless, and

Illegals are  everywhere.

 I want it all fixed!

I don't care that Trump is crude.

I don't care that he insults people.

I don't care that he has changed positions.

I don't care that he's been married 3 times.

I don't care that he fights with Megan Kelly and Rosie O’Donnell.

I don't care that he doesn't know the name of some Muslim terrorist.

 Our country has become weak, and bankrupt.

Our enemies are making fun of us.

We are being invaded by illegals

 We are becoming a nation of victims where every

Tom, Ricardo and Hassid is a special group with special rights

To a point where we don't even recognize the country we were born and raised in,

 "AND I JUST WANT IT FIXED."

 And Trump is the only guy who seems to understand what

We The People want and need.

 I'm sick of politicians,

Sick of the Democratic Party,

Sick of the Republican Party,

And sick of illegals.

I just want this thing fixed.

 Trump may not be a saint, but he doesn't have lobbyist money controlling him;

He doesn't have political correctness restraining him;

All you know is that he has been very successful;

A good negotiator;

He has built a lot of things; and,

he's also not a politician.

 He says he'll fix it.

I believe him because he is too much of an egotist

To be proven wrong or looked at and called a liar.

 I don't care if the guy has bad hair.

 You are welcome to pass this on, or not.

 Thought for the Day:

"No country can sustain, in idleness,

More than a small percentage of its numbers.

The great majority must labor at something productive!"

 P.S.  No Borders, No Language, No Culture = No Country.

 

         I sure hopes this goes to everyone.

A guide to the best and worst veterans charities
www.CHARITYWATCH.org

Where is your veterans charity money going?

CharityWatch.org keeps an eye on the best and worst veterans charities you can donate to on behalf of the brave men and women who have worn our nation’s uniform.
The organization grades each charity on an A-F scale:
Top choices among veterans charities
Bob Woodruff Family Foundation (A)
Fisher House Foundation (A+)
Gary Sinise Foundation (A)
Guide Dog Foundation for the Blind (A)
Homes for Our Troops (A)
Hope For The Warriors (A-)
Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund (A)
National Military Family Association (A)
Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society (A)
Operation Homefront (A)
Semper Fi Fund (A+)
Team Rubicon (A-)
Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (A)
Wounded Warriors Family Support (A)

Avoid these veterans charities

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is out with a new list of bogus charities.
In some cases, the FTC says the following charities pocketed 95% of donations intended for veterans:
American Disabled Veterans Foundation
Foundation for American Veterans, Inc.
Healing Heroes Network
Help the Vets, Inc.
Healing American Heroes, Inc.
Military Families of America
National Vietnam Veterans Foundation
Veterans Fighting Breast Cancer
VietNow National Headquarters, Inc.

Meanwhile, CharityWatch.org singled out four other veterans charities after they received failing marks in its charity rankings:
AMVETS National Service Foundation (F)
Military Order of the Purple Heart Service Foundation (F)
Paralyzed Veterans of America (F)
Veterans of Foreign Wars of the U.S. (F)

How to make your money count for any charitable donation

Before donating to any charity, you need to know the rules of the road and the precautions to take to ensure that the money will go where it’s needed.
Don’t give cash. Legitimate charities will take a check.
Don’t give credit card, bank account or personal information to telemarketers. In fact, you should be skeptical of telemarketers. If you want to give, you should be the one who initiates the call.
Don’t give to Internet appeals if the cause does not look legitimate and doesn’t check out. Traditional frauds have gone electronic in recent years, giving con artists easy access to thousands of potential victims.
Don’t give in to pressure. Anyone that can’t wait for a donation while you check out his or her organization is likely to be a crook.
Expect specific information. Ask what kind of relief this organization is going to provide. Don’t give to a vague appeal.
Check out the charity with national, state and local authorities. Established charities register with the Internal Revenue Service. You can search for specific non-profit organizations on the IRS website.
Beware of newly formed organizations. If the charity is new, you may have to rely on your relationship with the company or sponsor of the organization to determine whether you trust the group.
Report abuses to the nearest Better Business Bureau and the State Attorney General’s office. You can also report abuses to the National Fraud Information Center at (800) 876-7060 or at Fraud.org.

To find out more information about charities and how to investigate them on the web, go to either Give.org or CharityWatch.org

I can see it...

This swing toward socialism is sickening

Nike could have picked anyone, but they pick the controversial anti-American, American football player

Why? Cheap/free advertisement because of the controversial nature of this spoiled brat?

This nation is coming undone

Eighteen months ago, TAC publisher Ron Unz discovered an astonishing account of the role the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, had played in suppressing information about what happened to American soldiers missing in action in Vietnam. Below, we present in full Sydney Schanberg’s explosive story.


John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn’t return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero who people would logically imagine as a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books.

Almost as striking is the manner in which the mainstream press has shied from reporting the POW story and McCain’s role in it, even as the Republican Party has made McCain’s military service the focus of his presidential campaign. Reporters who had covered the Vietnam War turned their heads and walked in other directions. McCain doesn’t talk about the missing men, and the press never asks him about them.

The sum of the secrets McCain has sought to hide is not small. There exists a telling mass of official documents, radio intercepts, witness depositions, satellite photos of rescue symbols that pilots were trained to use, electronic messages from the ground containing the individual code numbers given to airmen, a rescue mission by a special forces unit that was aborted twice by Washington—and even sworn testimony by two Defense secretaries that “men were left behind.” This imposing body of evidence suggests that a large number—the documents indicate probably hundreds—of the U.S. prisoners held by Vietnam were not returned when the peace treaty was signed in January 1973 and Hanoi released 591 men, among them Navy combat pilot John S. McCain.

Mass of Evidence

The Pentagon had been withholding significant information from POW families for years. What’s more, the Pentagon’s POW/MIA operation had been publicly shamed by internal whistleblowers and POW families for holding back documents as part of a policy of “debunking” POW intelligence even when the information was obviously credible.

The pressure from the families and Vietnam veterans finally forced the creation, in late 1991, of a Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs. The chairman was John Kerry. McCain, as a former POW, was its most pivotal member. In the end, the committee became part of the debunking machine.

One of the sharpest critics of the Pentagon’s performance was an insider, Air Force Lt. Gen. Eugene Tighe, who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) during the 1970s. He openly challenged the Pentagon’s position that no live prisoners existed, saying that the evidence proved otherwise. McCain was a bitter opponent of Tighe, who was eventually pushed into retirement.

Included in the evidence that McCain and his government allies suppressed or sought to discredit is a transcript of a senior North Vietnamese general’s briefing of the Hanoi politburo, discovered in Soviet archives by an American scholar in 1993. The briefing took place only four months before the 1973 peace accords. The general, Tran Van Quang, told the politburo members that Hanoi was holding 1,205 American prisoners but would keep many of them at war’s end as leverage to ensure getting war reparations from Washington.

Throughout the Paris negotiations, the North Vietnamese tied the prisoner issue tightly to the issue of reparations. They were adamant in refusing to deal with them separately. Finally, in a Feb. 2, 1973 formal letter to Hanoi’s premier, Pham Van Dong, Nixon pledged $3.25 billion in “postwar reconstruction” aid “without any political conditions.” But he also attached to the letter a codicil that said the aid would be implemented by each party “in accordance with its own constitutional provisions.” That meant Congress would have to approve the appropriation, and Nixon and Kissinger knew well that Congress was in no mood to do so. The North Vietnamese, whether or not they immediately understood the double-talk in the letter, remained skeptical about the reparations promise being honored—and it never was. Hanoi thus appears to have held back prisoners—just as it had done when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and withdrew their forces from Vietnam. In that case, France paid ransoms for prisoners and brought them home.

In a private briefing in 1992, high-level CIA officials told me that as the years passed and the ransom never came, it became more and more difficult for either government to admit that it knew from the start about the unacknowledged prisoners. Those prisoners had not only become useless as bargaining chips but also posed a risk to Hanoi’s desire to be accepted into the international community. The CIA officials said their intelligence indicated strongly that the remaining men—those who had not died from illness or hard labor or torture—were eventually executed.

My own research, detailed below, has convinced me that it is not likely that more than a few—if any—are alive in captivity today. (That CIA briefing at the Agency’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters was conducted “off the record,” but because the evidence from my own reporting since then has brought me to the same conclusion, I felt there was no longer any point in not writing about the meeting.)

For many reasons, including the absence of a political constituency for the missing men other than their families and some veterans’ groups, very few Americans are aware of the POW story and of McCain’s role in keeping it out of public view and denying the existence of abandoned POWs. That is because McCain has hardly been alone in his campaign to hide the scandal.

The Arizona senator, now the Republican candidate for president, has actually been following the lead of every White House since Richard Nixon’s, and thus of every CIA director, Pentagon chief, and national security adviser, not to mention Dick Cheney, who was George H.W. Bush’s Defense secretary. Their biggest accomplice has been an indolent press, particularly in Washington.

McCain’s Role

An early and critical McCain secrecy move involved 1990 legislation that started in the House of Representatives. A brief and simple document, it was called “the Truth Bill” and would have compelled complete transparency about prisoners and missing men. Its core sentence reads: “[The] head of each department or agency which holds or receives any records and information, including live-sighting reports, which have been correlated or possibly correlated to United States personnel listed as prisoner of war or missing in action from World War II, the Korean conflict and the Vietnam conflict, shall make available to the public all such records held or received by that department or agency.”

Bitterly opposed by the Pentagon (and thus McCain), the bill went nowhere. Reintroduced the following year, it again disappeared. But a few months later, a new measure, known as “the McCain Bill,” suddenly appeared. By creating a bureaucratic maze from which only a fraction of the documents could emerge—only records that revealed no POW secrets—it turned the Truth Bill on its head. The McCain bill became law in 1991 and remains so today. So crushing to transparency are its provisions that it actually spells out for the Pentagon and other agencies several rationales, scenarios, and justifications for not releasing any information at all—even about prisoners discovered alive in captivity. Later that year, the Senate Select Committee was created, where Kerry and McCain ultimately worked together to bury evidence.

McCain was also instrumental in amending the Missing Service Personnel Act, which had been strengthened in 1995 by POW advocates to include criminal penalties, saying, “Any government official who knowingly and willfully withholds from the file of a missing person any information relating to the disappearance or whereabouts and status of a missing person shall be fined as provided in Title 18 or imprisoned not more than one year or both.” A year later, in a closed House-Senate conference on an unrelated military bill, McCain, at the behest of the Pentagon, attached a crippling amendment to the act, stripping out its only enforcement teeth, the criminal penalties, and reducing the obligations of commanders in the field to speedily search for missing men and to report the incidents to the Pentagon.

About the relaxation of POW/MIA obligations on commanders in the field, a public McCain memo said, “This transfers the bureaucracy involved out of the [battle] field to Washington.” He wrote that the original legislation, if left intact, “would accomplish nothing but create new jobs for lawyers and turn military commanders into clerks.”

McCain argued that keeping the criminal penalties would have made it impossible for the Pentagon to find staffers willing to work on POW/MIA matters. That’s an odd argument to make. Were staffers only “willing to work” if they were allowed to conceal POW records? By eviscerating the law, McCain gave his stamp of approval to the government policy of debunking the existence of live POWs.

McCain has insisted again and again that all the evidence—documents, witnesses, satellite photos, two Pentagon chiefs’ sworn testimony, aborted rescue missions, ransom offers apparently scorned—has been woven together by unscrupulous deceivers to create an insidious and unpatriotic myth. He calls it the “bizarre rantings of the MIA hobbyists.” He has regularly vilified those who keep trying to pry out classified documents as “hoaxers,” “charlatans,” “conspiracy theorists,” and “dime-store Rambos.”

Some of McCain’s fellow captives at Hoa Lo prison in Hanoi didn’t share his views about prisoners left behind. Before he died of leukemia in 1999, retired Col. Ted Guy, a highly admired POW and one of the most dogged resisters in the camps, wrote an angry open letter to the senator in an MIA newsletter—a response to McCain’s stream of insults hurled at MIA activists. Guy wrote, “John, does this [the insults] include Senator Bob Smith [a New Hampshire Republican and activist on POW issues] and other concerned elected officials? Does this include the families of the missing where there is overwhelming evidence that their loved ones were ‘last known alive’? Does this include some of your fellow POWs?”

It’s not clear whether the taped confession McCain gave to his captors to avoid further torture has played a role in his postwar behavior in the Senate. That confession was played endlessly over the prison loudspeaker system at Hoa Lo—to try to break down other prisoners—and was broadcast over Hanoi’s state radio. Reportedly, he confessed to being a war criminal who had bombed civilian targets. The Pentagon has a copy of the confession but will not release it. Also, no outsider I know of has ever seen a non-redacted copy of the debriefing of McCain when he returned from captivity, which is classified but could be made public by McCain.

All humans have breaking points. Many men undergoing torture give confessions, often telling huge lies so their fakery will be understood by their comrades and their country. Few will fault them. But it was McCain who apparently felt he had disgraced himself and his military family. His father, John S. McCain II, was a highly regarded rear admiral then serving as commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific. His grandfather was also a rear admiral.

In his bestselling 1999 autobiography, Faith of My Fathers, McCain says he felt bad throughout his captivity because he knew he was being treated more leniently than his fellow POWs, owing to his high-ranking father and thus his propaganda value. Other prisoners at Hoa Lo say his captors considered him a prize catch and called him the “Crown Prince,” something McCain acknowledges in the book.

Also in this memoir, McCain expresses guilt at having broken under torture and given the confession. “I felt faithless and couldn’t control my despair,” he writes, revealing that he made two “feeble” attempts at suicide. (In later years, he said he tried to hang himself with his shirt and guards intervened.) Tellingly, he says he lived in “dread” that his father would find out about the confession. “I still wince,” he writes, “when I recall wondering if my father had heard of my disgrace.”

He says that when he returned home, he told his father about the confession, but “never discussed it at length”—and the admiral, who died in 1981, didn’t indicate he had heard anything about it before. But he had. In the 1999 memoir, the senator writes, “I only recently learned that the tape … had been broadcast outside the prison and had come to the attention of my father.”

Is McCain haunted by these memories? Does he suppress POW information because its surfacing would rekindle his feelings of shame? On this subject, all I have are questions.

Many stories have been written about McCain’s explosive temper, so volcanic that colleagues are loath to speak openly about it. One veteran congressman who has observed him over the years asked for confidentiality and made this brief comment: “This is a man not at peace with himself.”

He was certainly far from calm on the Senate POW committee. He browbeat expert witnesses who came with information about unreturned POWs. Family members who have personally faced McCain and pressed him to end the secrecy also have been treated to his legendary temper. He has screamed at them, insulted them, brought women to tears. Mostly his responses to them have been versions of: How dare you question my patriotism? In 1996, he roughly pushed aside a group of POW family members who had waited outside a hearing room to appeal to him, including a mother in a wheelchair.

But even without answers to what may be hidden in the recesses of McCain’s mind, one thing about the POW story is clear: if American prisoners were dishonored by being written off and left to die, that’s something the American public ought to know about.

10 Key Pieces of Evidence That Men Were Left Behind

1. In Paris, where the Vietnam peace treaty was negotiated, the United States asked Hanoi for the list of American prisoners to be returned, fearing that Hanoi would hold some prisoners back. The North Vietnamese refused, saying they would produce the list only after the treaty was signed. Nixon agreed with Kissinger that they had no leverage left, and Kissinger signed the accord on Jan. 27, 1973 without the prisoner list. When Hanoi produced its list of 591 prisoners the next day, U.S. intelligence agencies expressed shock at the low number. Their number was hundreds higher. The New York Times published a long, page-one story on Feb. 2, 1973 about the discrepancy, especially raising questions about the number of prisoners held in Laos, only nine of whom were being returned. The headline read, in part, “Laos POW List Shows 9 from U.S.—Document Disappointing to Washington as 311 Were Believed Missing.” And the story, by John Finney, said that other Washington officials “believe the number of prisoners [in Laos] is probably substantially higher.” The paper never followed up with any serious investigative reporting—nor did any other mainstream news organization.

2. Two Defense secretaries who served during the Vietnam War testified to the Senate POW committee in September 1992 that prisoners were not returned. James Schlesinger and Melvin Laird, both speaking at a public session and under oath, said they based their conclusions on strong intelligence data—letters, eyewitness reports, even direct radio contacts. Under questioning, Schlesinger chose his words carefully, understanding clearly the volatility of the issue: “I think that as of now that I can come to no other conclusion … some were left behind.” This ran counter to what President Nixon told the public in a nationally televised speech on March 29, 1973, when the repatriation of the 591 was in motion: “Tonight,” Nixon said, “the day we have all worked and prayed for has finally come. For the first time in 12 years, no American military forces are in Vietnam. All our American POWs are on their way home.” Documents unearthed since then show that aides had already briefed Nixon about the contrary evidence.

Schlesinger was asked by the Senate committee for his explanation of why President Nixon would have made such a statement when he knew Hanoi was still holding prisoners. He replied, “One must assume that we had concluded that the bargaining position of the United States … was quite weak. We were anxious to get our troops out and we were not going to roil the waters…” This testimony struck me as a bombshell. The New York Times appropriately reported it on page one but again there was no sustained follow-up by the Times or any other major paper or national news outlet.

3. Over the years, the DIA received more than 1,600 first-hand sightings of live American prisoners and nearly 14,000 second-hand reports. Many witnesses interrogated by CIA or Pentagon intelligence agents were deemed “credible” in the agents’ reports. Some of the witnesses were given lie-detector tests and passed. Sources provided me with copies of these witness reports, which are impressive in their detail. A lot of the sightings described a secondary tier of prison camps many miles from Hanoi. Yet the DIA, after reviewing all these reports, concluded that they “do not constitute evidence” that men were alive.

4. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, listening stations picked up messages in which Laotian military personnel spoke about moving American prisoners from one labor camp to another. These listening posts were manned by Thai communications officers trained by the National Security Agency (NSA), which monitors signals worldwide. The NSA teams had moved out after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and passed the job to the Thai allies. But when the Thais turned these messages over to Washington, the intelligence community ruled that since the intercepts were made by a “third party”—namely Thailand—they could not be regarded as authentic. That’s some Catch-22: the U.S. trained a third party to take over its role in monitoring signals about POWs, but because that third party did the monitoring, the messages weren’t valid.

Here, from CIA files, is an example that clearly exposes the farce. On Dec. 27, 1980, a Thai military signal team picked up a message saying that prisoners were being moved out of Attopeu (in southern Laos) by aircraft “at 1230 hours.” Three days later a message was sent from the CIA station in Bangkok to the CIA director’s office in Langley. It read, in part: “The prisoners … are now in the valley in permanent location (a prison camp at Nhommarath in Central Laos). They were transferred from Attopeu to work in various places … POWs were formerly kept in caves and are very thin, dark and starving.” Apparently the prisoners were real. But the transmission was declared “invalid” by Washington because the information came from a “third party” and thus could not be deemed credible.

5. A series of what appeared to be distress signals from Vietnam and Laos were captured by the government’s satellite system in the late 1980s and early ’90s. (Before that period, no search for such signals had been put in place.) Not a single one of these markings was ever deemed credible. To the layman’s eye, the satellite photos, some of which I’ve seen, show markings on the ground that are identical to the signals that American pilots had been specifically trained to use in their survival courses—such as certain letters, like X or K, drawn in a special way. Other markings were the secret four-digit authenticator numbers given to individual pilots. But time and again, the Pentagon, backed by the CIA, insisted that humans had not made these markings. What were they, then? “Shadows and vegetation,” the government said, insisting that the markings were merely normal topographical contours like saw-grass or rice-paddy divider walls. It was the automatic response—shadows and vegetation. On one occasion, a Pentagon photo expert refused to go along. It was a missing man’s name gouged into a field, he said, not trampled grass or paddy berms. His bosses responded by bringing in an outside contractor who found instead, yes, shadows and vegetation. This refrain led Bob Taylor, a highly regarded investigator on the Senate committee staff who had examined the photographic evidence, to comment to me: “If grass can spell out people’s names and secret digit codes, then I have a newfound respect for grass.”

6. On Nov. 11, 1992, Dolores Alfond, the sister of missing airman Capt. Victor Apodaca and chair of the National Alliance of Families, an organization of relatives of POW/MIAs, testified at one of the Senate committee’s public hearings. She asked for information about data the government had gathered from electronic devices used in a classified program known as PAVE SPIKE.

The devices were motion sensors, dropped by air, designed to pick up enemy troop movements. Shaped on one end like a spike with an electronic pod and antenna on top, they were designed to stick in the ground as they fell. Air Force planes would drop them along the Ho Chi Minh trail and other supply routes. The devices, though primarily sensors, also had rescue capabilities. Someone on the ground—a downed airman or a prisoner on a labor gang —could manually enter data into the sensor. All data were regularly collected electronically by U.S. planes flying overhead. Alfond stated, without any challenge or contradiction by the committee, that in 1974, a year after the supposedly complete return of prisoners, the gathered data showed that a person or people had manually entered into the sensors—as U.S. pilots had been trained to do—no less than 20 authenticator numbers that corresponded exactly to the classified authenticator numbers of 20 U.S. POWs who were lost in Laos. Alfond added, according to the transcript, “This PAVE SPIKE intelligence is seamless, but the committee has not discussed it or released what it knows about PAVE SPIKE.”

McCain attended that committee hearing specifically to confront Alfond because of her criticism of the panel’s work. He bellowed and berated her for quite a while. His face turning anger-pink, he accused her of “denigrating” his “patriotism.” The bullying had its effect—she began to cry.

After a pause Alfond recovered and tried to respond to his scorching tirade, but McCain simply turned away and stormed out of the room. The PAVE SPIKE file has never been declassified. We still don’t know anything about those 20 POWs.

7. As previously mentioned, in April 1993 in a Moscow archive, a researcher from Harvard, Stephen Morris, unearthed and made public the transcript of a briefing that General Tran Van Quang gave to the Hanoi politburo four months before the signing of the Paris peace accords in 1973.

In the transcript, General Quang told the Hanoi politburo that 1,205 U.S. prisoners were being held. Quang said that many of the prisoners would be held back from Washington after the accords as bargaining chips for war reparations. General Quang’s report added: “This is a big number. Officially, until now, we published a list of only 368 prisoners of war. The rest we have not revealed. The government of the USA knows this well, but it does not know the exact number … and can only make guesses based on its losses. That is why we are keeping the number of prisoners of war secret, in accordance with the politburo’s instructions.” The report then went on to explain in clear and specific language that a large number would be kept back to ensure reparations.

The reaction to the document was immediate. After two decades of denying it had kept any prisoners, Hanoi responded to the revelation by calling the transcript a fabrication.

Similarly, Washington—which had over the same two decades refused to recant Nixon’s declaration that all the prisoners had been returned—also shifted into denial mode. The Pentagon issued a statement saying the document “is replete with errors, omissions and propaganda that seriously damage its credibility,” and that the numbers were “inconsistent with our own accounting.”

Neither American nor Vietnamese officials offered any rationale for who would plant a forged document in the Soviet archives and why they would do so. Certainly neither Washington nor Moscow—closely allied with Hanoi—would have any motive, since the contents were embarrassing to all parties, and since both the United States and Vietnam had consistently denied the existence of unreturned prisoners. The Russian archivists simply said the document was “authentic.”

8. In his 2002 book, Inside Delta Force, retired Command Sgt. Maj. Eric Haney described how in 1981 his special forces unit, after rigorous training for a POW rescue mission, had the mission suddenly aborted, revived a year later, and again abruptly aborted. Haney writes that this abandonment of captured soldiers ate at him for years and left him disillusioned about his government’s vows to leave no men behind. “Years later, I spoke at length with a former highly placed member of the North Vietnamese diplomatic corps, and this person asked me point-blank: ‘Why did the Americans never attempt to recover their remaining POWs after the conclusion of the war?’” Haney writes. He continued, saying that he came to believe senior government officials had called off those missions in 1981 and 1982. (His account is on pages 314 to 321 of my paperback copy of the book.)

9. There is also evidence that in the first months of Ronald Reagan’s presidency in 1981, the White House received a ransom proposal for a number of POWs being held by Hanoi in Indochina. The offer, which was passed to Washington from an official of a third country, was apparently discussed at a meeting in the Roosevelt Room attended by Reagan, Vice President Bush, CIA director William Casey, and National Security Adviser Richard Allen. Allen confirmed the offer in sworn testimony to the Senate POW committee on June 23, 1992.

Allen was allowed to testify behind closed doors and no information was released. But a San Diego Union-Tribune reporter, Robert Caldwell, obtained the portion relating to the ransom offer and reported on it. The ransom request was for $4 billion, Allen testified. He said he told Reagan that “it would be worth the president’s going along and let’s have the negotiation.” When his testimony appeared in the Union-Tribune, Allen quickly wrote a letter to the panel, this time not under oath, recanting the ransom story and claiming his memory had played tricks on him. His new version was that some POW activists had asked him about such an offer in a meeting that took place in 1986, when he was no longer in government. “It appears,” he said in the letter, “that there never was a 1981 meeting about the return of POW/MIAs for $4 billion.”

But the episode didn’t end there. A Treasury agent on Secret Service duty in the White House, John Syphrit, came forward to say he had overheard part of the ransom conversation in the Roosevelt Room in 1981, when the offer was discussed by Reagan, Bush, Casey, Allen, and other cabinet officials.

Syphrit, a veteran of the Vietnam War, told the committee he was willing to testify, but they would have to subpoena him. Treasury opposed his appearance, arguing that voluntary testimony would violate the trust between the Secret Service and those it protects. It was clear that coming in on his own could cost Syphrit his career. The committee voted 7 to 4 not to subpoena him.

In the committee’s final report, dated Jan. 13, 1993 (on page 284), the panel not only chastised Syphrit for his failure to testify without a subpoena (“The committee regrets that the Secret Service agent was unwilling …”), but noted that since Allen had recanted his testimony about the Roosevelt Room briefing, Syphrit’s testimony would have been “at best, uncorroborated by the testimony of any other witness.” The committee omitted any mention that it had made a decision not to ask the other two surviving witnesses, Bush and Reagan, to give testimony under oath. (Casey had died.)

10. In 1990, Col. Millard Peck, a decorated infantry veteran of Vietnam then working at the DIA as chief of the Asia Division for Current Intelligence, asked for the job of chief of the DIA’s Special Office for Prisoners of War and Missing in Action. His reason for seeking the transfer, which was not a promotion, was that he had heard from officials throughout the Pentagon that the POW/MIA office had been turned into a waste-disposal unit for getting rid of unwanted evidence about live prisoners—a “black hole,” these officials called it.

Peck explained all this in his telling resignation letter of Feb. 12, 1991, eight months after he had taken the job. He said he viewed it as “sort of a holy crusade” to restore the integrity of the office but was defeated by the Pentagon machine. The four-page, single-spaced letter was scathing, describing the putative search for missing men as “a cover-up.”

Peck charged that, at its top echelons, the Pentagon had embraced a “mind-set to debunk” all evidence of prisoners left behind. “That national leaders continue to address the prisoner of war and missing in action issue as the ‘highest national priority,’ is a travesty,” he wrote. “The entire charade does not appear to be an honest effort, and may never have been. … Practically all analysis is directed to finding fault with the source. Rarely has there been any effective, active follow through on any of the sightings, nor is there a responsive ‘action arm’ to routinely and aggressively pursue leads.”

“I became painfully aware,” his letter continued, “that I was not really in charge of my own office, but was merely a figurehead or whipping boy for a larger and totally Machiavellian group of players outside of DIA … I feel strongly that this issue is being manipulated and controlled at a higher level, not with the goal of resolving it, but more to obfuscate the question of live prisoners and give the illusion of progress through hyperactivity.” He named no names but said these players are “unscrupulous people in the Government or associated with the Government” who “have maintained their distance and remained hidden in the shadows, while using the [POW] Office as a ‘toxic waste dump’ to bury the whole ‘mess’ out of sight.” Peck added that “military officers … who in some manner have ‘rocked the boat’ [have] quickly come to grief.”

Peck concluded, “From what I have witnessed, it appears that any soldier left in Vietnam, even inadvertently, was, in fact, abandoned years ago, and that the farce that is being played is no more than political legerdemain done with ‘smoke and mirrors’ to stall the issue until it dies a natural death.”

The disillusioned colonel not only resigned but asked to be retired immediately from active military service. The press never followed up.

My Pursuit of the Story

I covered the war in Cambodia and Vietnam, but came to the POW information only slowly afterward, when military officers I knew from that conflict began coming to me with maps and POW sightings and depositions by Vietnamese witnesses.

I was then city editor of the New York Times, no longer involved in foreign or national stories, so I took the data to the appropriate desks and suggested it was material worth pursuing. There were no takers. Some years later, in 1991, when I was an op-ed columnist at Newsday, the aforementioned special Senate committee was formed to probe the POW issue. I saw this as an opening and immersed myself in the reporting.

At Newsday, I wrote 36 columns over a two-year period, as well as a four-part series on a trip I took to North Vietnam to report on what happened to one missing pilot who was shot down over the Ho Chi Minh trail and captured when he parachuted down. After Newsday, I wrote thousands more words on the subject for other outlets. Some of the pieces were about McCain’s key role.

Though I wrote on many subjects for Life, Vanity Fair, and Washington Monthly, my POW articles appeared in Penthouse, the Village Voice, and APBnews.com. Mainstream publications just weren’t interested. Their disinterest was part of what motivated me, and I became one of a very short list of journalists who considered the story important.

Serving in the Army in Germany during the Cold War and witnessing combat firsthand as a reporter in India and Indochina led me to have great respect for those who fight for their country. To my mind, we dishonored U.S. troops when our government failed to bring them home from Vietnam after the 591 others were released—and then claimed they didn’t exist. And politicians dishonor themselves when they pay lip service to the bravery and sacrifice of soldiers only to leave untold numbers behind, rationalizing to themselves that it’s merely one of the unfortunate costs of war.

John McCain—now campaigning for the White House as a war hero, maverick, and straight shooter—owes the voters some explanations. The press were long ago wooed and won by McCain’s seeming openness, Lone Ranger pose, and self-deprecating humor, which may partly explain their ignoring his record on POWs. In the numerous, lengthy McCain profiles that have appeared of late in papers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, I may have missed a clause or a sentence along the way, but I have not found a single mention of his role in burying information about POWs. Television and radio news programs have been similarly silent.

Reporters simply never ask him about it. They didn’t when he ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination in 2000. They haven’t now, despite the fact that we’re in the midst of another war—a war he supports and one that has echoes of Vietnam. The only explanation McCain has ever offered for his leadership on legislation that seals POW files is that he believes the release of such information would only stir up fresh grief for the families of those who were never accounted for in Vietnam. Of the scores of POW families I’ve met over the years, only a few have said they want the books closed without knowing what happened to their men. All the rest say that not knowing is exactly what grieves them.

Isn’t it possible that what really worries those intent on keeping the POW documents buried is the public disgust that the contents of those files would generate?

How the Senate Committee Perpetuated the Debunking

In its early months, the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs gave the appearance of being committed to finding out the truth about the MIAs. As time went on, however, it became clear that they were cooperating in every way with the Pentagon and CIA, who often seemed to be calling the shots, even setting the agendas for certain key hearings. Both agencies held back the most important POW files. Dick Cheney was the Pentagon chief then; Robert Gates, now the Pentagon chief, was the CIA director.

Further, the committee failed to question any living president. Reagan declined to answer questions; the committee didn’t contest his refusal. Nixon was given a pass. George H.W. Bush, the sitting president, whose prints were all over this issue from his days as CIA chief in the 1970s, was never even approached. Troubled by these signs, several committee staffers began asking why the agencies they should be probing had been turned into committee partners and decision makers. Memos to that effect were circulated. The staff made the following finding, using intelligence reports marked “credible” that covered POW sightings through 1989: “There can be no doubt that POWs were alive … as late as 1989.” That finding was never released. Eventually, much of the staff was in rebellion.

This internecine struggle continued right up to the committee’s last official act—the issuance of its final report. The Executive Summary, which comprised the first 43 pages, was essentially a whitewash, saying that only “a small number” of POWs could have been left behind in 1973 and that there was little likelihood that any prisoners could still be alive. The Washington press corps, judging from its coverage, seems to have read only this air-brushed summary, which had been closely controlled.

But the rest of the 1,221-page Report on POW/MIAs was quite different. Sprinkled throughout are pieces of hard evidence that directly contradict the summary’s conclusions. This documentation established that a significant number of prisoners were left behind—and that top government officials knew this from the start. These candid findings were inserted by committee staffers who had unearthed the evidence and were determined not to allow the truth to be sugar-coated.

If the Washington press corps did actually read the body of the report and then failed to report its contents, that would be a scandal of its own. The press would then have knowingly ignored the steady stream of findings in the body of the report that refuted the summary and indicated that the number of abandoned men was not small but considerable. The report gave no figures but estimates from various branches of the intelligence community ranged up to 600. The lowest estimate was 150.

Highlights of the report that undermine the benign conclusions of the Executive Summary:

• Pages 207-209: These three pages contain revelations of what appear to be either massive intelligence failures or bad intentions—or both. The report says that until the committee brought up the subject in 1992, no branch of the intelligence community that dealt with analysis of satellite and lower-altitude photos had ever been informed of the specific distress signals U.S. personnel were trained to use in the Vietnam War, nor had they ever been tasked to look for any such signals at all from possible prisoners on the ground.

The committee decided, however, not to seek a review of old photography, saying it “would cause the expenditure of large amounts of manpower and money with no expectation of success.” It might also have turned up lots of distress-signal numbers that nobody in the government was looking for from 1973 to 1991, when the committee opened shop. That would have made it impossible for the committee to write the Executive Summary it seemed determined to write.

The failure gets worse. The committee also discovered that the DIA, which kept the lists of authenticator numbers for pilots and other personnel, could not “locate” the lists of these codes for Army, Navy, or Marine pilots. They had lost or destroyed the records. The Air Force list was the only one intact, as it had been preserved by a different intelligence branch.

The report concluded, “In theory, therefore, if a POW still living in captivity [today], were to attempt to communicate by ground signal, smuggling out a note or by whatever means possible, and he used his personal authenticator number to confirm his identity, the U.S. government would be unable to provide such confirmation, if his number happened to be among those numbers DIA cannot locate.”

It’s worth remembering that throughout the period when this intelligence disaster occurred—from the moment the treaty was signed in 1973 until 1991—the White House told the public that it had given the search for POWs and POW information the “highest national priority.”

• Page 13: Even in the Executive Summary, the report acknowledges the existence of clear intelligence, made known to government officials early on, that important numbers of captured U.S. POWs were not on Hanoi’s repatriation list. After Hanoi released its list (showing only ten names from Laos—nine military men and one civilian), President Nixon sent a message on Feb. 2, 1973 to Hanoi’s Prime Minister Pham Van Dong saying, “U.S. records show there are 317 American military men unaccounted for in Laos and it is inconceivable that only ten of these men would be held prisoner in Laos.”

Nixon was right. It was inconceivable. Then why did the president, less than two months later, on March 29, 1973, announce on national television that “all of our American POWs are on their way home”?

On April 13, 1973, just after all 591 men on Hanoi’s official list had returned to American soil, the Pentagon got into step with the president and announced that there was no evidence of any further live prisoners in Indochina (this is on page 248).

• Page 91: A lengthy footnote provides more confirmation of the White House’s knowledge of abandoned POWs. The footnote reads, “In a telephone conversation with Select Committee Vice-Chairman Bob Smith on December 29, 1992, Dr. Kissinger said that he had informed President Nixon during the 60-day period after the peace agreement was signed that U.S. intelligence officials believed that the list of prisoners captured in Laos was incomplete. According to Dr. Kissinger, the President responded by directing that the exchange of prisoners on the lists go forward, but added that a failure to account for the additional prisoners after Operation Homecoming would lead to a resumption of bombing. Dr. Kissinger said that the President was later unwilling to carry through on this threat.”

When Kissinger learned of the footnote while the final editing of the committee report was in progress,he and his lawyers lobbied fiercely through two Republican allies on the panel—one of them was John McCain—to get the footnote expunged. The effort failed. The footnote stayed intact.

• Pages 85-86: The committee report quotes Kissinger from his memoirs, writing solely in reference to prisoners in Laos: “We knew of at least 80 instances in which an American serviceman had been captured alive and subsequently disappeared. The evidence consisted either of voice communications from the ground in advance of capture or photographs and names published by the Communists. Yet none of these men was on the list of POWs handed over after the Agreement.”

Then why did he swear under oath to the committee in 1992 that he never had any information that specific, named soldiers were captured alive and hadn’t been returned by Vietnam?

• Page 89: In the middle of the prisoner repatriation and U.S. troop-withdrawal process agreed to in the treaty, when it became clear that Hanoi was not releasing everyone it held, a furious chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Thomas Moorer, issued an order halting the troop withdrawal until Hanoi complied with the agreement. He cited in particular the known prisoners in Laos. The order was retracted by President Nixon the next day. In 1992, Moorer, by then retired, testified under oath to the committee that his order had received the approval of the president, the national security adviser, and the secretary of Defense. Nixon, however, in a letter to the committee, wrote, “I do not recall directing Admiral Moorer to send this cable.”

 

The report did not include the following information: behind closed doors, a senior intelligence officer had testified to the POW committee that when Moorer’s order was rescinded, the angry admiral sent a “back-channel” message to other key military commanders telling them that Washington was abandoning known live prisoners. “Nixon and Kissinger are at it again,” he wrote. “SecDef and SecState have been cut out of the loop.” In 1973, the witness was working in the office that processed this message. His name and his testimony are still classified. A source present for the testimony provided me with this information and also reported that in that same time period, Moorer had stormed into Defense Secretary Schlesinger’s office and, pounding on his desk, yelled: “The bastards have still got our men.” Schlesinger, in his own testimony to the committee a few months later, was asked about—and corroborated—this account.

• Pages 95-96: In early April 1973, Deputy Defense Secretary William Clements “summoned” Dr. Roger Shields, then head of the Pentagon’s POW/MIA Task Force, to his office to work out “a new public formulation” of the POW issue; now that the White House had declared all prisoners to have been returned, a new spin was needed. Shields, under oath, described the meeting to the committee. He said Clements told him, “All the American POWs are dead.” Shields said he replied: “You can’t say that.” Clements shot back: “You didn’t hear me. They are all dead.” Shields testified that at that moment he thought he was going to be fired, but he escaped from his boss’s office still holding his job.

• Pages 97-98: A couple of days later, on April 11, 1973, a day before Shields was to hold a Pentagon press conference on POWs, he and Gen. Brent Scowcroft, then the deputy national security adviser, went to the Oval Office to discuss the “new public formulation” and its presentation with President Nixon.

The next day, reporters right off asked Shields about missing POWs. Shields fudged his answers. He said, “We have no indications at this time that there are any Americans alive in Indochina.” But he went on to say that there had not been “a complete accounting” of those lost in Laos and that the Pentagon would press on to account for the missing—a seeming acknowledgement that some Americans were still alive and unaccounted for.

The press, however, seized on Shields’s denials. One headline read, “POW Unit Boss: No Living GIs Left in Indochina.”

• Page 97: The POW committee, knowing that Nixon taped all his meetings in the Oval Office, sought the tape of that April 11, 1973 Nixon-Shields-Scowcroft meeting to find out what Nixon had been told and what he had said about the evidence of POWs still in Indochina. The committee also knew there had been other White House meetings that centered on intelligence about live POWs. A footnote on page 97 states that Nixon’s lawyers said they would provide access to the April 11 tape “only if the Committee agreed not to seek any other White House recordings from this time period.” The footnote says that the committee rejected these terms and got nothing. The committee never made public this request for Nixon tapes until the brief footnote in its 1993 report.

McCain’s Catch-22

None of this compelling evidence in the committee’s full report dislodged McCain from his contention that the whole POW issue was a concoction by deluded purveyors of a “conspiracy theory.” But an honest review of the full report, combined with the other documentary evidence, tells the story of a frustrated and angry president, and his national security adviser, furious at being thwarted at the peace table by a small, much less powerful country that refused to bow to Washington’s terms. That president seems to have swallowed hard and accepted a treaty that left probably hundreds of American prisoners in Hanoi’s hands, to be used as bargaining chips for reparations.

Maybe Nixon and Kissinger told themselves that they could get the prisoners home after some time had passed. But perhaps it proved too hard to undo a lie as big as this one. Washington said no prisoners were left behind, and Hanoi swore it had returned all of them. How could either side later admit it had lied? Time went by and as neither side budged, telling the truth became even more difficult and remote. The public would realize that Washington knew of the abandoned men all along. The truth, after men had been languishing in foul prison cells, could get people impeached or thrown in jail.

Which brings us to today, when the Republican candidate for president is the contemporary politician most responsible for keeping the truth about this matter hidden. Yet he says he’s the right man to be the commander in chief, and his credibility in making this claim is largely based on his image as a POW hero.

On page 468 of the 1,221-page report, McCain parsed his POW position oddly, “We found no compelling evidence to prove that Americans are alive in captivity today. There is some evidence—though no proof—to suggest only the possibility that a few Americans may have been kept behind after the end of America’s military involvement in Vietnam.”

“Evidence though no proof.” Clearly, no one could meet McCain’s standard of proof as long as he is leading a government crusade to keep the truth buried.

To this reporter, this sounds like a significant story and a long overdue opportunity for the press to finally dig into the archives to set the historical record straight—and even pose some direct questions to the candidate.

I send words of encouragement and support on what is becoming a periodic basis, it seems. Should you be similarly motivated, here is the address:


https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

Psalm 107

1 Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good;
    his love endures forever.

2 Let the redeemed of the Lord tell their story—
    those he redeemed from the hand of the foe,
3 those he gathered from the lands,
    from east and west, from north and south.[a]

4 Some wandered in desert wastelands,
    finding no way to a city where they could settle.
5 They were hungry and thirsty,
    and their lives ebbed away.
6 Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble,
    and he delivered them from their distress.
7 He led them by a straight way
    to a city where they could settle.
8 Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love
    and his wonderful deeds for mankind,
9 for he satisfies the thirsty
    and fills the hungry with good things.

10 Some sat in darkness, in utter darkness,
    prisoners suffering in iron chains,
11 because they rebelled against God’s commands
    and despised the plans of the Most High.
12 So he subjected them to bitter labor;
    they stumbled, and there was no one to help.
13 Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble,
    and he saved them from their distress.
14 He brought them out of darkness, the utter darkness,
    and broke away their chains.
15 Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love
    and his wonderful deeds for mankind,
16 for he breaks down gates of bronze
    and cuts through bars of iron.

17 Some became fools through their rebellious ways
    and suffered affliction because of their iniquities.
18 They loathed all food
    and drew near the gates of death.
19 Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble,
    and he saved them from their distress.
20 He sent out his word and healed them;
    he rescued them from the grave.
21 Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love
    and his wonderful deeds for mankind.
22 Let them sacrifice thank offerings
    and tell of his works with songs of joy.

23 Some went out on the sea in ships;
    they were merchants on the mighty waters.
24 They saw the works of the Lord,
    his wonderful deeds in the deep.
25 For he spoke and stirred up a tempest
    that lifted high the waves.
26 They mounted up to the heavens and went down to the depths;
    in their peril their courage melted away.
27 They reeled and staggered like drunkards;
    they were at their wits’ end.
28 Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble,
    and he brought them out of their distress.
29 He stilled the storm to a whisper;
    the waves of the sea were hushed.
30 They were glad when it grew calm,
    and he guided them to their desired haven.
31 Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love
    and his wonderful deeds for mankind.
32 Let them exalt him in the assembly of the people
    and praise him in the council of the elders.

33 He turned rivers into a desert,
    flowing springs into thirsty ground,
34 and fruitful land into a salt waste,
    because of the wickedness of those who lived there.
35 He turned the desert into pools of water
    and the parched ground into flowing springs;
36 there he brought the hungry to live,
    and they founded a city where they could settle.
37 They sowed fields and planted vineyards
    that yielded a fruitful harvest;
38 he blessed them, and their numbers greatly increased,
    and he did not let their herds diminish.

39 Then their numbers decreased, and they were humbled
    by oppression, calamity and sorrow;
40 he who pours contempt on nobles
    made them wander in a trackless waste.
41 But he lifted the needy out of their affliction
    and increased their families like flocks.
42 The upright see and rejoice,
    but all the wicked shut their mouths.

43 Let the one who is wise heed these things
    and ponder the loving deeds of the Lord

Ya know, either this gets resolved by the rule of law or we will have to fight to restore our nation at some future point. The enem is all around us and firmly entrenched All those who have prepped to get away from population centers is wise indeed. I just can't see this ending any other way than is some sort of civil war. Well, that is if the bulk of America finds the spine it lost a couple decades ago...!



There is an interesting piece running around the internet that someone has put together. Other than Lisa H. Barsoomian, the connections are true. Indeed, the characters in the play are all incredibly connected and it certainly appears that there is a deep and dark conspiracy against Trump. But this is not against Trump simply because they do not like him personally. This is about removing an outsider from Washington. These are just the tip of the iceberg.

The New Yorker has revealed part of the conspiracy has been highlighted by a memo which has surfaced from an Obama aid who set up a war room to undermine Trump and his foreign policy. They are managing much of the media. A new report from The New Yorker reveals some details of a “conspiracy memo” that has been circulating behind the curtain for the past year. What seems to be operating is a massive campaign to actually disrupt the Trump Administration and prevent it from actually managing anything. This is far worse than pretend Russian hacking. This is a real covert ops to prevent the opposition from doing anything and this undermines the government – not just Trump. This is very strange and may be one reason in the years ahead we face a civil war.



Indeed, there is a lot more going on behind the curtain than people realize. Don’t forget, it was Lois Lerner who abused the IRS to target conservative groups who wanted to drain the swamp before Trump. Lerner argued that her testimony should be sealed and that she feared for her life if everyone she targeted using the IRS found out. She was given full paid leave from the IRS on May 23, 2013. In May 2014, Lerner was declared in contempt of Congress in connection with the invocation of her Fifth Amendment not to testify on the matter before a congressional committee. So she took the 5th claiming it might criminally expose here, and then Comey declares she committed no crime and would not prosecute her.



You have to understand that refusing to reform is why John Boehner was forced out of the Republicans. There was an internal revolution when the Tea Party was elected and this is who was targeted by Lerner. The revolution against Boehner took place because he tried to keep the status quo. Lerner used the IRS to go after the Tea Party and many believe that Boehner was behind that as well. He did remove every Congressman from any financial committee if they supported the Tea Party or Ron Paul. I know some of the people he retaliated against. When the Tea Party people arrived in Washington, Boehner told them they would vote how he directed. They said no way. They were elected for real reform. This is why Trump is where he is. This draining the swamp began before him. Boehner was retaliating against the same people Lerner targeted. Coincidence?

 

Connecting some dots
 

Here’s what it looks like when all the pieces are sewn together. It smells like conspiracy and treason. Everyone needs to read this. Slowly, and patiently, because it’s very important……

From 2001 to 2005 there was an ongoing investigation into the Clinton Foundation.

A Grand Jury had been impaneled.  Governments from around the world had donated to the “Charity”. Yet, from 2001 to 2003 none of those “Donations” to the Clinton Foundation were declared. Now you would think that an honest investigator would be able to figure this out.

Look who took over this investigation in 2005: None other than James Comey; Coincidence? Guess who was transferred into the Internal Revenue Service to run the Tax Exemption Branch of the IRS? None other than, Lois “Be on The Look Out” (BOLO) Lerner. Isn’t that interesting? But this is all just a series of strange coincidences, right?

Guess who ran the Tax Division inside the Department of Injustice from 2001 to 2005?

No other than the Assistant Attorney General of the United States, Rod Rosenstein.

Guess who was the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation during this time frame?

Another coincidence (just an anomaly in statistics and chances), but it was Robert Mueller.

What do all four casting characters have in common?  They all were briefed and/or were front-line investigators into the Clinton Foundation Investigation. Another coincidence, right?

Fast forward to 2009….

James Comey leaves the Justice Department to go and cash-in at Lockheed Martin.

Hillary Clinton is running the State Department, official government business, on her own personal email server. The Uranium One “issue” comes to the attention of the Hillary. Like all good public servants do, supposedly looking out for America’s best interest, she decides to support the decision and approve the sale of 20% of US Uranium to no other than, the Russians.

Now you would think that this is a fairly straight up deal, except it wasn’t, America got absolutely nothing out of it. However, prior to the sales approval, no other than Bill Clinton goes to Moscow gets paid 500K for a one-hour speech; then meets with Vladimir Putin at his home for a few hours.

Ok, no big deal right? Well, not so fast, the FBI had a mole inside the money laundering and bribery scheme.

Robert Mueller was the FBI Director during this time frame? Yep, He even delivered a Uranium Sample to Moscow in 2009.

Who was handling that case within the Justice Department out of the US Attorney’s Office in Maryland? None other than, Rod Rosenstein. And what happened to the informant?

The Department of Justice placed a GAG order on him and threatened to lock him up if he spoke out about it.

How does 20% of the most strategic asset of the United States of America end up in Russian hands when the FBI has an informant, a mole providing inside information to the FBI on the criminal enterprise? Very soon after; the sale was approved $145 million dollars in “donations” made their way into the Clinton Foundation from entities directly connected to the Uranium One deal.

Guess who was still at the Internal Revenue Service working the Charitable Division? None other than, – Lois Lerner. Ok, that’s all just another series of coincidences, nothing to see here, right?

Let’s fast forward to 2015.

Due to a series of tragic events in Benghazi and after the 9 “investigations” the House, Senate and at State Department, Trey Gowdy who was running the 10th investigation as Chairman of the Select Committee on Benghazi discovers that the Hillary ran the State Department on an unclassified, unauthorized, outlaw personal email server. He also discovered that none of those emails had been turned over when she departed her “Public Service” as Secretary of State which was required by law. He also discovered that there was Top Secret information contained within her personally archived email.

Sparing you the State Departments cover-up, the nostrums they floated, the delay tactics that were employed and the outright lies that were spewed forth from the necks of the Kerry State Department, we shall leave it with this…… they did everything humanly possible to cover for Hillary.

Now, this is amazing, guess who became FBI Director in 2013? None other than James Comey; who secured 17 no-bid contracts for his employer (Lockheed Martin) with the State Department and was rewarded with a six million dollar thank you present when he departed his employer? Amazing how all those no-bids just went right through at State, huh?

Now he is the FBI Director in charge of the “Clinton Email Investigation” after of course his FBI Investigates the Lois Lerner “Matter” at the Internal Revenue Service and he exonerates her. Nope…. couldn’t find any crimes there.

In April 2016, James Comey drafts an exoneration letter of Hillary Rodham Clinton, meanwhile the DOJ is handing out immunity deals like candy. They didn’t even convene a Grand Jury!

Like a lightning bolt of statistical impossibility, like a miracle from God himself, like the true “Gangsta” Comey is, James steps out into the cameras of an awaiting press conference on July the 8th of 2016, and exonerates the Hillary from any wrongdoing. Do you see the pattern?

It goes on and on, Rosenstein becomes Asst. Attorney General, Comey gets fired based upon a letter by Rosenstein, Comey leaks government information to the press, Mueller is assigned to the Russian Investigation sham by Rosenstein to provide cover for decades of malfeasance within the FBI and DOJ and the story continues.

FISA Abuse, political espionage….. pick a crime, any crime, chances are…… this group and a few others did it:

All the same players.
All compromised and conflicted.
All working fervently to NOT go to jail themselves
All connected in one way or another to the Clinton’s.
They are like battery acid; they corrode and corrupt everything they touch. How many lives have these two destroyed?

As of this writing, the Clinton Foundation, in its 20+ years of operation of being the largest International Charity Fraud in the history of mankind, has never been audited by the Internal Revenue Service.  Let us not forget that Comey’s brother works for DLA Piper, the law firm that does the Clinton Foundation’s taxes.

The person that is the common denominator to all the crimes above and still doing her evil escape legal maneuvers at the top of the 3 Letter USA Agencies? Yep, that would be Hillary R. Clinton.

Now, who is LISA BARSOOMIAN? Let’s learn a little about Mrs. Lisa H. Barsoomian’s background.

Lisa H. Barsoomian, an Attorney that graduated from Georgetown Law, is a protégé of James Comey and Robert Mueller. Barsoomian, with her boss R. Craig Lawrence, represented Bill Clinton in 1998. She was a former assistant U.S. attorney and represented various people in government only from that position.

….

… Additionally, Lisa Barsoomian has specialized in opposing the Freedom of Information Act requests on behalf of the intelligence community. Although Barsoomian has been involved in hundreds of cases representing the DC Office of the US Attorney …

It’s a cover, no big deal right? What does one more attorney with ties to the US intelligence community really matter?  It deals with Trump and his recent tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum imports, the border wall, DACA, everything coming out of California, the Uni-party unrelenting opposition to President Trump, the Clapper leaks, the Comey leaks, Attorney General Jeff Sessions recusal and subsequent 14 month nap with occasional forays into the marijuana legalization mix …. and last but not least Mueller’s never-ending investigation into collusion between the Trump team and the Russians. Clapper and Comey admitted that they were even spying on Trump during the election.

Why does Barsoomian …  merit any mention?

BECAUSE….

She is Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s WIFE!
Categories: Corruption

What a leader

What a change!

Overpaid brats

Seen a few of those stars myself!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgUzHat9XIs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzimgyhL-gU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt5DpFBtZwk

https://www.youtube.com/embed/8gxdjH3QjNU

Send Em' up. I'll wait

A cowboy walks into a bar and orders three mugs of Bud.


He sits in the back of the room, drinking a sip out of each one in turn.When he finishes them, he comes back to the bar and orders three more.

The bartender tells the cowboy, "You know the beer would be colder if you bought one at a time..."

The cowboy replies,  “I have two brothers. One is an Airborne Ranger, the other is a Navy Seal, both serving overseas. When we all left home, we promised that we'd drink this way to remember the days when we drank together. So I'm drinking one beer for each of my brothers and one for myself."

The cowboy becomes a regular in the bar, and always drinks the same way.

One day, he comes in and only orders two mugs. All the regulars take notice and fall silent.

When he comes back to the bar for the second round, the bartender says, "I don't want to intrude on your grief, but I wanted to offer my condolences on your loss."

The cowboy looks quite puzzled for a moment, then a light dawns in his eyes and he laughs. "Oh, no, everybody's just fine," he explains, "It's just that my wife and I just joined the Church of Christ and I had to quit drinking."

I am sickened by this sort of thing. Black men and women need to self police and get this fixed. So many fatherless children when we all know a father is essential to proper development.

But with examples like these POS NFL players, it is no wonder why they are failing.



Not  Only  the  Knee . . . !

The knee is not the only problem . . . 68 children by 52 women!  7 players!

 

Children raised in fatherless homes, especially black children, are far more likely than children raised in two parent homes to engage in criminal behavior and thus, have contact with police.

 

Ergo when they father a child with a woman to whom they are not married---or at least living with---they are contributing to the problem against which these football players are taking a knee

            If you look at many of these players' records on out-of-wedlock children, you find that they are contributing significantly to the problem against which they are protesting.

            For example, Antonio Cromartie has 12 children by 9 different women.  Apparently the NFL had to shell out $500,000 before he could even play football for them. Travis Henry has 11 children by 10 women, Willis McGahee has 9 children by 8 women, Derrick Thomas has 7 children by 5 different women, Bennie Blades has 6 children by 6 women,  Ray Lewis has 6 children by 4 women and Marshall Faulk has 6 children by 3 women.

            They forgot to include Adrian Peterson: 11 kids from 7 different women.

        Before these guys take a knee they should take a good look in the mirror.

 

It appears that their problem is  not the knee.

Extortion 17: What Really Happened On America’s Deadliest Day In Afghanistan
By

David Tarrant, The Dallas Morning News

on August 6, 2018

Editor’s note: This story originally appeared in October 2017.

On a moonless night, an Army Chinook helicopter swept low over the Tangi Valley, a strip of forbidding terrain in eastern Afghanistan teeming with Taliban and located just 35 miles south of Kabul.

Among the 38 occupants inside the Chinook were some of the most highly trained and battle-seasoned fighters in the U.S. military, including 15 commandos from the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, the unit that three months earlier had killed Osama bin Laden. Their target was a Taliban commander responsible for ambushes and other attacks against U.S. and Afghan forces.

Missions like this one to insert or remove an assault force are the military equivalent of a perfect 10 in the Olympics — equal parts skill, experience and daring.

Flying low, the pilots have to maneuver a machine weighing up to 50,000 pounds over mountains, under cover of darkness, in swirling wind and dust, wearing night vision goggles. Then they have to stick the landing. At any moment, they could come under rocket attack.

Despite the risk, operations like these were taking place with such frequency in Afghanistan they only made news when they produced a spectacular success, like the bin Laden mission. Or when something went terribly wrong.

On this night, Aug. 6, 2011, something went terribly wrong. And to this day, people are still debating what really happened.

Austin Williams visits the gravesite of U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Christopher C. Campbell, one of the U.S. service members killed during Extortion 17, in Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day, May 30, 2016.

The Texas commander
Justin “Buddy” Lee will never forget that night six years ago. Lee is 36 now, a civil attorney in Dallas, a world away from Afghanistan. He grew up in Tyler, went to Texas A&M, joined the Corps of Cadets and stared in shock at the news that two planes slammed into the World Trade Center and another into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. That same day he obtained a medical waiver he needed to pursue an Army commission — to serve an eight-year hitch before going to law school. A junior, he was ready to fight, but the war would be over, he figured, before he even got out of college.

Lee earned his wings at Fort Rucker, Ala., then deployed to Pakistan, where he did humanitarian missions, learning to fly into and out of mountainous terrain.

In 2006, he was called into Afghanistan, where he turned 25. He would eventually do two tours and become commander of a Chinook unit during his second deployment in 2011.

Hs unit called itself “Extortion Company.” One of his Chinooks, flying under the call sign Extortion 17 (“one-seven”), was tasked with the special operations mission the night of Aug. 6. He knew the pilots and crew members aboard Extortion 17. They were part of his command. He would not have hesitated to fly with any of them.

Lee had just flown the night before on a similar mission with one of the pilots, David Carter. A chief warrant officer 5, a member of the Colorado National Guard, Carter had over 4,500 flying hours, including more than 1,000 hours during combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. He taught helicopter pilots how to fly in high altitudes at an aviation training site in Colorado.

“He was probably in the top 1 percent of Army aviators,” Lee said. “The guy was incredibly skilled.”

The co-pilot, Bryan Nichols, was one of Lee’s closest friends in the Chinook company. They were part of the same Army Reserve unit, 7th Battalion, 158th Aviation Regiment based in Gardner, Kan. Nichols, with three combat tours of duty, also had plenty of experience flying dangerous missions.

Joining the 15 members of SEAL Team 6, two pilots and three-man crew inside Extortion 17: ten other Navy and Air Force personnel, eight Afghans and a combat assault dog named Bart.

That night, nearly 10 years after the U.S. had gone to war in Afghanistan, Lee believed they were the best team for this dangerous mission.

Extreme conditions
Nothing tests the capabilities of a young helicopter pilot like flying in the extreme conditions of Afghanistan.

“So much of the war is fought in areas where these helicopters have to fly at high altitudes,” where the thin air can strain the performance of the engines and rotor blades, said Ed Darack, author of the recently published book, The Final Mission of Extortion 17: Special Ops, Helicopter Support, SEAL Team Six and the Deadliest Day of the U.S. War in Afghanistan. (Smithsonian Books, September 2017).

A typical combat mission in Afghanistan leaves little margin for error, requiring Chinook pilots to land on tiny, makeshift sites on mountain slopes where any tree, bush or rock could be hiding an enemy fighter with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

“They’re going after [enemy fighters] in very hostile environments, who know the terrain very well, who know the battlescape very well,” Darack said. “It requires the highest level of skills from the pilots … because they are some of the most dangerous operations.”

Every mission is potentially life-threatening.

“The reality is, every time a helicopter lifts off the ground in a war zone, it might get shot down,” Darack said. “There is still a tremendous level of chance for a tragedy of such huge magnitude.”

Chinook workhorse
The workhorse in Army aviation, the tandem rotor, heavy-lift Chinook helicopter is used for carrying troops, equipment, supplies and even the mail. The Chinook is often used to assist in disaster relief, delivering food and water after earthquakes and floods.

In combat, its mission is to transport large teams of elite assault troops, including Army Rangers and Navy SEALs, to and from the battlefield.

On such missions, the Chinook pilots nearly always fly at night, wearing night vision goggles, or NVGs. While the goggles are better than nothing, they turn everything green, distort depth perception and limit peripheral vision.

“It’s like taking a paper towel roll, cutting it in half and strapping it to your eye,” Lee said.

Landing in deserts or mountainsides, the helicopter rotors kick up clouds of sand and dust, causing brownouts that can blind a pilot.

“I had to learn how to land while browned-out, wearing NVGs, on the side of a mountain or an uneven field,” Lee said. “It’s crazy how many times I can think of where me or the guys I was with had to do that.”

On his first deployment, he felt fortunate to be surrounded by veteran pilots he could learn from. “We had guys who had flown in Desert Storm, guys who had just come off active duty,” Lee said.

“The sheer amount of experience with our pilots, flight engineers and back-seaters and mechanics offered a wealth of knowledge,” he said. “We were told at that time we were the first unit to make it through a rotation without having anyone killed.”

Bin Laden killed
Lee’s second deployment started in May of 2011. The night before he left to go to Fort Hood, where he would board a plane to Afghanistan, the biggest event of the 10-year war occurred: Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan during a raid by Navy SEALs.

Lee’s wife, Christy, hoped the news would bring a sudden end to the war. She had just given birth to their first child. In fact, the conflict was heating up.

Lee, now a captain, was placed in command of a Chinook helicopter unit at Forward Operating Base Shank. Located in a remote and dangerous province in eastern Afghanistan, the base was the target of near-constant rocket attacks from Taliban insurgents. Six weeks into his deployment, Lee experienced his worst day as a helicopter pilot to that point.

That June, the U.S. military launched Operation Hammer Down to drive out insurgents entrenched in remote strongholds of eastern Afghanistan. Lee and his friend Bryan Nichols flew their Chinook into battle several times the first night, dropping off troops at a landing zone (“LZ”) almost 10,000 feet above sea level.

“The hardest LZ I’d ever been into,” Lee said.

The next night, the pair had orders to drop off more troops in the same spot. As they made their approach, there was a line of thunderstorms nearby. Winds whipped through the fir trees. As they started their descent, Lee heard a loud popping noise. The aircraft jerked. “I thought I hit a tree,”he said.

The helicopter plunged tail first. A catastrophic crash seemed unavoidable. “I was terrified. I didn’t want to die.”

He remembered the words of his old flight instructor: “Never stop flying the aircraft.”

He pushed hard on the cyclic stick to tilt the helicopter forward. As he did, he felt the craft leveling off. The Chinook smashed into the ground, the force ripping off his goggles. The front rotor shattered, and the back pylon sheared off. One of the engines flew off, and the other caught fire. It was a hard landing, but it would have been worse if they had landed tail first.

About a dozen of the 33 troops in the back of the helicopter suffered broken bones, heavy bruises and scrapes. But no one died. The worst of the wounded was one of Lee’s crew members, who suffered what was later diagnosed as a severe traumatic brain injury.

Two investigations of the incident proved inconclusive. Whether enemy fire brought down the Chinook or a tree strike would never be known for sure.

For Lee, there was no time to reflect on how close he had come to dying. The tempo of the missions did not decrease. Neither did the risk he and his pilots faced every night.

U.S. Navy photo

Rear Adm. Sean Pybus, right, commander of Naval Special Warfare Command, right, and Force Master Chief (SEAL) Stephen Link salute as taps is played during a memorial dedication ceremony at Naval Special Warfare Command in honor of the one-year anniversary of the Extortion 17 helicopter crash.

Fallen angel
Six weeks later, at around 10:40 p.m., an assault team of Army Rangers and Afghan special operations forces were dropped into an LZ on a mission to capture or kill a Taliban commander named Qari Tahir, who had been responsible for a series of attacks and ambushes in the Tangi Valley, not far from Shank.

That assault team captured Tahir’s compound and some of his men. But Tahir and a group of his fighters escaped. The mission’s commanders decided to insert another team to go after Tahir while the Rangers held the compound.

Darack did extensive research of what happened next. The quick reaction force included SEAL Team 6 and other special operations personnel. The team boarded Extortion 17 with Dave Carter and Bryan Nichols at the controls. The Chinook headed to a different landing zone than the first assault team — one in the narrowest part of the Tangi Valley.

“You never want to use the same landing zone twice,” Darack said. “ You also want to come in from a different direction for the element of surprise.”

The landing zone was small, and the commanders didn’t want to split up the strike force. So the whole team went in one Chinook helicopter — Extortion 17. As is routine on such missions, two Apache attack helicopters provided extra cover and security for Extortion 17, while circling above was an AC-130 aircraft, a gunship that also provides surveillance.

At the pilots’ request, the AC-130 flashed an infrared spotlight, which could be seen only through night vision goggles, to light up the landing zone.

In the dark
Nearby, there were two enemy fighters with rocket-propelled grenade launchers. “The insurgents had no way of knowing the helicopter would be coming in, at the speed it was coming and at the altitude,” Darack said.

“They heard a helicopter coming, they grabbed their RPGs, and they fired in quick succession,” Darack said.

They got lucky.

The first grenade missed Extortion 17. The Taliban shot at the Chinooks all the time with RPGs and rifles, Darack said. “It’s almost always a miss.”

The second shot hit the rear tail rotor assembly.

Around 2:40 a.m., an Apache pilot flying in support came on the radio and shouted: “Fallen Angel. Fallen Angel.”

Lee heard the call, and he knew what it meant.

The RPG that struck Extortion 17 threw the helicopter into an uncontrollable spin.

“The extreme G-forces killed everyone on board within a fraction of a second,” Darack said.

The shootdown was the single, deadliest loss of U.S. forces in the war.

U.S. Army photo

Soldiers with A Troop, 1st Squadron, 13th Cavalry march through a ravine in Wardak Province, Afghanistan on Nov. 12, 2011. Deployed from Fort Bliss, Texas, the troops are working with Afghan security forces to build stability in the region.

Conspiracy theories
Conspiracy theories started almost immediately.

An Afghan official, speaking anonymously a few days after the attack, speculated that the Taliban had laid a trap, that they had purposely put out false information about a meeting involving the Taliban commander.

Some news stories reported that investigators couldn’t find the helicopter’s “black box,” referring to the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder. The helicopter crashed into a creek bed and a flash flood shortly afterward washed away some parts of the wreckage.

But the CH-47D has neither a flight nor voice recorder, only an engine performance data recorder for maintenance.

The conspiracy theories didn’t bother Lee at first. He was too busy. But over time, they became more disturbing, including one that suggested the Taliban had been tipped off by someone inside the Afghan government as revenge for bin Laden’s killing.

“Just as ridiculous as saying [President George W.] Bush was responsible for 9/11,” Lee said.

An official investigation found no evidence of a pre-planned ambush, though it did suggest that other helicopter activity in the area could have tipped off Taliban fighters that more helicopters could be approaching, according to the report.

“This was preventable only if they just had not taken off that night,” Lee said. “If this [operation] was survivable, that was the right crew to have. There was a lot of experience in that cockpit, the flight engineers and the door gunners. It was a good crew, it really was. One of the best crews in my company. It wasn’t preventable. It just wasn’t.”

Finding meaning
Lee remained in Afghanistan flying combat missions for another eight months before returning home in the spring of 2012. He finished his contract with the Army shortly afterward, and that September enrolled in Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law.

For the last two years, he’s been an attorney with the law firm Jackson Walker. When asked what lessons Americans can draw from the crash of Extortion 17, Lee’s answer is simple: Americans should care about what happens in Afghanistan because they’ve sent Americans to war there.

“We’re asking people to do incredible things. We’re handing rifles to 20-year-olds and asking them to shoot people. And that’s fine; that’s what you signed up for,” Lee said. “But at least you should care about them and appreciate what we’re asking of them.”

Caring is more than just slapping a bumper sticker on your car, he said. It means being informed.

“No one is planting victory gardens, and we’re not rationing. But we are still sending people to another country to fight, and we need to understand why we’re doing that,” he said.

As for himself, he speaks out about Extortion 17 because he wants to remember the men on that mission. On his right wrist, he wears a bracelet with the names of the five crew members of Extortion 17.

“One of the things I vowed, I will never forget. I will never forget what they did,” he said.

“Over time, certain memories will fade, certain details will fade. But one thing that doesn’t fade is never forgetting what they did.”

BENGHAZI AND THE MATCHING SERIAL NUMBERS

So here's the REAL story:

Ambassador Stevens was sent to Benghazi to secretly retrieve US made Stinger Missiles that the State Dept had ILLEGALLY supplied to Ansar al Sharia in Libya WITHOUT Congressional oversight or permission.

Sec State Hillary Clinton had brokered the Libya deal through Ambassador Stevens and a Private Arms Dealer named Marc Turi (https://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/marc-turi-libyan-rebels-hillary-clinton-229115) but some of the shoulder fired Stinger Missiles ended up in Afghanistan where they were used against our own military.   On July 25th, 2012, a US Chinook helicopter was downed by one of them.  It was Not destroyed only because the idiot Taliban didn't arm the missile.  The helicopter didn't explode, but it had to land and an ordnance team recovered the missile’s serial number which led back to a cache of Stinger Missiles kept in Qatar by the CIA.

Obama and Hillary were in full panic mode, so Ambassador Stevens was sent to Benghazi to retrieve the rest of the Stinger Missiles. This was a "do-or-die" mission, which explains the Stand Down Orders given to multiple rescue teams during the siege of the US Embassy.

It was the State Dept, NOT the CIA, that supplied the Stinger Missiles to our sworn enemies because Gen. Petraeus at CIA would not approve supplying the deadly missiles due to their potential use against commercial aircraft.  So then, Obama threw Gen. Petraeus under the bus when he refused to testify in support of Obama’s phony claim of a “spontaneous uprising caused by a YouTube video that insulted Muslims.”

Obama and Hillary committed TREASON!

THIS is what the investigation is all about, WHY she had a Private Server, (in order to delete the digital evidence), and WHY Obama, two weeks after the attack, told the UN that the attack was the result of the YouTube video, even though everyone KNEW it was not.

Furthermore, the Taliban knew that the administration had aided and abetted the enemy WITHOUT Congressional oversight or permission, so they began pressuring (blackmailing) the Obama Administration to release five Taliban generals being held at Guantanamo.

Bowe Bergdahl was just a useful pawn used to cover the release of the Taliban generals.  Everyone knew Bergdahl was a traitor but Obama used Bergdahl’s exchange for the five Taliban generals to cover that Obama was being coerced by the Taliban about the unauthorized Stinger Missile deal.      Can you IMAGINE?     Obama traded 5 Taliban Generals, who would all be KILLING Americans again, for a TRAITOR to the United States, that we would eventually try for the reduced charge of Desertion!      What could be More Traitorous & more disgusting than that?

So we have a traitor as POTUS (President Of The United States) that is not only corrupt, but compromised, as well and a Secretary of State that is a serial liar, who perjured herself multiple times at the Congressional Hearings on Benghazi.    Perhaps this is why no military aircraft were called upon for help in Benghazi:  because the administration knew that our enemies had Stinger Missiles that, if used to down those planes, would likely be traced back to the CIA cache in Qatar and then to the State Dept’s illegitimate arms deal in Libya.

Forward this again and again and again until everyone reads the true story of Benghazi.




More than half of US citizens DO NOT KNOW THIS.

A MUST READ TO HELP UNDERSTAND OUR PRESIDENT TRUMP’S FIVE RULES FOR RULING THE WORLD

It’s the middle of 2018. And after spilling several small rivers of black ink (digital and virtual) analyzing, smearing, belaboring, insulting and fact checking President Trump, the media still doesn’t understand him.
That’s not surprising. The media has been writing about America for much longer than that and has even less of a clue about how people live outside its preciously hip urban and suburban bubbles.
But there are 5 simple rules for understanding President Trump. They define how he’s lived his life until now. And what still drives him at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. If you understand them, you will get what he’s doing. If you don’t, there’s always a job waiting at the New York Times.

    1.   Act, Don’t React
Trump hates reacting, he loves taking the initiative and forcing others, rivals, competitors, media syndicates or foreign dictators, to react to him. That’s the essence of strategy and he nails it the way few have.
When UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson muttered that there was a “method to his madness”, that was it.
The method is becoming the driving force in an escalating conflict. Instead of reacting to attacks, Trump forces his attackers to react to him. He takes the initiative and leaves his opponents sputtering.
That’s how he became the President of the United States. It’s what he’s doing internationally.
By acting, Trump takes control of each encounter. What happens next may not be ideal, but Trump cares more about maintaining the initiative than about forcing a specific outcome.
He doesn’t see politics as a chess match, but as a boxing match. He doesn’t get locked into predetermined goals. Instead he lets the kinetic confrontation create opportunities by exploiting his opponent’s reactions.
Picking a fight with the North Korean dictator, led to a peace summit. A trade war with China has already led to some serious concessions. A trade shoving match with Europe and Canada offers potential wins.
Unlike previous administrations, Trump isn’t satisfied with the status quo. And that means that he tries a lot of things.
That takes us to Rule 2.
2.   Try Everything
Critics have poked fun at Trump’s failed business ventures. But you don’t succeed without trying and failing.
Trump is comfortable with failure. He knows that if you’re willing to knock on 100 doors, you might get 1 sale. His approach to politics is trying a lot of different approaches and policies to get to a win.
When Obama expressed a willingness to meet with dictators and terrorists, it’s because he was already sympathetic to them. The seeds of the Iran deal were always in him. The negotiations just took him where he already wanted to be.
Trump however isn’t meeting with Kim Jong-un because he likes him. He’s doing it because it might pay off. Or it won’t and then he’ll try something else.
Obama needed Iran. Trump doesn’t need North Korea. He can take it or leave it. He’s hungry for wins, but he also sees the potential for them everywhere so he doesn’t overcommit to any individual deal.
Political professionals scoff at that scrappy attitude. They insist on the importance of posture and position. Trump knows all about posture and position, but he refuses to be its prisoner. He can insult Kim one day and flatter him the next. Politics is just business with countries instead of companies.
Trump’s approach is the same to both politics and business. Do whatever it takes to get the deal. And then decide if the deal is worth taking.

    3.   Chaos is Power
Most people want to minimize chaos. Countries and companies spend fortunes, fight wars and dedicate decades to reducing chaos. Trump however thrives on chaos. Instead of trying to control chaos, he generates it, causing uncertainty and then offering a sense of security in exchange for a good deal.
That’s what Trump is doing with trade. It’s what he did to China and North Korea.
Trump tries everything (Rule 2) and escalates confrontations (Rule 1) so that his opponents have no way to counter him except by escalating the confrontation and creating more chaos. And then Trump forces them to negotiate by proving he can function in a chaotic and uncertain situation better than they can.
That’s how he got North Korea to the table. After decades of the Norks intimidating previous administrations by creating chaos with their threats, Trump topped those threats. The media warned that a nuclear war would break out. Instead China and North Korea chose a peace summit.
The summit may come to nothing, but Trump had already broken the Nork ability to intimidate us.
China, Europe and Canada don’t want a trade war. They have nothing to gain and plenty to lose. By creating economic chaos, Trump also became the only man who can end the chaos and restore security.
Chaos is power.
When the United States became a world power, its administrations emphasized stability over everything. Trump welcomes chaos because it’s a much more effective negotiating strategy. Entities that seek order can be intimidated with chaos. But politicians who seek chaos can’t be intimidated.
Trump doesn’t seek order. He wants victory.

4.   Never Show Your Hand
Conventional politicians have a narrow window of agenda items. They’re very clear on what they want, what they don’t want, what they’re willing to do and what they’re willing to give up to get it.
Trump has always been ambiguous. Parse his sentences and you can read them three different ways. Each assertion eventually uncovers a contradiction. That’s confusion. Tactical confusion.
As Trump has mentioned plenty of times, he loves being unpredictable.
Trump is the only president in a century who is able to go into negotiations with a completely unpredictable outcome. And the roster of competing figures around him only creates more chaos.
To truly create chaos (Rule 3), you have to be unpredictable. That creates insecurity. It forces your opponents to read things into every move you make. And then to be stymied by the futility of it.
Ambiguity leaves the other side unable to assess what the United States would actually settle for. Instead it ends up offering far more than we would settle for just to restore that sense of security.
Trump is the most famous man in the world. And yet his decision-making remains mysterious.

    5.   Don’t Be Afraid to be the Bad Guy
If Americans have a fatal flaw, a weakness that undermines our domestic and international politics, it’s a need to be liked. Most other countries don’t wonder whether the rest of the world likes them.
Blame Hollywood, dime novels or comic books, but as Americans we see ourselves as the heroes. And our enemies, foreign and domestic, know that they can break us by making us question our goodness.
It’s how they did it in Vietnam, in Iraq and too many foreign policy debates to count.
One of Trump’s great strengths is that he’s not afraid to be the bully, the heavy and the jerk. He can flatter Kim Jong-un, Trudeau and any other leader. Or call them names.
He can say shocking things and take unacceptable positions if it gets him what he wants.
That’s the attribute that upsets and infuriates Never Trumpers. But it also gives the United States far more negotiating leverage and freedom than it ever had before. And that’s why the people chose him.
Trump embodied all the things that had been going unsaid and all the truths that needed telling.
Past presidents valued their personal relationships with foreign leaders. But Trump is willing to throw a punch at the boy band leader of Canada if it gets a farmer in Wisconsin a better deal for his dairy.
On the global stage, President Trump has forced North Korea, China, Europe and Canada to react to him. He’s trying everything. He’s creating chaos. He’s hiding his hand and he’s winning.
The media shouts that Trump is isolated. If he were isolated, the world wouldn’t be revolving around him. The world doesn’t stop when Putin or China’s Jinping issue a statement. But a single Trump tweet can upend the priorities of international diplomacy for days, weeks and even months.
Trump isn’t reacting to the world. The world is reacting to him.
And as long as he can keep the world reacting to him, he’s the one setting the agenda for the world