Dolph Honicker Online

Getting nothing for something

2009-04-02T07:47:00.002-05:00

You're at an upscale speakeasy. A man peers out a peep-hole and says, "Yeah?"

You say, "Bernie sent me."

The guy replies, "Come back later. We're full."

Repulsed a second time, you appear a third time and say, "Mr. Madoff sent me."

This time you're allowed in but told you're allowed one drink, a smooth, 18-year-old scotch.

That, in essence, is how Bernard Madoff lured his investment suckers. He made them want to part with their money. Only later did they learn it was rotgut whiskey, not scotch, they were being served.

It's difficult to feel much pity for them. Most were super rich to begin with. Rather than shoot for the moon they saw paper profits of 8 to 12 percent even in down markets, year after year. Each felt that he/she was one of a hundred of so privileged to park their life savings--hundreds of thousands, tens of millions--into Madoff's Ponzi scheme.

As Ron Chernow notes in The New Yorker, "The aura of exclusivity was bogus, of course; he ended up with almost five thousand client accounts."

Google "Ponzi scheme" and you get 5,010,000 hits.

Some of Madoff's early investors did see rewards from money "invested" by later arrivals. But when the market began to bottom out, $7 billion in chits came pouring in. That's when "Uncle Bernie" 'fessed up. His total take: some $65 billion, the largest scam in history.

Mark Seal, writing about "Madoff's World" in Vanity Fair, says he himself tried to get into Madoff's investment fund, fortunately, in vain.

"In November," says Seal, "I invited a friend and long-time Madoff investor to dinner and literally begged him to get me in. He listened politely, then shook his head slowly. 'Forget it,' he said. 'Bernie was closed; Bernie didn't need the money.' His discouraging response only made me want Bernie all the more."

Seal interviewed dozens of former millionaires and multi-millionaires for his article.

Some wealthy widows, heeding to their dying husbands' wishes to put everything in Bernie's hands, wound up as paupers.

Houston stockbroker Joyce Z. Greenburg had a fortune invested in Madoff. But when she inherited an investment from her husband she resumed a part-time job at a brokerage. Seal says Madoff found out and called her in 1999, fuming, "I never manage money for anyone who works at a brokerage." Either chose between his account or her job. She closed her account, and he wired her the money.

Seal quotes her further: "That's the good part. The stupid part is that I retired in 2001 and asked to open a new account. ... And now that's gone with the wind."

Two older men, Norman F. Levy and Walter J. Shapiro, both wealthy philanthropists, treated Madoff like a son, including him and his wife Ruth to every birthday, anniversary, bat mitzvah, wedding or graduation. He took Shapiro for more than half a billion dollars. The Betty and Levy Foundation and those of their sons had to shut down after Madoff's arrest.

The scheme could have been nipped in 2000 when Harry Markopolos, an accountant and private fraud investigator sounded the alarm to the Securities Exchange Commission to no avail. In 2005, he sent regulators a 19-page memo titled "The World's Largest Hedge Fund Is a Fraud."

He was referred to the SEC's New York branch chief, Meaghan Cheung, who, he wrote in an e-mail to one of her colleagues last year, "didn't have the derivatives or mathematical background to understand the violations" much less prosecute them.

One of the sadder cases is that of Maureen Ebel, 60. Seal relates:

"Following the untimely death 1n 2000 of her physician husband, she got suckered into the Madoff fund. 'All your problems are over,' said an elderly relative of her late husband's. 'My guy Madoff has agreed to take you as a favor to me. I pulled on his heartstrings.' Feeling blessed, she eventually transferred everything she had: $7.3 million.

"Now she was sitting among the ruins, having returned Christmas gifts, begged back her annual $5,000 International Polo Club membership fee, persuaded the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society to return her $1,000 donation, sold valuable jewelry, put up her Lexus for sale on-line, and listed her home ... she had to take a job caring for a wealthy friend's 93-year-old mother, which developed into 'basically being a maid,' she said. On the day of my visit, she had just been informed by her employer, 'We're interviewing a Hispanic woman to do the work. It's best for us.'

Ebel added, "If I have to feed myself, I can go and work as a waitress."

Meanwhile, Ruth Madoff, who seeks $69 million, claiming it was not part of the Ponzi scheme, has expensive tastes of her own, going to Davidoff of Geneva on one of her husband's recent birthdays to buy a $14,500 humidor, inlaid with a buffalo motif, filled with his favorite cigars.

{Honicker is a retired newspaperman and a freelance writer}.

May the Green Be With You

2009-03-11T12:33:00.004-05:00

By Dolph Honicker

The convergence of three perfect storms shows why the state legislature was in such a rush to do the bidding of Southern Co., its subsidiary, Georgia Power, and their 70 lobbyists to fleece ratepayers.

Late last week the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's three-judge panel told Georgia utilities their application to build two new reactors at Plant Vogtle was incomplete because it failed to consider how nuclear waste would be managed if a storage site remains unavailable when the new reactors begin operation.

Then came the bombshell of Energy Secretary Stephen Chu's announcement that the Department of Energy was dropping plans to store radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada after a 27-year, $13.5 billion outlay.

Earlier, Congress killed a $50 billion subsidy for the nuclear industry from its stimulus plan. And Wall Street won't touch such high-risk investments in this worst of all possible economic worlds.

What to do?

Georgia House legislators, in a 207-66 vote, approved a sweetheart license plan adopted by the utilities known as (CWIP) construction work in progress.

That means you start paying for the nukes now and, 10 or 12 years from now your homes will be juiced with nuclear electricity--provided the plants are ever built and that you're still alive to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Otherwise, it's billions of dollars sucked from the economy that could have gone for renewable energy.

If an automobile dealer offered to deliver a 2020 Jazzmatic SUV 10 or 12 years from now if you started making payments today, you'd think he was loony. But the powerful utilities, rather than risk their own capital, prefer the pay-them-as-you-go plan.

"Radioactive nuclear waste is already piling up right here in Georgia," said Bobbie Paul, executive director of Georgia WAND (Women's Action for New Directions). "Nuclear reactors continue to leave a horrible legacy for all future generations. It's totally irresponsible for the utilities to push a plan that will only make this situation worse."

The Rev. Charles Utley, pastor of a church in Waynesboro within view of Plant Vogtle and a community organizer for the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, said, "Radioactive waste storage in Burke County puts our people's lives at risk. It's an injustice."

"Utilities should instead build clean, safe and affordable energy solutions such as wind, solar, tidal and biopower that don't pose these risks," declared Sara Barczak, program director with Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, one of the intervening organizations in their Savannah field office.

LaGrange, though it has no shortage of electricity, is part of the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia (MEAG) and has agreed to buy a portion of the two new reactors proposed for the Vogtle site. Plans are to sell the electricity it has obligated to buy to Jacksonville, Fla., and to a South Alabama utility.

The NRC's licensing board will conduct a further hearing for the contentions to the early site permit from March 16-19. in Augusta.

Fortunately, the people appear to have an ally in their corner, Barack Hussein Obama, America's first black president, who also is a deep shade of green.

{Dolph Honicker is a semi-retired newspaperman and a freelance writer}.

Merry former Christmas

2007-12-25T21:07:00.000-05:00

By DOLPH HONICKER

Critics who condemn movies sight unseen and would ban books they've never read fascinate me. I can only recommend to them Adolf Hitler's solution to their concerns: bonfires. Big bonfires.

A recent letter writer urged parents to prevent their children from seeing "Golden Compass" for fear their little tykes, having been infused in the Christian story since falling out of the crib, suddenly would flee the theaters like miniature Red Guards and espouse the cause of atheism.

Now that Christmas carols have faded into the ozone, ending another Pagan holiday adopted as a Christ fest, and as families sit on pins and needles awaiting the credit card bills from Wal-Mart for doodads and junk mostly made in China and bought on a last-minute whim for fear of leaving out Uncle Tim, I can only hope this brief can get at least a blurry-eyed New Year's airing.

Consider the aforementioned film. It's a fairy tale, a watered-down version of a book written by the Brit, Phillip Pullman, an acknowledged atheist. The word atheist is mentioned at least one time less in the film than the word Mormon in Mitt Romney's political speech explaining his beliefs.

But Christians, who thus far are an overwhelming majority in America, see Barbarians banging at the box office gate to view the movie.

Voicing particular concern is the Catholic League, led by its president, Bill Donohue. The "Golden Compass," the first of Pullman's trilogy of children's books titled "His Dark Materials," is an attempt, says Donohue, to "sneak his atheism in back door to kids. If he had any courage, he'd defend his work, but instead he continues to do what he does best--practice deceit."

Perhaps kids ought to shun the movie and, on visiting days, go see the Catholic priests and bishops building time for molesting kids who once were their peers.

In a November interview last year with "Today" host Al Roker, Pullman had this to say of Donohue's remarks:

"Well, you know, I always mistrust people who tell us how we should understand something. They know better than we do what the book means or what this means and how we should read it and whether we should read it or not.

"I don't think that's democratic. I prefer to trust the reader. I prefer to trust what I call the democracy of reading--when everybody has the right to form their own opinion and read what they like and come to their own conclusion about it. ..."

But it seems like when you're in the limelight, brickbats are flung from all sides. Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society says, "We knew from the beginning that the producers (of 'The Golden Compass') intended to leave out the anti-religious references. We think this is a great shame."

Donohue counters: "Eighty-five percent of the people in this country are Catholic or Protestant and I'd like them to stay at home, or go see some other movie."

I'd recommend "Elmer Gantry."

Home: 706-884-7765 Cell:205-790-0476 P.O. Box 637 LaGrange, GA 30241-0011
Honicker is a retired newspaperman and a freelance writer appearing regularly in the Liberal Opinion Weekly.

Just bottle the smell of war

2007-11-29T06:19:00.000-05:00

By DOLPH HONICKER

It matters not one iota what political party is in power, or what president holds the reins of office. We are not politicians or public thinkers: we are the rich; we own America; we got it, God knows how; but we intend to keep it.

--Frederick T. Martin,

The Passing of the Idle Rich (1911)

I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.

--Jay Gould, railroad financier

Virtually every American wartime president from George Washington on has expressed abhorrence for the killings and atrocities that go on. This current president, George W. Bush, and his chicken hawk vice president, Richard Cheney, are the exceptions.

This administration does not even question the use of torture.

The closest either man has come to hearing a shot fired in anger is Cheney's mistaking a hunting partner for a quail.

As our treasury sinks as deeply into the red as the blood being shed in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush blithely demands that Congress pluck money out of thin air to pay for the endless carnage, unheard of during previous wars -- but shun the wallets of his wealthy benefactors.

There's no rationing; shop 'til you drop; no dollar-a-year industrialists as there were in World War II, which right-wing pundits favorably compare to Iraq by citing the lower number of deaths. It's the high percentage of permanently wounded that's going to hit home in the long run.

While Cheney is off getting a heart tune-up, Bush visits a military rehab center to play video war games with some of the legless and armless warriors.

Video games. If this is as close as Bush can get to war, I suggest he read a novel, Once An Eagle, by Anton Myrer, who graduated from Boston Latin and entered Harvard College in 1941, but left to join the Marines soon after Pearl Harbor. He served more than three years in the Pacific, took part in the invasion of Guam, rose to the rank of corporal, and was wounded.

The book, first published in 1968 by Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, was published by the Army War College Foundation in 1997.

The Army War College? Yes. The novel, about the making of a general, Sam Damon, is one of the textbooks. Why?

Listen to Army Gen. John W. Vessey Jr. (ret.):

"First and foremost, this is a consummate anti-war book. ... His descriptions of combat based on his personal experiences engage all our senses. Myrer forces us to smell and feel the battlefield as well as hear and see it. His narrations horrify, provoke and frighten. No one who has experienced combat directly, or even vicariously, would seek it."

If you wonder what America is today with Democratic and Republican presidential candidates strutting across a stage like semi-trained seals, spitting out sound bites, each vowing not to raise taxes, you have to ask: How do you pay cops, firefighters, teachers and, yes, troops without taxes?

Consider these prescient words by Damon's mentor, Gen. Caldwell, on page 537:

"... what would emerge from (postwar America) would be a vast, impersonal juggernaut of industrial cartels, a mountainous administrative bureaucracy and a prestigious military junta -- and beneath these, far beneath, an emotional and highly subservient citizenry whose attitudes and actions would be created, aroused, manipulated, subverted by the roar of the mass media ... whoever rode this wave deftly, keeping just ahead of the boiling crest -- would hold the future securely in his fine right hand ..."

If only there could be a way to bottle the stench of the Iraqi war and release it full blast in the Oval Office, Congress and boardrooms of arms manufacturers.

Fortunately, Myrer's Colonel Beaupre has captured it all during a jungle battle. Don't turn away. Read:

"It was impossible to walk without stepping on the bodies--this tumult of crushed heads and sheared-off legs and tight bouquets of guts flowering from ruptured bellies. Flies clung in loose, weaving masses, like slick blued bees swarming; the whole valley hummed with their odious presence. Maggots worked in gross struggling chains at the gaping wounds, bloated and intent. ...

"If you could bottle it, Beaupre thought savagely, swallowing, fighting the hot clutch of nausea with all his might, trying not to breathe ... This smell. If you could bottle it, store it in some tanks just outside Washington or New York City or Chicago; and then when the drums began to beat, when the eminent statesmen rose in all their righteous choler and the news rags and radio networks started their impassioned chant, if you could release a few dozen carboys on the Senate floor, the executive offices of Du Pont de Memours, Boeing ... the trading posts on Wall Street; and seal off the exits. Repeat every three hours as needed. Rx. By God, that would take some of the fun out of it. If you could only bottle it and feed it to the fire-eating sons of bitches, jam it down their throats."

Don't leave yet, Mr. Bush and Cheney for Myrers has a special message for you. Listen to his character named Bill Bowdoin:

"Every war has to be a gleaming crusade, with a hovering Grail of Joseph of Arimathea for only the holiest of eyes to behold. When the plain fact of the matter is the war resembles nothing so much as a big corporation going full blast, with its board of directors meetings and reports and prospectuses, its graphs and charts and shipping sections, layout and advertising--right down to the final product."

Anton Myrer spent 30 years researching and writing his novel. He'd never heard of Bush, Cheney, Haliburton, tag-team presidential debates and sound bites. But he sure got it right.

Dolph Honicker is a retired newspaperman and a freelance writer.

Pythian Press.

Atheism now in the open

2007-11-29T06:05:00.000-05:00

By DOLPH HONICKER

Thank God we live in an era where atheism can be discussed in public, even on Fox News, although the network gave short shrift to nonbelievers.

The appearance on the best-selling nonfiction list of three books by atheists has pushed reason to the forefront.

First was Sam Harris' The End of Faith.

Then came Richard Dawkins The God Delusion.

Lastly, my favorite by a splinter off the True Cross is Christopher Hitchens' god (cq) is Not Great.

Though I once proposed, as Hitchens does in his book that all religions are man-made, I won't sue him for plagiarism for others have long offered this reasonable supposition.

Right off, let's dispose of the canard that morality rests in belief of a supreme being, whether it be Jesus, Allah or any one of a thousand and one other gods. Ask your preacher, priest or rabbi if he would abandon himself to adultery, rape, robbery and murder if it were not for his faith in the hereafter. Given that he's an honest man he'll tell you that no, his conscience won't let him, but ...

Following that "but" will come a string of arguments trying to convince you that his brand is the one true faith.

I use the masculine gender because the church of Rome, Islam and most mainstream Protestant denominations forbid women to assume the authority to pass on nostrums from the past.

Pope Benedict XVI makes no bones about it: the Roman Catholic Church is the only true church. All others are false.

When I read of the pope's elevation of 23 new cardinals, I was taken by his haberdashery. I wondered which Bible verses inspired his ornate vestments. Associated Press writer Nicole Winfield says Benedict "donned a long, golden silk cape, embroidered with scenes from the life (sic)of the saints that was held up by two altar servers as he processed down the main aisle."

Was one of them St. Francis Xavier? It was he, says Hitchens, "who brought the Inquisition to Asia and whose bones are still revered by those who choose to revere bones."

Religions sell the fear of hell the way George W. Bush sells the fear of terrorism -- good or evil -- my way or the highway.

Hindus set a time limit on hell. "A sinner, for example," says Hitchens, "might be sentenced to a given number of years in hell, where every day counted as 6,400 human hairs. If he slew a priest, the sentence thus adjusted would be 149,504,000,000 years. At this point, he was allowed nirvana, which seems to mean annihilation." But Christians found a hell from which there is no possible appeal.

Fundamentalists cling firmly to Old Testament myths. The National Park Service, pressured by Bush appointees, forbid rangers from giving an official estimate of the Grand Canyon's age to avoid offending the author of a Creationist book on sale in the park's bookstore claiming the canyon was formed by Noah's flood. Touchy, touchy.

As Sam Harris notes in his book: "Most of the people of this world believe that the Creator has written a book. We have the misfortune of having many such books, each making an exclusive claim to its infallibility."

Told in Sunday School as a kid that God created the heavens and the earth and then breathed into a cloud of dust to create Adam, thereafter performing a ribectomy to create Eve, I asked what seemed a logical question: "Who created God?"

"God has been with us always," said the flustered Sunday School teacher.

Lot's of things we can't prove "exist," says James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author of A Jesuit Off-Broadway: Center Stage With Jesus, Judas and Life's Big Questions.

"Love, for instance," he says. "Many believers would say that they've experienced God's presence in ways that go beyond the bounds of reason. They stand on the seashore and feel profound longing. They hold their newborn baby and feel profound joy."

Is Martin saying atheists have no such feelings?

As Hitchens notes, "It may have been a Jesuit who was first actually quoted as saying, 'Give me a child until he is ten, and I will give you the man.'"

Since the Catholic church, having paid out billions for cases of sex abuse against children by its priests and bishops, "one can only shudder to think what was happening in the centuries where the church was above all criticism," says Hitchens.

The astronomer Carl Sagan said he could look into the sky and admire its vastness without seeking divine origins.

Albert Einstein, addressing a writer troubled by a misrepresentation attributed to him, replied:

"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

Years later, to another query, he said:

"I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it."

A few quickies from god is Not Great:

Jehovah's Witnesses have refused blood transfusions for their children.
Followers believed an illiterate scoundrel, Joseph Smith, was led to buried golden tablets by an agel named Moroni which, with help, he "translated" into the Mormon bible.
Shia fundamentalists in Iran lowered the age of "consent" to nine, perhaps in admiring emulation of the age of the youngest "wife" of the "Prophet" Mohammad.

It's an empirical fact that elephants and mice die, as do mighty oaks and roses. Yet, in this 21st century, we have a president who questions evolution, believes it's his Christian duty to kill tens of thousands of innocents to plant his brand of democracy at gunpoint and that he will some day swap one of his earthly mansions for a more glorious one in heaven.

I submit that if all Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews and others of faith held a massive prayer day it would have no more effect on the cosmos than this proposal by Robert G. Ingersoll:

"Would Calvin have been more bloodthirsty if he had believed in the religion of the South Sea Islanders? ... Would the Dutch have been more idiotic if they had denied the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and worshiped the blessed trinity of sausage, beer and cheese?"

Dolph Honicker is a retired newspaperman and a freelance writer.

Copyright 2007, Pythian Press

An honorable general gets the axe

2007-09-12T06:38:00.000-05:00

By DOLPH HONICKER

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing. --George Bernard Shaw

... we have violated the laws of warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and ... the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe ... that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.--Gen. Antonio Taguba (ret.)

Why in the name of God -- if there’s such a being -- create a nation in which its leaders countenance medieval torture ... warrantless wiretaps on its subjects ... imprisonment without the right of trial ... questionable elections ... a milquetoast media and a timid legislative branch?

Yes, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia come to mind. But that was yesterday. Today is today.

With a pair of lame ducks pooping on them, why doesn’t a nation of sheep tire of the embarrassment, tune out “American Idol” and Paris Hilton, rise up as one and, like the star of the movie “Network,” shout, “I’m mad as hell and not going to take this any more?”

Realistically, what kind of a president allows his minions to send Maj. Bryan Bowlsbey to Iraq as part of a transport unit?

Who is Maj. Bowlsbey and why should this long-time National Guardsman, the director of the Illinois Veterans’ Affairs Department, get a free ride?

In the months before being shipped out, Bowlsbey was getting his home readied so that his invalid wife could get around. She’s missing two legs.

In 2005, his wife, Maj. Tammy Duckworth, was piloting a Blackhawk helicopter over Iraq when it was struck by a rocket propelled grenade. She tried vainly to control the chopper by pressing on the rudders.

She couldn’t feel them. Her right leg was shredded to the hipbone. Her left leg was shot off just below the knee, her right arm broken in three places. She lost almost half her blood.

One assumes that because Tammy Duckworth ran an unsuccessful race for Congress in 2006 on an anti-war campaign, denouncing the policies of President George W. Bush, had nothing to do with Maj. Bowlsbey’s deployment.

You have the right to assume that.

Meanwhile, is the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh the only reporter digging through the muck of the Bush/Cheney torture policy as enunciated by the know-nothing U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez?

Hersh’s latest report details how an honorable general, Antonio Taguba, tried to tell the truth and was steamrollered by the White House and his peers in the Army.

In his first meeting with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Taguba told Hersh that an old friend, Lt. Gen. Banz J. Craddock, who was Rumsfeld’s senior military assistant, met him at the door and coldly told him, “Wait here.”

When ushered in, Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice, “Here ... comes that famous General Taguba -- of the Taguba Report!”

Also in the meeting: Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy; Stephen Cambone, under-secretary of defense for intelligence; Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Gen. Peter Schoomaker, Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials.

All professed ignorance of Abu Ghraib.

Asked if he had found abuse or torture, Taguba recalled telling the group: “I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, ‘That’s not abuse. That’s torture.’ There was quiet.”

Tugaba says Rumsfeld denied seeing his in-depth investigative report despite having sent dozens of copies through several channels at the Pentagon and to the Central Command Headquarters, in Tampa, Fla., which ran the Iraq War.

Also, before the meeting, Tugaba says he’d spent weeks briefing senior military leaders on the report.

He says when he urged one lieutenant general to look at the photos, the officer rebuffed him, saying, “I don’t want to get involved by looking, because what do you do with information, once you know what they show?”

Gen. Myers testified that in January of 2004 information about the photographs had been given “to me and the Secretary up through the chain of command. ... And the general nature of the photos, about nudity, some mock sexual acts and other abuse, was described.”

Yet, testifying before Senate and House Armed Service Committees on May 7, Rumsfeld, said, “I wish we had known more, sooner, and been able to tell you more sooner, but we didn’t.”

Taguba told Hersh he was appalled, saying the secretary was in denial. Had an aide withheld the facts?

“Rumsfeld is very perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap,” said Taguba. “There’s no way he’s suffering from C.R.S. -- Can’t Remember Shit. He’s trying to acquit himself, and a lot of people are lying to protect themselves.”

What particularly galled Taguba was that Rumsfeld was accompanied by senior military officers who concurred with his denials.

In January 2006, Gen. Richard Cody, the Army’s vice-chief of staff, calls Taguba, who’d served 34 active years, and says, “I need you to retire by January 2007.” No chit-chat, though the two had known each other for years. Then Cody hangs up.

"They always shoot the messeger," Taguba told Hersh. "There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this."

The message is: Don’t rock the bleeping boat.

Pythian Press.

Red tape clogs 'terps'way out

2007-07-18T12:42:00.000-05:00

By DOLPH HONICKER

Poker has two inviolate axioms: (1) know when to hold and when to fold and (2) never send good money after bad.

In Iraq, President George W. Bush and the president of vice, Dick Cheney, have run roughshod over both rules.

The time for folding has long since past. In fact, it was a hand that never should have been dealt. That brings us to No. 2. In Iraq, we’re not only spending like it was Monopoly money, we’re spending our most valuable assets, boots on the ground -- some 30,000 pairs of them.

They’re volunteers. But if you polled them, most probably would prefer going to Afghanistan, where the 9/11 terrorists trained, so they could make a dent against a surging Taliban and al-Qaeda force .

Some of us, even though we were not military experts, saw the error of pulling troops from Afghanistan as we were zeroing in on Osama bin Laden and sending them to invade Iraq. It was stupid since allied forces controlled the air over Iraq and Saddam Hussein wasn’t going anywhere.

The world knows we cherry-picked faulty evidence from the likes of “Curveball,” Amad Chalibi and, my favorite, this from the archives of Newsweek, which said information about links between Iraq and al-Qaeda came from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. “I been a shaky alibi (?)”

Imagine the immediate days post-9/11. The world was with us. We could have had half a million U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. With that show of force, Pakistan would have thrown in her lot wholeheartedly. Saddam could have been held off with our left hand. How could he hit New York with Scuds that had a range of 100 miles?

But today Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf sits on a powder keg, his will weakened. Time quotes a senior military official in Afghanistan as saying: “The bottom line is that the Taliban can do what they want in the tribal areas because the {Pakistani} army is not going after them.”

Taliban and al-Qaeda forces are settled in small groups in a heavily forested band of mountains that has virtually been conceded to them. It’s called Talibanistan. Digging them out will be like plucking fire ants one at a time.

Iraq presents a sorry tale of betrayal on our part as detailed in a lengthy New Yorker piece by George Packer. Hundreds of Iraqi translators and intelligence agents that served America, facing daily risks of having their heads chopped off, have been shafted. Many have died.

For instance, Ali spent his childhood in Pennsylvania and Oklahoma while his father completed graduate studies. Unfortunately, they returned home to Baghdad when he was 11 so his father could get his green card. The Iranian war prevented them from leaving.

Packer says Ali had to learn Arabic from scratch and “considered his American childhood a paradise lost.“ In 2003 he became an interpreter with the 82nd Airborne Division. He could not tell his family.

“Ali found that, although many soldiers were friendly, they often ignored information and advice from their Iraqi employees,” Packer writes. “Interpreters would give them names of insurgents, and nothing would happen. When Ali suggested that soldiers buy up locals’ rocket-propelled grenade launchers so they wouldn’t fall into the hands of insurgents, he was disregarded. ...“

Consider this vignette of Othman, a Sunni doctor, 29, and Laith, a Shia engineer, a few years younger, who shared a strong friendship based on a desire for the Americans to arrive and change their lives.

“Most of the people Othman and Laith knew had left Iraq,” says Packer. “House by house, Baghdad had been abandoned. Othman was considering his options: move his parents from their house (in an insurgent stronghold) to his sister’s house (in the midst of civil war); move his parents and brothers to Syria (where there was no work) and live with his friend in Jordan (going crazy with boredom while watching his savings dwindle); go to London and ask for asylum (and probably be sent back); stay in Baghdad for six more months until he could begin a scholarship that he had won to study journalism in America (or get killed waiting). Beneath his calm good humor, Othman was paralyzed -- he didn’t want to leave Baghdad and his family, but staying had become impossible. Every day, he changed his mind.”

As for Laith: “Sometimes I feel like we’re standing in line for a ticket, waiting to die.”

Many of the young Iraqis who signed up with the U.S. military to become translators, or “terps” as the soldiers called them, “had learned English,” says Packer, “from American movies and music, and from listening secretly to the BBC.”

Otherwise, under Saddam, as one said, it “was a one-way road leading to nothing.”

Ironically, that’s where it stands today. Red tape and indifference clog their every step. Try to teach a soldier cultural dos and don’ts, he won’t listen. You’re an Iraqi and untrustworthy. Just translate for me, mother.

Iraqi “terps” received inferior or no body army, leading Baathists to make a persuasive case that Americans treat all Iraqis badly, even those who work for them.

L. Paul Bremer III, as the virtual dictator in Iraq for 14 months, ditched the entire Iraqi army, threw hundreds of thousands out of work and lit the fuse that has led to today’s chaos. He spoke no Arabic and knew nothing about the Middle East. By the time he was forced to fold his hand, it was too late.

As the banner across the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln the summer of 2003 so blithely put it: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

Sooner or later -- a year, four years, twenty years -- we’ll be out. What happens then to all the Iraqi “terps” who served us at great risk but have been fingered by both Sunni and Shia insurgents as collaborators?

Many of them now seek safe flight ahead of the eventual exodus, before heads roll. They’re snarled in red tape.

It’s Catch-22. We can’t tell you when we’re leaving. It would tip off the enemy. Anyway, American personnel will leave first. You’re on your own. Catch a chopper out, if you can.

With friends like us, who needs enemies?

Ghost letters: read 'em and weep

2007-07-18T12:38:00.000-05:00

By DOLPH HONICKER

To you SUV owners sporting “Support Our Troops” ribbons and “God Bless America” posters plastered on the rear of your vehicles, close your cell phone and detour to the nearest newsstand to get the April 2 special issue of Newsweek.

Read “The War in the Words of the Dead.”

There are photographs of them as well -- while they were alive. Warning: It’s not easy going. Read it and weep. I did.

The families granted Newsweek permission to run these e-mails and letters. My focus is on two officers and two enlisted Marines because their stories seem to sum up the surreal nature of the Iraqi War.

Here are two excerpts from Army Col. Theodore Westhusing, the first dated April14, 2005, from Baghdad:

“It is really an eye-opener how the real person comes out over here in battle, the heroics by so many ... At times things appear suspicious with a few {Iraqis} we are dealing with, and we don’t know how they are going to act. Remember, some were Saddam’s elite army special forces and guards, who never liked us and now we work/fight side by side. There is a chance the enemy could be right beside you.”

Finally, there’s this brief note, dated May 10, less than a month later, that Westhusing wrote from Baghdad:

“Life is worthless over here to so many. Killing everywhere and always ongoing. So many people don’t care and appear to have given up. But I won’t, I need to be here to help them ...”

Westhusing, 44, died , an apparent suicide, on June 5. He was less than a month from going home.

Among the most moving letters are those hand-written that begin, “If you are reading this ...”

One of those was that of Lance Cpl. Lance Graham, 26, of San Antonio, 6-foot-5 and 240 pounds. His father says, “He made other people feel safe -- even other Marines.” He died May 7, 2005, near Haditha Dam when a pair of suicide bombers hit his convoy. Here are excerpts from the hand-printed letter (his spellings):

“Well if your reading this, I guess this deployment was a one way trip. I just have one thing to ask. Please don’t be mad at the Marine Corps. It was my choice to join & come here. I honestily belive this what I was meant to do. I don’t care what the media says we are making a difference here. Know that I did not die in vain or for some worthless cause. ... Not all the people here are bad. Don’t fill your hearts with anger & hate. ... Just know that I have God in my life & Im in a better Place & Marines guard the streets in Heaven. Who else would God trust? ...

“Semper Fi

Love Lance”

This excerpt is from Army Maj. Michael Mundell, Sept. 1, 2006, from Fallujah:

“The question has been asked ... what this place is like. Try to imagine this: if you go out in your front yard, take a weapon with you and stare REAL careful at all the neighbors’ houses. One of them may be on the roof, trying to snipe you. Also, don’t stay out too long -- someone down the road may just try to lob a few mortars at you, or drive by and fire some machine guns, or perhaps shoot an RPG rocket. ... If you get in your car to go to the grocery, you can never ever go by yourself -- you gotta have at least two cars and at least three people in each one. And make sure that at least one of your passengers is a medic. ...

“Is that a trash bag? An empty box? Or a command-detonated bomb? ... Never let any other car get close to you -- EVER. ... If they get too close ... wave a flag ... shoot a flare ... honk the horn and blink your lights. If they don’t move, or keep driving at you kill them. Period ... That is what it’s like here.”

Thirteen days later Mundell writes, “Audrey once asked me what the attitude of the troops is over here, about the war, about the President and so on. ... You can’t see what we see every day (like today, dead kids {killed by an IED} and not get a little cynical ... High-minded political phrases sound pretty hollow out here ... things look a lot different down here at the point of ‘W’’s spear. The ones at home rattling the loudest saber aren’t here helping load dead kids into and ambulance. WE are. And that just sucks.”

Lance Cpl. Anthony Butterfield, 19, enlisted straight out of high school. He and three other Marines were killed when a suicide bomber set off a propane truck in Rawah (cq) on July 29, 2006.

Here are excerpts from his unsealed “if you read this ...” letter:

“Hi Mom, Dad, Britney, Jeremy, and Bartley.

“If your getting his letter then I’m sure you’ve already heard. I’m so sorry. But I know that I’m safe now. I’m with God watching over you. I wanna tell you all some special memories I’ll always hold on too. Staying up late with you Mom watching the food channel while you rub my back, or when I was little you’d always get me a glass of chocolate milk with a lid and a straw . With you Dad going out on the sidecar and driving to volleyball tournaments. ... Brit, trying to hold my hand crossing the streets. ... Jeremy, you and me always building cool ass stuff. ... Bartley remember all those late nights when you’d come into my room and we’d just talk. ... Just know that I made it to heaven before you and we’ll see you all again.

“Your loving son, brother,

“Anthony Edward Butterfield”

And this from Maj. Mudell, Nov. 8, 2006, from Fallujah:

“... I hope that no one is making decisions about the war based on what I’m saying. I don’t know what’s going on in Baghdad or Ramadi or Mosul or anywhere else. ... I can only tell you what I see, hear, think or experience. I don’t have the vaguest idea as to who is winning this war, and I don’t care. My job is to bring home my boys and I will do whatever I have to in order to accomplish that. Lance Corporal Danny Catron, all of 19, his wife (18) and their new baby are counting on me not to screw it up here. I could care less what is going on in Baghdad. Or anywhere else.

Mundell, 47, was killed by an IED in Fallujah Jan. 5, 2007. (Corporal Catron is still in Iraq, due to return home soon).

Impeachment off the table ... why?

2007-07-14T06:52:00.000-05:00

By DOLPH HONICKER

"President Bush lives in a world where in effect it is always the summer of 1945, the Allies have just defeated the Axis, and a world filled with darkness ... has been rescued by a new and optimistic democracy ... His is a world where other nations admire America or damned well ought to ..." --David Halberstam

Who are the criminals today? Look in the mirror. It is we who allowed a criminal regime to take over, to shred our Constitution while we, a nation of sheep, doped out on American Idol, Survivors, Jerry Springer.

The Democratic victory in November of 2006 was a phony spring. Winter chills set in when House Speaker Nancy Polosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced they were taking impeachment off the table, thus giving Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Karl Rove & Co. free rein to run rampant.

California Sen. Barbara Boxer's recent attempt to revive impeachment comes many days late and half a trillion dollars short.

George W. Bush verus the U.S. Constitution, with a forward by Rep. John Conyers Jr. and an introduction by Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson laid out the criminal articles for impeachment in 287 pages in 2006. Since then, an addendum could add many hundred more pages.

Had such an impeachment been brought forward, it should have been a twofer with Cheney as the lead defendant -- Cheney the war lover who skipped Vietnam with five deferments.

An event that churned my stomach in early July was a speech Bush delivered to a safe audience in Cleveland. He used his father to make a point -- not his heavenly father, but the one whose sperm spawned him.

You see, Bush said, Japan was our mortal enemy during World War II. And his daddy flew a torpedo bomber. He was shot down. He was a hero (true). Now Japan is one of our strongest allies. That's what we're doin' in Iraq today. Some day, just let me pour more and more troops into the maw, and we'll be one happy family.

You craven so-and-so, I wanted to yell, Vietnam is a trading partner today. Why don't you tell us about your heroic exploits in Vietnam, protecting the friendly skies of Texas, partying and politicking in Alabama before opting out of the Texas Air National Guard early after family influence got you in ahead of 500 other recruits.

As much as I hold Dubya in disdain, I yield to a 20,000-word article July 3 by Washington Post writers Baron Gelllman and Jo Becker to express my feelings for Cheney.

Cheney, they write, has been the most influential public official in the country, not necessarily excluding President Bush, and his influence has been entirely malign. He is pathologically (but purposefully) secretive; treacherous toward colleagues; coldly manipulative of the callow, lazy, and ignorant president he serves; contemptuous of public opinion; and dismissive not only of international law (a fairly standard attitude for conservatives of his stripe) but also of the very idea that the Constitution and laws of the United States, including laws signed by his nominal superior, can be construed to limit the power of the executive to take any action that can plausibly be classified as part of an endless, endlessly expandable "war on terror."

The August Vanity Fair has run Halberstam's last article before his untimely death, "The History Boys."

"Recently," Halberstam wrote, "Harry Truman, for reasons that would surely puzzle him if he were still alive, has become the Republicans' favorite Democratic president. In fact, the men around Bush who attempt to feed the White House line to journalists have begun to talk about the current president as a latter day Truman: Yes, goes the line, Truman's rise to an ever more elevated status in the presidential pantheon is all ex post facto, conferred by historians long after he left office a beleaguered man, his poll numbers hopelessly low. Thus Bush and the people around him predict that a similar Trumanization will ride to the rescue for them."

The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzbg sums up Cheney:

"Cheney has been the intellectual author and bureaucratic facilitator of the crimes and misdemeanors that have inflicted unprecedented disgrace on our country's moral and political standing: the casual trashing of habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions; the claim of authority to seize suspects, including American citizens, and imprison them indefinitely and incommunicado, with no right to due process of law; the outright encouragement of 'cruel,' 'inhuman,' and 'degrading' treatment of prisoners; the use of undoubted torture, including waterboarding (Cheney: 'a no-brainer for me'), which for a century the United States had prosecuted as a war crime; and, or course, the bloody, nightmarish Iraq war itself ..."

Is there any reason why Cheney and Bush should not be impeached, convicted and their cases sent to the International War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague to be tried for war crimes?

No.

Pythian Press.

An honorable general gets the axe

2007-06-26T17:53:00.000-05:00

By DOLPH HONICKER

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing. --George Bernard Shaw

... we have violated the laws of warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and ... the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe ... that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.--Gen. Antonio Taguba (ret.)

Why in the name of God -- if there’s such a being -- create a nation in which its leaders countenance medieval torture ... warrantless wiretaps on its subjects ... imprisonment without the right of trial ... questionable elections ... a milquetoast media and a timid legislative branch?

Yes, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia come to mind. But that was yesterday. Today is today.

With a pair of lame ducks pooping on them, why doesn’t a nation of sheep tire of the embarrassment, tune out “American Idol” and Paris Hilton, rise up as one and, like the star of the movie “Network,” shout, “I’m mad as hell and not going to take this any more?”

Realistically, what kind of a president allows his minions to send Maj. Bryan Bowlsbey to Iraq as part of a transport unit?

Who is Maj. Bowlsbey and why should this long-time National Guardsman, the director of the Illinois Veterans’ Affairs Department, get a free ride?

In the months before being shipped out, Bowlsbey was getting his home readied so that his invalid wife could get around. She’s missing two legs.

In 2005, his wife, Maj. Tammy Duckworth, was piloting a Blackhawk helicopter over Iraq when it was struck by a rocket propelled grenade. She tried vainly to control the chopper by pressing on the rudders.

She couldn’t feel them. Her right leg was shredded to the hipbone. Her left leg was shot off just below the knee, her right arm broken in three places. She lost almost half her blood.

One assumes that because Tammy Duckworth ran an unsuccessful race for Congress in 2006 on an anti-war campaign, denouncing the policies of President George W. Bush, had nothing to do with Maj. Bowlsbey’s deployment.

You have the right to assume that.

Meanwhile, is the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh the only reporter digging through the muck of the Bush/Cheney torture policy as enunciated by the know-nothing U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez?

Hersh’s latest report details how an honorable general, Antonio Taguba, tried to tell the truth and was steamrollered by the White House and his peers in the Army.

In his first meeting with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Taguba told Hersh that an old friend, Lt. Gen. Banz J. Craddock, who was Rumsfeld’s senior military assistant, met him at the door and coldly told him, “Wait here.”

When ushered in, Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice, “Here ... comes that famous General Taguba -- of the Taguba Report!”

Also in the meeting: Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy; Stephen Cambone, under-secretary of defense for intelligence; Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Gen. Peter Schoomaker, Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials.

All professed ignorance of Abu Ghraib.

Asked if he had found abuse or torture, Taguba recalled telling the group: “I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, ‘That’s not abuse. That’s torture.’ There was quiet.”

Tugaba says Rumsfeld denied seeing his in-depth investigative report despite having sent dozens of copies through several channels at the Pentagon and to the Central Command Headquarters, in Tampa, Fla., which ran the Iraq War.

Also, before the meeting, Tugaba says he’d spent weeks briefing senior military leaders on the report.

He says when he urged one lieutenant general to look at the photos, the officer rebuffed him, saying, “I don’t want to get involved by looking, because what do you do with information, once you know what they show?”

Gen. Myers testified that in January of 2004 information about the photographs had been given “to me and the Secretary up through the chain of command. ... And the general nature of the photos, about nudity, some mock sexual acts and other abuse, was described.”

Yet, testifying before Senate and House Armed Service Committees on May 7, Rumsfeld, said, “I wish we had known more, sooner, and been able to tell you more sooner, but we didn’t.”

Taguba told Hersh he was appalled, saying the secretary was in denial. Had an aide withheld the facts?

“Rumsfeld is very perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap,” said Taguba. “There’s no way he’s suffering from C.R.S. -- Can’t Remember Shit. He’s trying to acquit himself, and a lot of people are lying to protect themselves.”

What particularly galled Taguba was that Rumsfeld was accompanied by senior military officers who concurred with his denials.

In January 2006, Gen. Richard Cody, the Army’s vice-chief of staff, calls Taguba, who’d served 34 active years, and says, “I need you to retire by January 2007.” No chit-chat, though the two had known each other for years. Then Cody hangs up.

"They always shoot the messeger," Taguba told Hersh. "There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this."

The message is: Don’t rock the bleeping boat.

Pythian Press.

When in Nice, wear sandals

2007-06-05T13:04:00.001-05:00

By DOLPH HONICKER

It was a lesson I should have learned when still wet behind the ears: never watch sausage being made or Congress at work.

But there I was viewing CSPAN as Democratic congresspersons tried vainly to pass a resolution to up the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour -- a pittance that hadn’t been changed in a decade -- as one Republican speaker after another rose to defend our troops, our flag and our record deficits. No, scratch that last item.

Having a weak stomach, I switched to the Discovery Channel. There I saw the No. 1 concern of my Republican friends. The channel was running a segment on yachts.

One of my favorite yachts was built for speed at 140 feet long and 26 feet wide. The master bedroom with its king-sized bed stretched from port to starboard. On a trial run, its owner got it up to 69 knots. That’s 74 miles an hour. Imagine the wake!

This fits the GOP axiom that a rising tide lifts all yachts. Leaky rowboats fend for themselves.

Was that yacht powered by 2,000 horsepower or 20,000 horsepower engines? I don’t recall. I just remember the owner smiling into the camera and saying, “When you open this up to maximum speed, it could burn up your credit card.”

Yeah.

Have no fear, Mr. Yacht Owner, President George W. Bush’s tax cuts that turn millionaires into multimillionaires will bail you out at the pump, and his pie-in-the-sky hydrogen program, run by nuclear power plants, will have your boat running on water vapors.

The speedy yacht sleeps ten plus its crew with a mere $30 million price sticker. And, when hurricane season approaches, you can avoid dings in the hull and bent windshield wipers by having it transported on specially built tankers to the Mediterranean off Monaco or Nice where the young maidens go topless on the pebble beaches.

Transportation cost? A shade over $200,000 one way. But, when you own a $30 million yacht, what’s a few hundred thou? Play your cards right and Bush-Cheney will reimburse you.

The yacht that really caught my eye was a large steamer built in 1921by the founder of Dodge auto works (I think his name was Dodge) which burned in 1926 and was refurbished a year or so later. Its original $2 million cost would be the equivalent of $100 million today -- chicken feed for the current crop of Bushonaires.

Teakwood furnishings, Jacuzzies and the all comforts of home (yours, not mine) abound in this floating luxury hotel.

But I offer this small bit of advice to neophyte yachtsmen sailing off to Nice. My wife and I were there in 1991. I was armed with a primitive video cam that weighed about 20 pounds. I zoomed in on the nubile beach scenery, swinging my neck from left to right. The next day in Avignon I woke up with a stiff neck that stayed that way for a month.

Note: Pebbles on the Nice beach hurt bare feet. This is not Florida. Wear sandals.

Pythian Press.

King George to be anointed?

2007-06-04T06:42:00.000-05:00

By DOLPH HONICKER

More than one person close to President George W. Bush has said that he has a messianic complex. The Rev. Pat Robertson says that when Bush was governor of Texas Bush informed the evangelist that God had told him to run for president.

Since biblical happenings seem to occur in threes -- the Three Wise Men, Christ rising from the tomb on the third day, the Holy Trinity of Jesus, God and the Holy Ghost -- what could be so unusual about a third, self-anointed term for a man who considers himself above the law? In other words: King George.

Don't laugh.

At least don't laugh until you have absorbed National Security Presidential Directive NSPD 51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive HSPD-20.

They were handed down by the White House May 9, although you did not read them in the Washington Post or the New York Times. If you'd been one of the few thousand readers of the Progressive, you could have read it in their May 18 issue.

To be brief, Bush's two directives grant the presidency extraordinary powers without apparent congressional approval.

WorldNetDaily.com columnist Jerome R. Corsi says the directives establish under the office of the president a new national continuity coordinator to make plans for "National Essential Functions" of all federal, state, local, territorial and "tribal" governments, as well as private sector organizations to continue functioning under the president's directives in the event of a national emergency.

Tribal? Once again the Indians get the shaft.

National emergency?

This smells of martial law.

Ah, as though Bush and his joined-at-the-hip president of vice, Dick Cheney, did not have enough power already.

Under the definitions (b) "Catastrophic Emergency" means any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, economy, or government functions.

Another Katrina and perhaps another Michael ("Ya doin' a fine job, Brownie") could take over.

Under (c), (d) and (e), alphabetical agencies take over: COG, "Continuity of Government; COOP, "Continuity of Operations; and ECG, "Enduring Constitutional Government.

One thing bureaucracy never runs out of is letters. So under (h) we have NEFs, or "National Essential Functions," which must be supported through COOP and COG capabilities, and (i) PMEFs or "Primary Mission Essential Functions," those government functions that must be performed in order to support or implement the performance of NEFs before, during, and in the aftermath of an emergency.

The directives, which meander on for six and one-eighth finely printed pages, is another example of why lawyers in the Bush administration have nothing better to do than to grant more powers to their leader.

Will the Democrats put a stop to such nonsense?

Sure, just like they've dilly-dallied over halting the war in Iraq.

The worst national disasters that these directives do not seem to recognize is the Bush/Cheney administration itself.

Pythian Press.

Get ready for the long, long haul

2007-05-18T19:21:00.000-05:00

By DOLPH HONICKER

What would happen in Iraq if American troops suddenly withdrew tomorrow and the Green Zone became a giant Motel 6 to house displaced Iraqis?

Chaos would erupt. But not necessarily in Iraq. That country already has its own brand of chaos which its own people must end, just as a minority of Americans overthrew the first King George in the 1700s.

If Sunnis and Shi’ites wake up tomorrow to find their streets free of roadblocks, troops kicking in doors, Humvees, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, tanks, jet fighters roaring overhead, and helicopters chopping up the desert air, the tribes might actually shout, “Praise Allah for delivering us from the infidels!” They’d probably exchange high-fives and move back into their formerly mixed neighborhoods.

The real chaos would break out in America.

Stocks in Halliburton, Lockheed, General Dynamics, Boeing, Raytheon and other defense firms would plummet, with layoffs in the millions.

Silicon Valley would panic.

China, Japan and other foreign nations would demand payment of trillions of dollars in loans that the U.S. under Bush/Cheney has used to finance wars and deficits and prop up the economy.

The GOP accused the Democratic Party of being the one of “tax and spend.“ Is it worse than being a party that chews ever so lightly on the upper crust to borrow and spend?

If an Iraqi pullout occurred tomorrow, you’d have to dodge CEOs leaping off tall buildings.

Tiger Woods might have to sell his yacht and play tournaments with second-hand driving range balls.

Paris Hilton might shave her head and sell her hair to cancer victims.

THINK.

Think back to 1929 and the Great Depression. Millions in bread lines. Massive runs on banks.

By 1933, 26.6 percent of Americans were unemployed. Those still working were paid less. Factory workers were forced to work twice as hard for the same wages.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made noble efforts to bring the country to its feet with such alphabet agencies as the WPA (Works Progress Administration), the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), and the NRA (National Recovery Agency).

He declared a bank holiday to prevent devastating withdrawals.

FDR’s efforts made a dent in the Depression, but it took World War II with the U.S. serving as the Arsenal for Democracy to bring about full employment.

And we’ve been on a wartime economy ever since -- from the Cold War with the Soviet Union, to the Korean Conflict, to the Vietnam War, to our mighty victory in Grenada over a fifth-rate police force and a bunch of Cuban workers building a runway, to Bosnia, Somalia, Panama, Desert Storm, Afghanistan and now the quagmire in Iraq.

Did I leave out any?

Sadly, we’re a nation made up of intelligent people who can be fooled some of the time but seem to catch on only when it’s almost too late to play catch-up.

Barack Obama and John McCain spoke the truth -- before they tripped over themselves apologizing -- terming the loss of troops in Iraq a waste. True. Those in uniforms didn’t give up their lives for mom, the flag and apple pie. Their lives were ripped from them by sniper bullets, RPGs and stress-induced suicides. Wasted!

If is the biggest little word in the English language.

If Adolf Hitler had sent his Panzer divisions into Russia a month earlier, we’d be speaking German today. If Japan had followed up after its Pearl Harbor attack, we’d likely be bilingual -- speaking German and Japanese.

And if George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Pearle and the other neocons had not been so fixated on invading Iraq even before 9/11 and concentrated on taming the Taliban and capturing Osma bin Laden THINK of all the lives and money that would have been saved.

Should we leave Iraq tomorrow? Official numbers answer in the affirmative.

President Bush is sending 21,500 additional troops to Iraq. But, wait! He’s supplementing that with 4,700 support troops for a total of 26,200 troops, and maybe more. According to Pentagon assessments, Iraqi security forces now number 357,400.

That adds up to 383,600. That should be enough to start easing our forces out -- if not tomorrow, then by mid-summer.

All this is a dream, of course. Truth is, we’ll probably have boots on the ground there for 30 more years, long after my bones have turned to dust. How else would our economy survive?

And then there’s the oil, you know.

Pythian Press

Red tape clogs way out for friends

2007-05-17T20:34:00.000-05:00

By DOLPH HONICKER

Poker has two inviolate axioms: (1) know when to hold and when to fold and (2) never send good money after bad.

In Iraq, President George W. Bush and the president of vice, Dick Cheney, have run roughshod over both rules.

The time for folding has long since past. In fact, it was a hand that never should have been dealt. That brings us to No. 2. In Iraq, we’re not only spending like it was Monopoly money, we’re spending our most valuable assets, boots on the ground -- some 30,000 pairs of them.

They’re volunteers. But if you polled them, most probably would prefer going to Afghanistan, where the 9/11 terrorists trained, so they could make a dent against a surging Taliban and al-Qaeda force .

Some of us, even though we were not military experts, saw the error of pulling troops from Afghanistan as we were zeroing in on Osama bin Laden and sending them to invade Iraq. It was stupid since allied forces controlled the air over Iraq and Saddam Hussein wasn’t going anywhere.

The world knows we cherry-picked faulty evidence from the likes of “Curveball,” Amad Chalibi and, my favorite, this from the archives of Newsweek, which said information about links between Iraq and al-Qaeda came from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. “I been a shaky alibi (?)”

Imagine the immediate days post-9/11. The world was with us. We could have had half a million U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. With that show of force, Pakistan would have thrown in her lot wholeheartedly. Saddam could have been held off with our left hand. How could he hit New York with Scuds that had a range of 100 miles?

But today Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf sits on a powder keg, his will weakened. Time quotes a senior military official in Afghanistan as saying: “The bottom line is that the Taliban can do what they want in the tribal areas because the {Pakistani} army is not going after them.”

Taliban and al-Qaeda forces are settled in small groups in a heavily forested band of mountains that has virtually been conceded to them. It’s called Talibanistan. Digging them out will be like plucking fire ants one at a time.

Iraq presents a sorry tale of betrayal on our part as detailed in a lengthy New Yorker piece by George Packer. Hundreds of Iraqi translators and intelligence agents that served America, facing daily risks of having their heads chopped off, have been shafted. Many have died.

For instance, Ali spent his childhood in Pennsylvania and Oklahoma while his father completed graduate studies. Unfortunately, they returned home to Baghdad when he was 11 so his father could get his green card. The Iranian war prevented them from leaving.

Packer says Ali had to learn Arabic from scratch and “considered his American childhood a paradise lost.“ In 2003 he became an interpreter with the 82nd Airborne Division. He could not tell his family.

“Ali found that, although many soldiers were friendly, they often ignored information and advice from their Iraqi employees,” Packer writes. “Interpreters would give them names of insurgents, and nothing would happen. When Ali suggested that soldiers buy up locals’ rocket-propelled grenade launchers so they wouldn’t fall into the hands of insurgents, he was disregarded. ...“

Consider this vignette of Othman, a Sunni doctor, 29, and Laith, a Shia engineer, a few years younger, who shared a strong friendship based on a desire for the Americans to arrive and change their lives.

“Most of the people Othman and Laith knew had left Iraq,” says Packer. “House by house, Baghdad had been abandoned. Othman was considering his options: move his parents from their house (in an insurgent stronghold) to his sister’s house (in the midst of civil war); move his parents and brothers to Syria (where there was no work) and live with his friend in Jordan (going crazy with boredom while watching his savings dwindle); go to London and ask for asylum (and probably be sent back); stay in Baghdad for six more months until he could begin a scholarship that he had won to study journalism in America (or get killed waiting). Beneath his calm good humor, Othman was paralyzed -- he didn’t want to leave Baghdad and his family, but staying had become impossible. Every day, he changed his mind.”

As for Laith: “Sometimes I feel like we’re standing in line for a ticket, waiting to die.”

Many of the young Iraqis who signed up with the U.S. military to become translators, or “terps” as the soldiers called them, “had learned English,” says Packer, “from American movies and music, and from listening secretly to the BBC.”

Otherwise, under Saddam, as one said, it “was a one-way road leading to nothing.”

Ironically, that’s where it stands today. Red tape and indifference clog their every step. Try to teach a soldier cultural dos and don’ts, he won’t listen. You’re an Iraqi and untrustworthy. Just translate for me, mother.

Iraqi “terps” received inferior or no body army, leading Baathists to make a persuasive case that Americans treat all Iraqis badly, even those who work for them.

L. Paul Bremer III, as the virtual dictator in Iraq for 14 months, ditched the entire Iraqi army, threw hundreds of thousands out of work and lit the fuse that has led to today’s chaos. He spoke no Arabic and knew nothing about the Middle East. By the time he was forced to fold his hand, it was too late.

As the banner across the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln the summer of 2003 so blithely put it: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

Sooner or later -- a year, four years, twenty years -- we’ll be out. What happens then to all the Iraqi “terps” who served us at great risk but have been fingered by both Sunni and Shia insurgents as collaborators?

Many of them now seek safe flight ahead of the eventual exodus, before heads roll. They’re snarled in red tape.

It’s Catch-22. We can’t tell you when we’re leaving. It would tip off the enemy. Anyway, American personnel will leave first. You’re on your own. Catch a chopper out, if you can. With friends like us, who needs enemies

Pythian Press

Stay the course, slay the horse?

2007-05-17T20:33:00.000-05:00

By DOLPH HONICKER

In a rapid advance to the rear in the bloody occupation of Iraq, George W. Bush and his fellow warriors have muzzled their impotent “stay-the-course” weapon and unleashed newly coined rhetorical artillery under the rubric of “progress moving forward.”

This new “strategy” is anchored upon a three-legged stool of (1) governance, (2) security and (3) economics.

At least it has a far better ring to it than the shock and awe

pre-preempted invasion labeled Operation Iraqi Liberation and changed as rapidly as you can spell OIL to Operation Enduring Freedom.

Democrats can never hold a candle to the way Republicans can shoot themselves in the foot and tap-dance away from “stay the course” to “a study of constant motion,” meaning that stay the course did not mean what it said.

Still, in a Salt Lake City address in August 2006, Bush said: “We will stay the course. We will help this young Iraqi democracy succeed.”

And July, in Milwaukee, according to the Washington Post: “We will win in Iraq so long as we stay the course.”

Earlier, in June, after returning from Baghdad, “I saw people wondering whether the United State would have the nerve to stay the course and help them succeed.”

But, just as he cut and ran from Afghanistan, Bush has cut and run from that phrase of steely resolve.

White House press secretary Tony Snow and the Bush team has tried to explain that “stay the course” does not actually mean stay the course but is a study in constant motion by the administration.

And what once was “we’ll stand down as soon as they stand up” is now we’ll “step back as they step forward and step up.” A little longer, perhaps, but it gets the point across.

In an Oct. 11 news conference, Bush became tangled over the original phrase, complaining, “The characterization of, you know, ‘it’s stay the course’ is about a quarter right. ‘Stay the course means keep doing what you’re doing. My attitude is: Don’t do what you’re doing if it’s not working -- change. ‘Stay the course’ also means don’t leave before the job is done.“

In a later appearance with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, it was no longer a quarter right as Bush said: “We have been -- we will complete the mission, we will do our job and help achieve the goal, but we’re constantly adjusting tactic. Constantly.“

It was painful to watch Marine Gen. Peter Pace, head of the Joint Chief of Staffs, blinking rapidly like a resurrected Richard Nixon as he tried to put a new face on a disintegrating policy.

Instead of a target date to withdraw from Iraq, we now have a timetable with windows of opportunity for the Iraqi leadership to meet. If they fail to meet our timetable for cleaning up corruption, protecting the population and rebuilding the infrastructure, then we’ll adjust the timetable and open the windows a little wider. To put a precise date on our leaving, Pace says, meekly echoing his boss, would result in chaos -- as though Iraqis today were living in Ronald Reagan’s peaceful city on a hill.

Anyway, as the commander-in-chief himself once announced -- in words meant to sound Churchillian -- the war against terrorism will be long hard, bloody and victory will be up to the next president(s).

Blame Bob Woodward for the recent Republican shift in “strategy” that’s merely a shift in rhetoric. In his book, State of Denial, Woodward peels away the framework from the false White House of cards to reveal the arrogance of the neocons, particularly former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney who led a willing Bush into the Iraq quagmire.

And remember, Rummy was Bush’s point man until the day after the election.

Pythian Press

Everything's just too damn small

2007-05-16T06:43:00.000-05:00

By DOLPH HONICKER

My wife Jeannine and I own a cell phone (one). We share it. If she’s out, it’s attached to her purse, which means she has to drag her purse up to her ear if anyone calls. People stare when she’s at a restaurant and appears to be talking into her purse while leaning under the table.

If I’m out, she still has the cell phone with her. I haven’t quite got the hang of it. My fingers fumble.

It’s a remarkable device. Fits in the palm of your hand. It can take photos. It has a button that turns it into a video camera. I think it can add, subtract, divide and multiply (not like rabbits but with numbers). It may even have a timer and a button to get the latest stock market reports.

We use it to call people and receive calls from other people. That’s it. The luxury services remain unused.

If we had a flat tire on the highway or saw a traffic accident, our cell phone would come in handy. Unless we were in a dead zone, we could call 911 and tell them where we were -- if we had a global positioning system.

But, even if we saw a spectacular accident, worthy of CNN coverage, I wouldn’t know how to photograph with a digital camera which I usually leave at home.

Many years ago, I had a Rolliflex camera. I never used a flash. I learned to use available light. A light meter gave me settings for Tri-X film which I could juice up to an even higher speed.

Our digital camera fits in the palm of your hand. We ordered it over the internet. Yes, I’ve learned how to use the internet. Small as it is, the ad said the camera can turn out images of 10 pixels, which means it can cram a bunch of dots smaller than a period at the end of this sentence so tightly the photo would be almost as sharp as an old-fashioned darkroom photo -- so sharp you could blow up the image into a poster.

By the time I added a battery charger and lots of other stuff to my order, the bill came to $318.

We’ve had it for almost a year now. Every time I take it out and look at it the damned thing intimidates the hell out of me. It came with a manual. The manual also intimidates the hell out of me. It also came with a CD of instructions. But I’ve lost it.

With my Rolliflex all I had to do was look down, focus, set the shutter speed and snap. I could develop and print my own pictures. I was no Ed Weston or Ansel Adams, but some of my shots looked pretty good. Or, as Larry David would say: “Pretty, pretty good.”

Today everything technical seems to be getting smaller and smaller. Next year I may be able to watch Lawrence of Arabia on my thumbnail.

But do I?

Technology is passing me by. I have no idea what an iPod is. It sounds like one of those old black-and-white horror films where giant ants from outer space land in pods, hatch and then begin gobbling all the people in their path until a handsome young scientist develops a death ray that kills the ants.

Apple (not the edible type but the Silicon Valley version) is coming out with an iPhone that’ll sell for $500 to $600. What will you get for your money besides a mobile phone? Here are the other features: music player, camera, wireless e-mail, Web browser and video player.

For that money, it ought to have a device that will burn in CDs, although I have no idea how to burn in CDs. However, there’s a lot of rap music I’d like to burn. I come from an era of 78-rpm records with one song on one side and a second on the flip side.

Forget this high tech stuff. In my book, the greatest invention of the modern era was the flip-top can that replaced the ubiquitous “church key,” once a must at all beer busts.

And forget about making things smaller. Give me something Big like Sharp’s 108-inch flat panel television, the largest ever made. Of course, the only place we’d have to put it would be on our roof.

If we sat out chairs in the backyard and charged admission, it might be worth it.

Pythian Press

Just a bunch of ‘lucky’ stiffs

2007-05-14T15:56:00.000-05:00

By DOLPH HONICKER

A man can be rich, but only a nation can be wealthy. And if any person of any age suffers from poverty, then our whole country bears the shame.

--Walter Mosley in the Oct. 23 issue of The Nation.

There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.

--Warren Buffett

Who says the American economy is not booming? The cup not only is half full, it’s overflowing.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, especially if you are an investment banker. For instance, John Mack, chief executive officer of Morgan Stanley, was to be awarded a Christmas bonus in 2006 worth about $40 million in stock and options for 2006, according to the Washington Post.

That’s a nice hunk of change. But it gets better.

At Goldman Sachs, jaws dropped on Wall Street as the investment bank reported that profits soared 93 percent. As a result, its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, was in line to receive a record compensation exceeding $50 million in his Christmas stocking.

The New York Times quotes Michael Holland, chairman of Holland & Company, a New York-based investing firm, as saying: “Anyone at the bonus line at Goldman Sachs died and went to bonus heaven. It doesn’t get any better than this.”

But CEOs were not alone in being awash in greenbacks. Outside directors at hundreds of American companies received option grants that were likely to have been manipulated, says a new study printed in the Washington Post.

It reported that 9 percent of 29,000 option grants to outside directors from 1996 to 2005 were granted on a day the company stock hit a monthly low. “The likelihood of such a concentration of ‘lucky’ grants is so low as to be statistically impossible,” say the study’s authors.

Post writer Terence O’Hara quotes Lucian Bebchuk, a Harvard University professor who co-authored the report -- “Lucky Directors” -- with Cornell University’s Yaniv Grinstein and Urs Peyer, a professor at the

French business school, as saying:

“It’s like going to Vegas thousands of times and betting on red every time and winning more than half the time. From a numerical standpoint, it can’t be random. There has to be some manipulation in the outcome.”

Of the more than 130 firms that have disclosed probes of their options-granting practices, only a handful of CEOs have been canned.

The latest study is the first focused solely on grants to directors. Oddly enough, another study, this one by the Corporate Library of 120 companies implicated in backdating, found a high incidence of interlocking directors who served on more than one company that backdated.

Ain’t America wonderful?

Retired teachers, police officers and firefighters and other public workers might differ.

As state governments cut benefits, set aside money to cover future costs and shift expenses to the federal Medicare program, USA Today says 43 state legislatures are set to convene in January to address a liability of more than $1 trillion to provide medical care promised to some 25 million current and future retired state and local civil servants.

The newspaper quotes state Rep. Dale Folwell (R-NC) as saying, “The numbers make your jaw drop.”

North Carolina, for instance has reported a $23.8 billion unfunded liability for retiree healthcare, more than three times what the state owes in ordinary debt.

Meanwhile, at Goldman Sachs, the bank earned nearly as much per share in 2006 as it had in the last two record years combined, and paid out $16.5 billion in compensation this year, or roughly $623,418 per employee.

No retirement worries for these guys.

And if by chance one of these bankers had to live from paycheck to paycheck, like millions of Americans who live in dread of receiving pink slips, it would be a long time before the wolves started to howl at the doors of the boys on Wall Street.

What hath Bush wrought?

2007-05-14T15:55:00.000-05:00

By DOLPH HONICKER

A Presidential Prayer Team urges us to “pray for the President as he seeks the wisdom to legally codify the definition of marriage. Pray that it will be according to biblical principles.” The prayer team’s first goal should be that marriage consist of a union between one man and one or more women. (Gen. 29: 17-28).

Laban has two daughters, Leah the elder of “tender eyes,” and Rachel the younger, “beautiful and well favored.” Jacob, naturally, has eyes for Rachel and vows to serve Laban seven years.

But Laban, a sly old dog, throws a big party at the end of seven years, slips Leah into Jacob’s bed and he “went into her,” awakening the next morning to learn that Laban had “beguiled” him.

Teed off, Jacob asks why. Fulfill Leah for a week and Rachel is yours, says Laban. But, you have to serve me seven more years as well. After a week with Leah, Laban gives Jacob Rachel. And Jacob “went in also unto Rachael.”

The rest reads like an R-rated soap opera. Leah bears Jacob four sons. The barren Rachel, angry, offers her maid, Bilhah, to Jacob and he “went into her.” She bears three sons.

Leah, not to be outdone, offers up her maid, Zilpah, and the race is on.

To reinforce this theme: (II Sam. 5:13): “And David took him more concubines and wives out of Jerusalem after he was come from Hebron; and there were yet sons and daughters born to David.”

(II Chron. 11:21): “And Rehoboam loved Maachan the daughter of Absalom above all his wives and his concubines: for he took eighteen wives, and threescore concubines; and begat twenty and eight sons, and threescore daughters.”

If the wife isn’t a virgin she must be stoned to death unless her family brings “tokens of her virginity.” A Saudi ukase? No, (Deut 22:13-21).

Bush’s new law should forbid marriage between a believer and a nonbeliever (Gen. 24:3):

“And I will make thee swear by the Lord ... that thou shalt not take a wife unto my son of the daughters of the Cananites, among whom I dwell.”

Also, (Num. 25:1-9): “And Israel abode in Shittim, and the people began to commit whoredom with the daughters of Moab. ... And Israel joined himself unto Baalpeor; and the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel.

“And the Lord said unto Moses, take all the heads of the people, and hang them up before the Lord against the sun, that the fierce anger of the Lord may be turned away from Israel.”

Knights of the Christian Crusades followed suit, catapulting severed heads of Muslims over the walls of fortresses; today’s Islamic fanatics practice beheadings on a smaller scale via TV.

“And Moses said unto the judges of Israel, Slay everyone of his men that were joined unto Baalpeor.”

Phinehas, thereupon, takes up a javelin and thrusts it through both Israel and the belly of his woman.

Goodness! No conservative compassion at all.

Also, if a married man dies sans kids, his brother must marry the widow. If he refuses or deliberately does not impregnate her, he should be fined one shoe and otherwise punished. (Gen. 38:6-10) and (Deut. 25:5-10).

In Deuteronomy we read: “If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child, her husband’s brother shall go in unto her.”

If not?

“... then let his brother’s wife go up to the gate unto the elders, and say ... he ... will not perform the duty of my husband’s brother. ... Then shall (she) come unto him in the presence of the elders, and loose his shoe from off his foot, and spit in his face, and shall answer and say, So shall it be done unto that man that will not build up his brother’s house.”

This is true Bush country.

Joan Baez, 66, puts fear in Army brass

2007-05-06T19:57:00.000-05:00

By DOLPH HONICKER

Back in the 1970s, when Angel Records released a new vinyl long-playing record by Joan Baez, I’d rush out to buy it. She’s 66 now, but the melodious. bell tone quality of her voice has not diminished.

It’s a pity that wounded warriors at the Walter Reed Medical Center were not allowed to hear her. She could have sparked a revolution. Wounded vets might thrown their prosthesis's at orderlies serving them lukewarm coffee.

My wife Jeannine and I are the lucky ones. We attended her concert at Vanderbilt University when she was a raven-haired young beauty and again in Knoxville when she was entering her 60s, still beautiful.

Today we’ve captured her on CDs. I put one on, close my eyes, and she’s there beside me. You wounded vets don’t know what you missed.

`The George W. Bush/Dick Cheney White House shows no compunction in sending troops into the grinding maw of Iraq despite constant evidence that its Plans A, Plans B and C have not worked. But, like an elephant stomping an ant, the Pentagon fearfully squelches the voice of a slim, gray-haired lady who is famous the world over for her folk songs, her songs of protest against war, her tender ballads, pro-union ditties and yes, even her hymns.

Has there ever been a more delusional president, one who does not recognize reality when it slaps him in the face day after day?

Rocker John Mellencamp did perform for the recovering soldiers at Walter Reed. But he apparently caved in and the soldiers did not hear his typical blistering rhetoric against the war in Iraq. Also missing in action, of course, was Joan Baez who says she was disinvited from the event by Army officials.

She told the Washington Post in a letter that Mellencamp had wanted her to perform two songs with him and that she had agreed only to be told four days before the concert “I was not ‘approved‘ by the Army to take part.”

Brave old Army brass.

Secrecy being the watchword in the Bush White House, Walter Reed officials declined comment. But later, in an e-mail on Rollingstone.com, spokesman Steve Sanderson said the medical center received the requests for the Baez participation two days before the concert and that would have required a contract change.

Well, duh, change it.

Who would soldiers rather hear? A rock and roller forbidden to deliver his usual hard-hitting act, or Joan Baez?

In other words, as Bush might say, we screw up concerts the same way we screw up wars -- with red tape.

Or, most likely, this was just the latest lie and deception.

Baez’s manager, Mark Spector, said Mellencamp’s had invited Baez in March and that up to April 23, when she was turned down, everything was “still inching forward.”

Had she been allowed to perform, I would have hoped the wounded warriors could have heard Baez sing Finlanda, a song about Finland:

This is my song, Oh God of all the nations,/

A song of peace for lands afar and mine./

This is my home, the country where my heart is;/

Here are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine./

But other hearts in other lands are beating,/

With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine./

My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,/

And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine./

But other lands have sunlight too and clover,/

And skies everywhere as blue as mine./

Oh hear my song oh God of all the nations,/

A song of peace for their land and for mine.

No, that would never do. Luckily, the Army nipped one revolution in the bud. If peace broke out, what then?

It’s time we all knuckled down

2007-05-02T14:38:00.000-05:00

MEMO TO:

President George W. Bush,

Vice President Dick Cheney

FROM:

Dolph Honicker

Gentlemen:

It has taken all these years for me to come over to your side. Yes, we are engaged today in a total global war on terror. It’s time that we ordinary Americans did something about it and made real sacrifices rather than carrying on business as usual, shopping at Wal-Mart, attending ball games, going on vacations.

During World War II, we kids collected aluminum pots and pans in the neighborhood to build warplanes. I always hoped that mine went into a P-38 Lightning or P-51 Mustang.

Our parents bought $25 defense bonds for something like $18.75. We kids bought defense stamps for a dime. There was a 20 per cent luxury tax.

Sugar was rationed. We added powdered red color to a stuff that resembled lard and called it Oleo.

Since the war in Iraq has lasted longer than the one we got into on Dec. 7, 1941, maybe it’s past time for us to tighten our belts. Gasoline and many other items were rationed then. My dad was a railroad man and drove a 1931 Model A Ford coupe he’d bought for fifty bucks and worked on until the engine purred. He received an “A” ration stamp for his windshield.

Others, who drove gas guzzlers or worked in nonessential jobs got “B” or “C” stamps.

I thought about this as my wife Jeannine and I drove our 2003 Honda Civic Hybrid to Birmingham the other day and got snarled in traffic spilling from the Talladega 500 Race Track. Those folks sure travel in style. There were literally hundreds, maybe thousands, of mobile homes clogging the highway. Some I swear were luxury motels on wheels as large as tractor trailers and must have averaged no more than 4 miles per gallon.

On the highway, our hybrid delivers 48 to 49.9 mpg. But these monsters in front and back reduced us to 45 mpg. Some of them were cute, though. They pulled a small car behind them or had a couple of bikes attached to their rear ends.

Since you, Mr. President, noted our addition to oil, the first thing to do is to declare a moratorium on NASCAR races where it’s not just the racecar drivers who burn up fuel, but those monster mobile homes. After we “win” in Iraq, it’s back to racing. I’m convinced this could save us from building a nuclear plant.

Gasoline ration stamps for cars and SUVs, rewarding the high mph vehicles and punishing the low mpg vehicles, could get us on the fast track to energy independence. People might try car pools or even mass transit. No more moms driving SUVs to the store for a loaf of bread and using up more gas than the bread itself cost.

Except for that little blip in 2003 on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln when you announced, under a banner reading MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, that major fighting had ended in Iraq, you’ve been right on the money, telling us suckers that things will get worse in Iraq before they get better. And we buy it.

Just the other day, after the number of American deaths came in for the month at 104, the sixth highest figure for a single month since the war began -- eight fewer than the December toll of 112, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, warned that “there is a very real possibility” of intense combat in the coming months and “therefore, there could be more casualties.”

How can you guys be so accurate in casualty forecasts and so far off-base on the war costs now approaching half a trillion dollars? Since there’re about 16 more wounded troops for every one killed, please bite the bullet and use the extra $4 billion in the supplemental bill Congress passed and you vetoed and get VA hospitals up to snuff.

You put them there, give them the best treatment, especially those who’ve lost limbs, eyes, other organs or have been brain damaged.

I believe you err when you warn that if we leave Iraq, the Viet Cong, I mean al Qaeda, will follow us home.

I know you oppose abortion, but I urge you to abort any further ideas of tripping to the moon or Mars. Just concentrate on getting our astronauts home safely and use the remainder of the budget and brain power to monitor the orbiting information satellites and to tap into means to provide renewable energy.

We once had dollar-a-year men who went to Washington to serve. I don’t expect the heads of such companies as Halliburton and Lockheed to make such sacrifices, but it was a thought.

With our troops spread thin, serving in Iraq another 20 or 40 years to build democracy in a theocracy where tribes have fought one another for 1,400 years, please consider a draft. Mr. Bush, if your twin daughters are drafted, well, that’s the luck of the draw.

Remember, even Lucky Strike Green went to war during WWII.

Sincerely,

An American

Bill Garner’s famous last words

2007-05-01T20:19:00.000-05:00

By DOLPH HONICKER

When I heard President George W. Bush tout nuclear power plants as his No. 1 solution to global warming and our energy problems, I thought about the late Bill Garner and the piece I wrote about him and his late wife, Mary Tex, that appeared Jan. 31, 1979 on the editorial page of The Nashville Tennessean.

Bush won’t read this; I hope you will:

“A man’s last words ‘have an aura about them if not a halo,’ according to Edward S. Le Comte, editor of the Dictionary of Last Words.

“Not Bill Garner’s. His had just a whiff of fire and brimstone. They were vented at TVA, a federal utility that appropriated part of his family land to build the Bellefonte Nuclear Plant. One of the giant, almost completed cooling towers now casts a shadow across the Garner property.

“Bill’s 11-year-old son William shoots baskets in the yard behind their modest ranch-style home. From that distance the cooling tower resembles a beer can someone had squeezed in the middle and tossed out of a car. William’s mother, Mary Tex, can look out the kitchen window and see the squeezed beer can sitting there.

“Bill Garner, a Scottsboro, Ala., lawyer and former assistant attorney general for the state, declared war against the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1970.

“‘Bill and I had just built our house. I was in the yard planting grass,’ said Mary Tex, a lawyer in her own right and a former Alabama state auditor, treasurer and secretary of state.

“‘The TVA agent came by and nonchalantly said he would like for me to sign this form, that he wanted to look over our property for educational, economical and scientific reasons,’ she said. ‘I really don’t know why I didn’t sign except that I’d been working in the grass and my hands were dirty.’

“Bill was out of town and the TVA agent pestered Mary Tex day after day, she said. ‘One Saturday night -- I remember it very well because I happened to have on a bathrobe and the children were running around -- the agent knocked on the door and I invited him in,’ Mary Tex said.

“‘He looked at my fireplace and said it must be wonderful to have all these logs to burn and what a shame we’d built our house there. I looked at him like he was crazy or I was crazy and he said, “Well, I’ll tell you this, Mrs. Garner, if you don’t sign this form the federal marshal will be here in two or three days to serve you.” ‘Sure enough, this tremendously large man showed up ... and served me with the papers.’

“Said Bill later, ‘In the beginning the fight was just to hold onto the land. That was before I knew anything about nuclear energy. As we got further into it, I realized nuclear energy was evil no matter whose land they took.’

“A shining amalgam of liberalism and conservatism, Bill was called everything from environmentalist to radical to fanatic and cared not a tinker’s damn. ‘We anarchists,’ he joked, ‘don’t always throw bombs.’

“He saw true liberals and true conservatives as ‘brothers under the skin’ who could unite to halt the spread of nuclear energy, which he called the ‘greatest moral issue of our time.’

“In his 54th year, Bill knew he was dying. But he fought on, he said, not for himself but for his children.

“‘Bill not only was close to Clarence Darrow in his philosophical bent, he bore an uncanny physical resemblance as well,’ said Leroy Ellis III, a Nashville lawyer whom Garner aided in an intervention against the Hartsville nuclear plant, the world’s largest. ‘This past year, Bill seemed to be living beyond and outside himself.’

“This was noted by other friends who urged the stubborn, chain-smoking Garner to quit the great god Nicotine and take it easy for awhile. But no, last fall at a gathering of the Catfish Alliance at Vanderbilt University, he stood puffing on a cigarette, eyes hollow, cheekbones stretching skin, and gasped out words of Jeffersonian wisdom, for it was Thomas Jefferson he most admired.

“Bill put himself into the University of Alabama Hospital in Birmingham Jan. 4, gave the nurses fits for hiding his cigarettes, and fought three heart attacks before dying at 4 a.m. on Jan. 17.

“Lord Byron uttered his last words in Greek. Schiller in Latin, and the Arkansas poet Albert Pike in Hebrew. According to family friend Tom Paul of Huntsville, Bill spoke his in Anglo-Saxon vernacular.

“Last words fascinate. Marie Antoinette’s were: ‘Monsieur, I beg your pardon.’ (She had stepped on the executioner’s foot).

“Bill had a love-hate relation with TVA. The early work, the potential, the promise, he loved. He also had a professional prize fighter’s respect for one of his adversaries, TVA lawyer David Powell. But TVA was subsidizing a dying industry, he said. Mushrooming electric rates, a rural North Alabama still downtrodden after four decades of TVA progress, and that atomic beer can in his front yard led to Bill’s last recorded words:

“‘I only wish I could take a dozen of those TVA bastards with me.’”

Bush tries Abbott and Costello routine

2007-04-24T22:06:00.000-05:00

By DOLPH HONICKER

Why does it seem that everything President George W. Bush touches turns to {expletive deleted?}

In a single day in April, while surfing the internet, I ran across several news items that may seem redundant but, as the late author Kurt Vonnegut noted, “And so it goes.” So here it goes:

* A suicide bomber rams an explosives-rigged truck into a U.S. military outpost near Baquhah, killing nine soldiers and wounding 20, in one of the deadliest single ground attacks on U.S. bases since the start of the war in Iraq. Suicide attackers rarely penetrate defenses that surround U.S. troops, says the Washington Post, but “a 10-week-old U.S. counterinsurgency strategy has placed them in outposts and police stations that some soldiers say makes them more vulnerable.”

* World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz meets with senior managers to promise unspecified changes in his leadership and to appeal for their help after ethics complaints over his personnel decisions regarding his companion, Shaha Riza. Not to worry, his newly hired lawyer, Robert S. Bennet, says his client’s “mood is just fine. ... He feels people are trying to interfere with his job to get at world poverty ...” His first act, apparently, was a sweetheart deal for his “companion.” Bush has voiced his full backing of Wolfowitz.

* Mark Dennis Zachares, a former staffer on the House Transportation Committee, agrees to plead guilty to conspiracy to defraud the public by steering potential clients and inside government information to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff in return for cash, gifts and the promise of a high-paying job on K Street. He’s the 11th to plead guilty in the Abramoff probe. Finally, the last item would be almost laughable if it were not so ludicrous.

* Bush says his confidence in Alberto R. Gonzales has grown as a result of the attorney general’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee despite a performance criticized by senators in both parties.

“The attorney general went up there and gave a very candid assessment and answered every question he could possibly answer, in a way that increased my confidence in his ability to do his job. Some senators didn’t like his explanation, but he answered as honestly as he could.”

I can just see Bush glued to the television watching Gonzales, the Justice Department’s equivalent of FEMA’s Michael Brown (“Ya doin’ a great job, Brownie”), testify.

But wait!

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino later told reporters that Bush actually didn’t watch the testimony but received updates from aides.

Picture this scenario as an aide rushes into the Oval Office to deliver an update.

BUSH: Make it quick. I’m on the line to Baghdad hearing about the great progress we’re making in Iraq. What’s the latest on Alberto?

AIDE: I forgot.

B: Quit stallin’. Let’s have it.

A: I don’t remember.

B: Are ya gonna tell me or not?

A: I don’t recall.

B: Ya been monitorin’ that bleeping TV all mornin’. What is it ya don’t recall?

A: I don’t remember.

B: Ya don’t remember what?

A: I can’t recall.

Abbott and Costello had a similar routine. But theirs was more believable.

Copyright 2007, Dolph Honicker

Halberstam: the Best and the Brightest

2007-04-24T08:59:00.000-05:00

By DOLPH HONICKER

David Halberstam, three years younger than I, already was an established reporter on The Nashville Tennessean when I arrived in late 1959 as a copy editor.

Hearing on CNN that my old friend was killed Monday, April 22, in a car crash south of San Francisco came as a palpable shock. Dave, like his book about the leaders who dragged us into the Vietnam War, was indeed The Best and the Brightest in the true sense.

I knew him during an era when reporters wrote their stories on paper cut from rolls of newsprint on Royal Upright typewriters that clacked away with the sound of a freight car running over cracks in the rails. Copy editors' tools were pencils and paste pots. It seemed that everyone above the age of puberty smoked in the newsroom. I once had three cigarettes going at the same time and quit cold turkey that very night.

I’ll always remember the first story of Dave that I had to edit. This guy, I told myself, is the absolute worst typist I’ve ever seen -- words xxxxed out, words on top of words. Then I read what he’d written and told myself, this guy is one hell of a writer.

Of course, he went on to prove it by writing 21 books and winning a Pulitzer Prize. He later went to The New York Times where he covered the Congo and then later the Vietnam War where his dispatches outraged generals and the powers that be back in Washington but won him the respect of the grunts on the ground.

Instead of attending the 5 o’clock follies, Halberstam hitched rides on helicopters and rode into the war.

Speaking to a journalism conference in Tennessee last year, according to ESPN, he said government criticism of news reporters in Iraq reminded him of the way he was treated while covering the war in Vietnam.

“The crueler the war gets, the crueler the attacks get on anybody who doesn’t salute or play the game,” he said. “And then one day, the people who are doing the attacking look around, and they’ve used up their credibility.”

Neill Sheehan, who was Saigon bureau chief for United Press International, said: “We were in Vietnam at a time when we were being denounced by those on high. There was tremendous pressure. David never buckled under it at all. He was capable of standing up to it. You could not intimidate David.”

Sheehan recalled how Halberstam once called a general at home for permission to fly to a site of a U.S. defeat. At a briefing the next day, a brigadier general scolded “pitiful, lowly young reporters” for having the temerity to call a general at home.

“General, you do not understand,” Halberstam responded, according to Sheehan, “we are not corporals. We do not work for you. ... We will call a commanding general any time at home to get our job done.”

Despite living a charmed life, tragedy struck in 1980 when an escaped convict killed his brother, Michael Halberstam, a cardiologist, during a robbery.

“There’s nothing you can do,” Dave said in an interview. “You have to get on, and you have to get on with life, and get on with living.”

The one story that set Dave above others while on The Tennessean was one he dug out of a funeral. This couple lived in abject poverty not knowing where their next meal would come from when the husband died. While mourning for him and wondering if she’d have to bury him in potters’ field, she turned over the mattress and found $10,000.

Did she use this money to set her life on a new course? No, she paid the undertaker $10,000 to give hubby a grand exit.

Dave, I’m just one of the tens of thousands of journalists and retired newspapermen and women who’ll miss you.

ESPN had a wonderful quote that you gleaned from the basketball star Julius Irving. It sums up your philosophy:

“Being a professional is doing the things you love to do on the days you don’t feel like doing them.”

{Honicker is a semi-retired newspaperman. Information from The Associated Press was used in this report}.

It’s correct to shun the bloody hand.

2007-04-03T10:58:00.000-05:00

By DOLPH HONICKER

If you found yourself having to confront a man responsible for the unnecessary deaths of over 3,220 of your countrymen plus 50,000 to 650,000 lives in a nation that was no threat to us, would you go out of your way to be polite?

Assume further that your own son was in harm’s way because of this person and he walked and asked, “How’s your boy?”

Responding to President George W. Bush, the Democratic senator-elect from Virginia, James Webb replied, “I’d like to get them out of Iraq.”

When Bush asked again, Webb replied, “That’s between me and my boy.”

Webb later told the Washington Post about his refusal to pass through a White House reception for newly elected members of Congress, laying grammar aside, “I’m not particularly interested in having a picture of me and George W. Bush on my wall. No offense to the institution of the presidency, and I’m certainly looking forward to working with him and his administration. {But} leaders do some symbolic things to try to convey who they are and what the message is.”

George Will, a top-chop wordsmith, who can write lovingly of baseball, considers Webb’s response to Bush that of a “boor.”

I disagree.

Webb’s son, a Marine, is in Iraq. Webb himself is a decorated Marine veteran of Vietnam, a war from Bush and Vice President Cheney found an exit strategy.

Had I been in Webb‘s combat boots, I’d have had the temerity to answer: “My boy faces death daily, Mr. President. He’s a Marine who volunteered to go to Iraq to fight in your stupid war. May I ask why your two daughters are not over there as well?”

But that’s me. George Will sees it differently.

I remember that when Cindy Sheehan, a mother who lost her son in Iraq, tried to see Bush, he snubbed her. Did Will consider Bush’s behavior boorish? Cowardly? Craven?

Will says of Webb: “In a republic, people decline to be led by leaders who are insufferably full of themselves.”

Could this not be said of Bush who is so sure of his king-like divinity that he refuses to admit mistakes and blindly follows his own counsel?

Rather that grasping the essence of Webb’s message, Will parses words. Imagine parsing some of Bush’s verbal goofs.

Webb wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal that began, as Will notes:

“The most important -- and unfortunately the least debated -- issue in politics today is our society’s steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century. America’s top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. It is not unfair to say that they are literally living in a different country.”

While Will focuses on thee words -- infinitely, tier and literally -- I had no problem getting the gist: that the poor are getting poorer, the rich are getting richer, locked away in their gated communities and the country is headed toward third world status unless our deficits and debt are reined in.

A recent issue of The New Yorker offers Webb more reasons for shunning a man who hasn’t learned the meaning of bipartisanship.

On Nov. 15 Bush renominated four of his hardest-right candidates for the federal appeals:

1. A Defense Department lawyer who has been denounced by a score of retired generals and admirals for his role as an architect of the administration’s infamous interrogation regime.

2. A former Interior Department attorney and mining and ranching lobbyist who sees the Clean Water Act as “regulatory excess.”

3. A district court judge whose decisions have been reversed or vacated more than 150 times, including two reversals from the Supreme Court -- one of them in a unanimous opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, no less, in a voting rights case.

4. A former aide to Sen. Trent Lott who is the first such nominee in a quarter of a century to be unanimously rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association.

The next day, notes The New Yorker, Bush appointed Eric Keroack as new chief of “population affairs” at the Department of Health and Human Services. A gynecologist, he will oversee Title X, a Nixon-era program that distributes contraceptives to poor and uninsured women.

“Until recently,” says writer Hendrik Hertzberg, “he was the medical director of a Christianist pregnancy-counseling organization that regards the distribution of contraceptives as ‘demeaning to women.’”

There’s more.

“One of his odder theories,” says Hertzberg, “makes him a sort of family-friendly Gen. Jack D. Ripper” (of Dr. Strangelove fame). “In Keroack’s case, the precious bodily fluid ... is the hormone oxytocin, a.k.a. ‘God’s Super Glue.’ Apparently, oxytocin is released during certain enjoyable activities, including hugging, massage, and, of course, sex.

“It is also, according to Keroack, the fluid that keeps married couples bound to each other. ...”

Too much fooling around and you lose it.

Unfortunately, Sen.-elect Webb, Keroack’s appointment, unlike the others, does not require Senate confirmation.

Eternity’s a hell of a long time

2007-04-02T13:55:00.000-05:00

By DOLPH HONICKER

Suppose that an infinite God exists, what can we do for him? Being infinite, he is conditionless; being conditionless, he cannot be benefited or injured. He cannot want. He has. Think of the egotism of a man who believes that an infinite being wants his praise!

-- Robert Ingersoll

He has yet to step forward. But suppose that a highly intelligent man, mid-fifties, in the prime of life, fluent in a dozen different languages, married to an equally intelligent and attractive woman, parents of 2.3 children, their lives never touched by a hint of scandal, ran for president of the United States.

Suppose he already has been a foreign envoy to several troubled countries and helped to leave peace and stability in his wake.

Or, maybe he is a successful university president at a college where academics are the No. 1 priority and where there are no athletic scholarships. Kids just go out and play varsity sports and intramural sports for the fun of it. If a kid is too poor to pay tuition, he is allowed to work his way through via a co-op plan.

He could even be a successful businessman who runs a high tech firm where the employees share in the profits and he, the CEO, is paid only five times what the average worker makes -- not 431 times as much.

This man is considered a pillar of his community, volunteering his time and money for all sorts of efforts to improve his city and state.

He even could be a well-thought-of governor who has put his state on a pay-as-you-go plan, brought unemployment to a minimum and raised education to a high standard.

This hypothetical everyman and his family attend church every week, just so long as it’s a mainstream church and not an off-brand such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses or a snake-handling holiness cult.

With a war chest of tens of millions of dollars raised for him in small sums by millions of people who believe in him, would this everyman have an almost sure lock on winning the White House?

You betcha.

Same scenario with a slight difference.

At a nationally televised press conference, a reporter poses these questions to which Everyman responds:

REPORTER: Mr. Everyman, is it true that you and your family do not belong to a church?

EVERYMAN: Yes, it’s true.

R: But surely you believe in God?

E: No, I stopped believing in such myths and superstitions when I was a small boy. But I’ve encouraged my family to seek their own answers on this.

R: How can you expect to lead a Christian nation if you’re not a Christian yourself?

E: First of all, I don’t consider this a Christian nation. We’re a people with all sorts of beliefs -- and unbeliefs.

R: But without the Bible to guide us and the Ten Commandments ...

E: There are many different religions, each with its own bible and each believing it to be the one true religion, although moderates tend to deny this until you pin them down. I don’t need the Ten Commandments to tell me it’s immoral to murder and rape or to steal and lie. There are laws on the books that forbid such crimes. As a young person you learn morality by observation, trial and error. I’ve made my share of mistakes and probably will make more.

R: Aren’t you afraid of going to hell if you don’t accept Jesus as your personal savior?

E: I believe we make our own heaven and hell here on earth. If you’re a normal person -- not a sociopath or a psychopath -- you feel good, or heavenly, when you do the right thing. You feel like hell when you hurt someone, lie or cheat.

R: Where do you plan to spend eternity?

E: Before I was born, I had no memory; I was a nothingness. The moment I die, I’ll return to that nothingness. The idea of eternity -- after what I hope will be a fruitful life on earth -- seems like a terrible bore. Preachers claim the saved will spend eternity singing praises and hosannas to God. Think about it. He, she or it was so intelligent he created the entire universe over a span of billions of years. And now, while this divine being oversees wars, hurricanes, earthquakes, forest fires, porno flicks, AIDS, starvation and poverty on earth, he wants to hear a bunch of yahoos singing his praises in heaven for a few billion more years?

R: This means you’re an atheist.

E. Yes.

R: Sir, I’m being told in my ear-phone that this news conference is being interrupted by a commercial for Viagra to be followed by a bulletin.

BULLETIN: The Party has just announced that it is withdrawing its support for Everyman for president.

Ghost letters: read 'em and weep

2007-03-30T06:38:00.000-05:00

By DOLPH HONICKER

To you SUV owners sporting “Support Our Troops” ribbons and “God Bless America” posters plastered on the rear of your vehicles, close your cell phone and detour to the nearest newsstand to get the April 2 special issue of Newsweek.

Read “The War in the Words of the Dead.”

There are photographs of them as well -- while they were alive. Warning: It’s not easy going. Read it and weep. I did.

The families granted Newsweek permission to run these e-mails and letters. My focus is on two officers and two enlisted Marines because their stories seem to sum up the surreal nature of the Iraqi War.

Here are two excerpts from Army Col. Theodore Westhusing, the first dated April14, 2005, from Baghdad:

“It is really an eye-opener how the real person comes out over here in battle, the heroics by so many ... At times things appear suspicious with a few {Iraqis} we are dealing with, and we don’t know how they are going to act. Remember, some were Saddam’s elite army special forces and guards, who never liked us and now we work/fight side by side. There is a chance the enemy could be right beside you.”

Finally, there’s this brief note, dated May 10, less than a month later, that Westhusing wrote from Baghdad:

“Life is worthless over here to so many. Killing everywhere and always ongoing. So many people don’t care and appear to have given up. But I won’t, I need to be here to help them ...”

Westhusing, 44, died , an apparent suicide, on June 5. He was less than a month from going home.

Among the most moving letters are those hand-written that begin, “If you are reading this ...”

One of those was that of Lance Cpl. Lance Graham, 26, of San Antonio, 6-foot-5 and 240 pounds. His father says, “He made other people feel safe -- even other Marines.” He died May 7, 2005, near Haditha Dam when a pair of suicide bombers hit his convoy. Here are excerpts from the hand-printed letter (his spellings):

“Well if your reading this, I guess this deployment was a one way trip. I just have one thing to ask. Please don’t be mad at the Marine Corps. It was my choice to join & come here. I honestily belive this what I was meant to do. I don’t care what the media says we are making a difference here. Know that I did not die in vain or for some worthless cause. ... Not all the people here are bad. Don’t fill your hearts with anger & hate. ... Just know that I have God in my life & Im in a better Place & Marines guard the streets in Heaven. Who else would God trust? ...

“Semper Fi

Love Lance”

This excerpt is from Army Maj. Michael Mundell, Sept. 1, 2006, from Fallujah:

“The question has been asked ... what this place is like. Try to imagine this: if you go out in your front yard, take a weapon with you and stare REAL careful at all the neighbors’ houses. One of them may be on the roof, trying to snipe you. Also, don’t stay out too long -- someone down the road may just try to lob a few mortars at you, or drive by and fire some machine guns, or perhaps shoot an RPG rocket. ... If you get in your car to go to the grocery, you can never ever go by yourself -- you gotta have at least two cars and at least three people in each one. And make sure that at least one of your passengers is a medic. ...

“Is that a trash bag? An empty box? Or a command-detonated bomb? ... Never let any other car get close to you -- EVER. ... If they get too close ... wave a flag ... shoot a flare ... honk the horn and blink your lights. If they don’t move, or keep driving at you kill them. Period ... That is what it’s like here.”

Thirteen days later Mundell writes, “Audrey once asked me what the attitude of the troops is over here, about the war, about the President and so on. ... You can’t see what we see every day (like today, dead kids {killed by an IED} and not get a little cynical ... High-minded political phrases sound pretty hollow out here ... things look a lot different down here at the point of ‘W’’s spear. The ones at home rattling the loudest saber aren’t here helping load dead kids into and ambulance. WE are. And that just sucks.”

Lance Cpl. Anthony Butterfield, 19, enlisted straight out of high school. He and three other Marines were killed when a suicide bomber set off a propane truck in Rawah (cq) on July 29, 2006.

Here are excerpts from his unsealed “if you read this ...” letter:

“Hi Mom, Dad, Britney, Jeremy, and Bartley.

“If your getting his letter then I’m sure you’ve already heard. I’m so sorry. But I know that I’m safe now. I’m with God watching over you. I wanna tell you all some special memories I’ll always hold on too. Staying up late with you Mom watching the food channel while you rub my back, or when I was little you’d always get me a glass of chocolate milk with a lid and a straw . With you Dad going out on the sidecar and driving to volleyball tournaments. ... Brit, trying to hold my hand crossing the streets. ... Jeremy, you and me always building cool ass stuff. ... Bartley remember all those late nights when you’d come into my room and we’d just talk. ... Just know that I made it to heaven before you and we’ll see you all again.

“Your loving son, brother,

“Anthony Edward Butterfield”

And this from Maj. Mudell, Nov. 8, 2006, from Fallujah:

“... I hope that no one is making decisions about the war based on what I’m saying. I don’t know what’s going on in Baghdad or Ramadi or Mosul or anywhere else. ... I can only tell you what I see, hear, think or experience. I don’t have the vaguest idea as to who is winning this war, and I don’t care. My job is to bring home my boys and I will do whatever I have to in order to accomplish that. Lance Corporal Danny Catron, all of 19, his wife (18) and their new baby are counting on me not to screw it up here. I could care less what is going on in Baghdad. Or anywhere else.

Mundell, 47, was killed by an IED in Fallujah Jan. 5, 2007. (Corporal Catron is still in Iraq, due to return home soon).

Copyright 2007, Dolph Honicker

Red tape clogs 'terps'way out

2007-03-27T14:04:00.000-05:00