Naval Power is the cornerstone of the defense of the Nation.

UNITED STATES NAVY                                  VETERANS ASSOCIATION              A MEMBERSHIP ORGANIZATION Serving the recognized interests of the U.S. Navy Veteran since 1927 Nationally Recognized by the U.S. Department of Veterans' Affairs Website as a Partner in VA's Approved Veterans Service Organization Program Washington D.C. National Headquarters Telephone (202) 736-1725 On our Homeport Page, you will find: Our Quotations and Factoids Section (in the left margin); A Commentary on, and a History of, the Association; A News and Analysis Field containing the very first articles of our  War on Terror E-Newstand, our Veterans' Issues E-Newstand,    our National Security Affairs E-Newstand; Information about the News and Editorial Comment on the Site, Information on the Demographics of Our Viewers; and Hyperlinks to some of the best related Sites of Interest around (with even more hyperlinks on our Links Page); Just scroll to the area you're interested in.
CELEBRATING OUR 19TH YEAR ON THE WEB, WE SALUTE THE PEOPLE AND IDEAS THAT MAKE AMERICANS WHO WE ARE. THE PHOTOGRAPH AT THE TOP LEFT OF YOUR WEBSITE IS THAT OF THE DESTROYER U.S.S. COLE, ALMOST SUNK BY THE AL QUAIDA IN ADEN HARBOR IN YEMEN IN 2000, PULLING OUT TO SEA, FULLY READY FOR COMBAT, FROM NORFOLK, IN APRIL 2002. YOU CAN CLICK ON THE PHOTO TO GO DIRECTLY TO THE LATEST NEWS AND ANALYSIS FOR THE WAR ON TERROR. ON DECEMBER 7, 1941, A DATE THAT WILL FOREVER LIVE IN INFAMY, NAVAL AND AIR FORCES OF THE JAPANESE EMPIRE SUDDENLY AND DELIBERATELY  ATTACKED THE U.S. PACIFIC FLEET AT PEARL HARBOR. THE SHIPS BOMBED AT PEARL THAT MORNING, FROM THEIR POSITIONS WEST TO EAST, CLOCKWISE AROUND FORD ISLAND, WERE: the MEDUSA, the CURTISS, the TANGIER, the UTAH, the RALEIGH, the DETROIT, the DOBBIN, the WHITNEY, the NEVADA, the ARIZONA, the VESTAL, the TENNESSEE, the WEST VIRGINIA, the MARYLAND, (the Maryland and West Virginia were "Colorado" class battleships) the OKLAHOMA, the NEOSHO, the CALIFORNIA, the NEW ORLEANS, and the SAN FRANCISCO.    1,177 men died on board  the U.S.S. ARIZONA (BB39) alone, including ADM David C. Kidd, Battleship Division 1 Commander, ARIZONA's Commanding Officer, CAPT Franklin Van Valkenburgh, and the entire USS Arizona band, at their stations passing ammunition under Turret Gun 1. 400 Sailors were trapped inside the ARIZONA's hull as she sank. Reliable sources indicate that that there was probably enough air to last the last Sailor left alive until approximately Christmas Eve of that year. The ARIZONA, an oil burning ship, burned for two solid days and the sunken ARIZONA is still discharging oil today, "tears" as we say in the Navy. The story goes that the tears will stop when the last survivor of the ARIZONA is laid to rest. MAY GOD HOLD IN THE PALM OF HIS HAND FOREVER THE SOULS OF THOSE AMERICAN SAILORS WHOSE BODIES STILL REST AT THE BOTTOM OF PEARL HARBOR TODAY, BECAUSE OF THAT MURDEROUS AND UNPROVOKED ATTACK, AND THE SOULS OF ALL OUR SERVICE PERSONNEL WHO DIED, OR FOUGHT, IN WORLD WAR II. OF THE SHIPS DAMAGED AT PEARL HARBOR ON DECEMBER 7, 1941, OVER 70% WERE FULLY REPAIRED AND PUT TO SEA AGAIN. THAT WAS SOMETHING THE JAPANESE EMPIRE LEARNED...THE HARD WAY...TO REGRET. 2400 AMERICAN MEN AND WOMEN LOST THEIR LIVES IN HAWAII ON THE MORNING OF DECEMBER 7, 1941, ALMOST 1200 ON BOARD THE U.S.S. ARIZONA HERSELF, A NUMBER NOT MATCHED IN A SURPRISE ATTACK ON AMERICA UNTIL SEPTEMBER 11, 2001. DECEMBER 7, 1941 CONSITUTED THE GREATEST LOSS OF LIFE IN U.S. NAVAL HISTORY IN ONE DAY. DO NOT DOUBT THE WILL OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, IF YOU SHOULD BE SO FOOLISH AS TO PUT THEIR BACKS AGAINST THE WALL, AND MARK THESE WORDS WELL: "And... the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night, that our Flag was still there... O,say, does that Star Spangled Banner yet wave, Over the home of the free, And the land of the brave?" From "The Star Spangled Banner," by Francis Scott Key, 1812 (This Page features The Star Spangled Banner as background music.) Key wrote the words to the Star Spangled Banner after he had been held prisoner on a British ship during a nightime bombardment of Fort McHenry, which protected Baltimore, in the War of 1812. At dawn the next morning, Key still did not know whether the fort had fallen. Then he looked up and saw a huge American flag still flying over its walls. Key began writing verses immediately on an unfinished letter he had in his pocket. "America, America, God shine His Grace on Thee, And crown Thy Good with Brotherhood, from sea to shining sea." -Lyrics from "America the Beautiful," written by Katherine Lee Bates If, as a simple act, once a week at Saturday night at the supper table, you ask your young children or grandchildren to sing (or, if you can't sing, recite as poetry) these simple words, like a stone thrown into a lake with its ripples, it will make a difference, in your life, in theirs, and in America's life as well.   "Mine Eyes have Seen the Glory" WAC World War II Poster Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on. I have seen Him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps; They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps, I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps; His day is marching on. He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat. Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet! Our God is marching on. In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me; As he died to make men holy, let us die to make them free, While God is marching on. Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on! Lyrics to "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," by Julia Ward Howe, 1861 Julia Ward Howe went on to become a leader in the Women's Suffrage Movement. She died in 1910.   I wish I was in the land of cotton, Old times there are not forgotten, Look Away! Look Away! Dixieland. In Dixie Land where I was born, Early on one frosty mornin,' Look Away! Look Away! Dixie Land. Then I wish I was in Dixie, Hooray! Hooray! In Dixie Land, I'll take my stand, To live and die in Dixie. Away, away, away down south in Dixie, Away, away, away down south in Dixie! "Dixie," words and music by Daniel Decatur Emmet. Emmet , an Ohioan, wrote this song in New York City in 1859, about northern blacks who wanted to go back home to the South. It subsequently became the War Anthem of the Confederacy. Upon the surrender of the South in 1865, President Lincoln ordered the White House Band to play 'Dixie.' "It is one of the best tunes I have ever heard," he said. Oh, the moonlight's fair tonight along the Wabash, From the fields there comes the breath of new-mown hay. Thro' the sycamores the candle lights are gleaming. On the banks of the Wabash far away. From "On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away," by Paul Dresser, 1897. This song became a favorite of American soldiers during the Spanish-American War and, subsequently, the state song of Indiana. The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home, Young folks roll on the little cabin floor, All merry, all happy, and bright; By'n'by hard times comes a-knocking at the door, Then my old Kentucky home, goodnight! From "My Old Kentucky Home," by Stephen C. Foster, 1853. "My Old Kentucky Home" is the state song of Kentucky.   There's a yellow rose of Texas I'm going for to see, No other soldier knows her, nobody only me. She cried so when I left her, it like to broke my heart, and if I ever find her, we never more will part. Where the Rio Grande is flowing and starry skies are bright, She walks along the river in the quiet summer night. She thinks if I remember we parted long ago; I promised to come back again and never let her go. "The Yellow Rose of Texas" is not a flower, but a person, Emily D. West, who was indentured to Colonel James Morgan, who fought in Texas' war for independence against Mexico.     Many are the hearts that are weary tonight, wishing for the war to cease; many are the hearts that are looking for the right, To see the dawn of peace. Tenting tonight, tenting tonight, tenting on the old camp ground__ Tenting tonight, tenting tonight, tenting on the old camp ground. "Tenting on the Old Camp Ground" was composed during the Civil War, and this poignant song remained popular long afterward, especially in wartime. It was a particular favorite of Buffalo Bill Cody.         ***************************** "America will not waver, we will not tire, America will not falter, and we will not fail" - President George W. Bush, October 7,2001 "The men and women of our Armed Forces have delivered a message now clear to every enemy of the United States: Even 7,000 miles away, across oceans and continents, on mountaintops and in caves, you will not escape the justice of this Nation." - President George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, January 29, 2002 It is morally compelling, in the opinion of the Association, for the United States to attack terrorism and the supporters of terror everywhere. No exceptions. No limitations. A loud voice cannot compete with a clear voice, even if it's a whisper. ****************************** "From our mountains to our prairies, to our oceans white with foam, May God Bless America, Our home, sweet home." ****************************** One frequently asked question we get is : "What is a USN Battle Group?" A USN Battle Group is group of ships, the heart of which is one or more carriers, used to project U.S. power militarily at sea, in the air, or on land. In 1991, the U.S.S. Independence Battle Group was the first USN battle group in the Mid-East region to support the Gulf War, an effort that was totally successful. Aircraft were sent out in strike packages - fighters, fighter-bombers, and bombers - to attack Saddam's forces. About 10 ships, including a  guided missile cruiser and a destroyer, are assigned to protect each carrier in a battle group. Each carrier group has 50 strike aircraft.       Another frequently asked question we get ,is: How many men and women normally serve today on board a USN aircraft carrier? About 8,000, slightly short of an average U.S. Army or U.S.M.C. infantry division.  ***************************** "What we have found in Afghanistan confirms that-far from ending there-our war against terror is only beginning." -President George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, January 29,2002 **************************** "Any man who may be asked in this century what he did to make his life worthwhile...can respond with a good deal of pride and satisfaction,' I served in the United States Navy.'" - President John F. Kennedy ,1917-1963 ***************************** There are 277 words in the Gettysburg Address on what it means to be an American, and 177 words, total, in the Ten Commandments. We don't understand why it takes 10,000 volumes of laws and regulations, and over 5 trillion words, in America, to say the same thing. ***************************** Greatest Modern Naval Battles: Trafalgar, where the one-eyed, one-armed, one-minded British Admiral Horatio Nelson defeated Napoleon's fleet off the coast of Portugal, destroying France's last chance to invade England; Jutland; the Battle of Midway; and the Battle of Leyte Gulf ***************************** " A Sailor's Prayer" " They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old; Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn; At the setting of the sun on America's oceans, and in the morning rush of America's new dawn, we will remember them." -USNVA Poet Laureate John Witherspoon ***************************** And for those who say that Liberty is a phantom, we have these words of advice: Renaissance means rebirth. We say that the 21st Century is the Renaissance of American Freedom. Freedom is like good art; it may be hard to define, but we know it when we see it.... And for those abroad who say any of our liberties are lost, or never existed, we say you are mistaken: Americans will remember our rightful Liberty, and if you take it from us, we will take it back, no matter how long it takes, and that day we do will be a day of our choosing, not yours, and it will be a day that you will rue. As the old Arabic proverb says: "From our lips, to God's ears." "This is my Right, Given by God, To live in Freedom." - From "Freedom," sung by Paul McCartney at the New Orleans Superbowl XXXVI, 2-3-02 "There'll be blue skies over the white cliffs of Dover, just you wait and see... One day, when the world is free." -From "The White Cliffs of Dover," as sung by the Glenn Miller Band, 1944 This country is patriotic to the core, and that, our friends, Democrat and Republican alike, will never change. As Jimmy Carter would say, our enemies can take that to the bank. ***************************** In Lyndon Johnson's time, we preached Guns and Butter. It cost us 20 years of national deficits to pay for that philosophy. We have to figure out how to pay for America's War on Terror without another 20 years of federal deficit spending. The USG deficit for FYE 2002 was approximately $165 billion. The real USG deficit for  FYE  2003 was approximately  $400 billion. President George W. Bush's proposed 2007 Budget was $354 billion. President Obama's proposed 2009 budget was  $3.5 trillion, with a projected annual deficit of $1.75 trillion. The National Debt hit $9 trillion in 2006. 40% of it is held by foreigners. At that point in time, $9 trillion consituted 70% of the United States' Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The Gross National Debt today: The Gross National Debt ***************************** Even when faced with the murderous madness of criminals, and in the presence of the silent agony of their victims, it is incumbent upon us to choose between escape and courage, shame and honor. The terrorists have chosen shame. WE CHOOSE HONOR. ***************************** As you can see from our Breaking News and Analysis Section on this Homepage, the Association does believe the worst part of the sacrifice of Americans in the War on Terror is yet to come, but America is not in decline; we are not going downhill; the 21st Century will be America's greatest century to date, with many more to come. If you underestimate America, or its economy, or its people, or its stock markets, you are making a mistake. ***************************** One simple act by Congress, approved by the President, would end the 2002 U.S. stock market jitters; end talk of whom we need to jail and whom we don't; bring equity back to American capitalism; and send us on the road to a new stock market boom: No executive compensation, per person, including everything, over $1 million per year, shall be deductible as a business expense by a publicly listed corporation, including ADRs and foreign corporate parents with U.S. subsidiaries. That act would also raise billions in new dollars for the U.S. Treasury. ****************** The Association's Award for National Co-Comforters for the Year 2001 goes jointly to First Lady Laura Bush and New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The Association's Award for "Most Honest" Political Figure of the Year 2001: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He tells the American people the straight truth on the War on Terror abroad. If he doesn't know, he says so. If he can't say because of the protection of sources and methods, he says so. Most unfairly underreported Armed Service branch in the War on Terror abroad: The United States Navy Best Quote ever from the TV Show "West Wing:' Posed to a White House Advisor as a question: "The Arab world will oppose us if we fight Islamic fundamentalism, so what are we going to do?" The Advisor responds: "Tell them this.... Freedom and democracy are coming soon to a theatre near you, so get prepared." -From "West Wing," 2-6-02   **************** Simply put, the American Nation, any nation, is built on land. But that same nation needs its seas to defend itself. **************** The Association's "Best Ever" Award for the Year 2001: We, the People of the United States of America. ******************************** On 9-11, the violent Islamic fundamentalits came to America. They thought they would make us afraid, that they would take us down. They failed, and they failed with a massive repercussion. America united in the face of this new threat, a threat that is not over. Al Quaida declared war on America, and we declared war on them, all of them. It is not the Islamic Street that we need to be afraid of, for they are nothing. It is only our lack of continuing united resolve we need to fear. "This is a struggle of good versus tyranny...and we're going to get them.... If we blink, the world's going to go to sleep...so we won't." -President George W. Bush, January 23,2002 ******************************** There are 22 distinct dialects of Arabic. Being fluent in one as an American learning Arabic as a second language may not even give you a clue as to how to understand the other 21. Query: How many Arabic speakers did Special Envoy to Iraq Paul Bremer have on his Staff? As of 7/03, twelve. ******************************** "Islam is the Dawn which burns the Zionist night." - A Saudi poet performing officially in front of the Saudi leadership, 2-15-02 "On earth, petroleum once turned petty thugs into world leaders."     - From the Star Trek movie "Insurrection"   Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia   "The United States will be finished very soon, sooner than they think." - Omar Sayeed Sheikh, one of the murderers of Danny Pearl, yelling to the anti-American crowd outside one of his court appearances ******************************** Heard on "West Wing", 2-6-02: "The Congolese government is a myth." Most governments in the Third World are a myth, or worse. 'Bout time somebody said so. Might as well be West Wing. [Ed. Note: The World bank, on July 15,2002, decreed that 80% of the real Congolese government's $12 billion foreign debt be wiped out. That's quite a "line your pockets" benefit for a dictatorially-run, corrupt, and mythical government, in our view.] Also heard on  "West Wing" 2-19-03, the President of the United States   "President Josiah Bartlet" speaking of the French President who was opposing U.S. unilateral military intervention in a third world country:" Tell that poncy poof if he doesn't get out of our way, I'll come over there and stick a loaf of bread up his ass!" It's bad enough, in the opinion of this Association, that we outsource some of our most valuable jobs . We shouldn't also outsource our national security to the likes of those same foreigners, or to the likes of Jacques Chirac. The Presidents of France have lived in the Elysee Palace in Paris since 1873. It's the same place that Madame de Pompadour entertained her lovers, that was turned into a dance hall during the Revolution of 1789; it was the place where Napoleon signed his abdication after Waterloo, and where Wellington's British troops quartered themselves, with their boots on the table, so it was said. All those humiliations bothered DeGaulle. They bother Chirac. It's said it bothers all of them. They should just move to the Sun King's palace at Versailles where, in our opinion, they'd all feel quite at home with their 'L'etat, c'est moi!' complexes. 20% of the population of France is now foreign-emigrated Muslims, most of them radical, vicious, terroristic anti-Semites and anti-Americans. These people were permitted to become part of the French nation by France's immigration laws. French politicians now have to reap this whirlwind. In the process of that reaping, the USG and Americans should not look for the Elysee Palace to have an epiphany anytime soon and become pro-American.   TV and movie star Lisa Kudrow says of France on the 'Tonight Show,' 9/23/03: "Half the people there are unemployed. Then they go on strike because they're not getting enough money! It's almost impossible to fire anyone. If you ask for service in a restaurant, they say, 'I'm trying to eat, what do you want?' Then they accuse you of being the ugly American." She should know. Kudrow is married to a Frenchman, for the time being at least. Why any American policymaker would propose seeking approval  for our foreign policy of these French, these self-proclaimed heads of the international house of pancakes known as the U.N., this Association has no idea, and will continue to have no idea. As with Korea in 1950, as with Iraq under Saddam, as with Afghanistan under the Taliban, as with the anti-American Muslim government of the Sudan in 2004, in its genocide against black Christian Sudanese in the south of the country, the U.N. has shown itself next to worthless without U.S. financing, and U.S. military force.   We will, however, to be evenhanded, say something nice about France, because the French are not our natural enemies. Quite the reverse, we are natural allies, and have been since the time of the Revolution and since then, two democracies united for the cause of Liberty in the world.  In July, 2004, the government and people of France sponsored and paid for the greatest and most dramatic bicycle race in the world since 1903, the Tour de France. That July, as an American, a recovered cancer patient from Texas, Lance Armstrong, was poised to win that race triumphantly for an unprecedented 6th time, Americans could be seen running beside him in the Pyrenees, waving huge American flags, unmolested by the crowds of Frenchmen. If this had been a dictatorship somewhere in the Islamic world, there would have been no such race, or the American team would have been kidnapped or shot, and the patriots running with the flags, well, they would have been murdered on the spot. That is the difference between us and them. That is the fundamental difference between a free society, and one based on intimidation and fear. Let Freedom Ring, and let those opposed to it tremble as mUch as they would like us to tremble. Let that be our foreign policy.     TV star John Amos for CNO? Why not? We've seen worse. [John, who's a great and unassuming guy, and goes back a long way on TV, plays the CNO on "West Wing" (as of 5-02), the only CJCS featured at the fictional White House security council. In one episode he says of Islamic terrorists: " We're talking about animals who blow up pregnant women and children, and you're talking to me about international law...hell, the laws of nature don't even apply to these people." Can't say the producers don't like the Navy.]  [UPDATE 10-23-03: Unfortunately the producers of the West Wing read the above note and, listening to complaints from the Army, on the 10-8-03 show, introduced an Army Chief of Staff at the White House NSC for the first time. John Amos, we understand, has gone on to host his own, and separate, TV show.] President Bartlet of the West Wing (Broadcast 4-9-03), by the way, is wrong in one of his speeches: America's Destiny is of our choosing. No nation, no people, no group of nations on earth, dictate our destiny to us. Providence might, but none of the above will.   ***************************** "O-sa-ve" - "Freedom," in Afghan and yes, it is a word in Afghani ******************************** Ten Americans once set sail upon a great sea. Their common purpose was to reach a shining city on a hill they could see, far away, on the other side of the sea. But, as they were sailing a great storm, a great tempest, came up, and their ship began to circle itself and drift. The Americans became angry with themselves, and started to blame it on each other. They did silly things, like tweak each other's noses, and post bumperstickers on their foreheads denouncing each other. Then two of them, one black, one white, two big women, let's call them Marian and Kate, stood up in the boat and , in a loud and magnificent voice, a capella, began to sing the most beautiful rendition of "God Bless America" you ever have heard. The other eight suddenly stopped their feuding, stood up, placed their hands on their hearts, and listened to the words. When the song was over, all of them...all of them, began rowing as one toward the shore of their dreams.... They haven't got there yet, but they are still trying, and we'll keep you informed on their progress. To us here at the United States Navy Veterans Association, it does not matter whether your mother came here on the Mayflower, or on a slave ship from Africa. We're all in the same boat now.  Update, and it's pretty clear: As of January 2009, this country pretty much returned to its pre-9/11 state of mind, the bumperstickers, attacking and vilifying each others, treating foreigners who hate the U.S. as if they have the same rights as us, giving our largesse to foreign blackmailers who say if we don't they will overcome us, ignoring their crimes in their countries, while throwing our own people, as the new enemy #1, in jail, for far, far less. We believe that we may all need enemies; the problem with many americans is that they think the enemy is us. "It's been a long road, Getting from there to here, It's been a long time, but my time is finally here. And I will see my dream come alive at last. They're not gonna change my mind, Cause I've got faith of the heart. I'm going where my heart will take me. I've got strength of the soul, No one's gonna bend or break me. I can reach any star. I've got faith. I've got faith into the heart. " - The theme from Star Trek "Enterprise," by Diane Warren   This Association also believes that no one is going to bend or break the United States, and that we, too, have faith into the heart as to our purposes.   Space, to a naval veteran, is simply another form of sea upon which America must sail. Subcommander T'Pol said on Star Trek "Enterprise" on 4-24-02, echoing the viewpoint of many modern day anti-Americans and One Worlders, "If you want to explore alien cultures, you need to respect their laws."  That's b.s. Most of the laws of most of the countries on this planet, as they're currently enforced, discriminate totally against the rights of the individual as contained in the American Bill of Rights, and also against American values. While American travelers to these countries may be forced by those wearing the guns to obey these laws, there's no need for any American to "respect" them. The TV show Star Trek Enterprise was cancelled on May 15, 2005 and it may be a long time, unfortunately, before Americans see the likes of it again on television as a new series. Live long and prosper, Star Trek. Live long and prosper, Enterprise. ****************** There is a tendency among certain policy thinkers to believe the world is united against the United States. This is not true. But many of those foreigners, it is true, are driven purely by their own unilateral, and jealous, hatreds of the United States, in formulating their own foreign policies. Our foreign policy, and America's future, cannot be placed in the hands of foreign unilateralists just because they outnumber us in some international house of pancakes. Our national security must mean more than just counting votes in the U.N. and then deciding what or what not to do accordingly. Great nations do not let others determine their future.  ******************************** "We've come to know truths that we will never question: Evil is real, and it must be opposed. Beyond all differences of race or creed we are one country, mourning together and facing danger together. Deep in the American character there is honor, and it is stronger than cynicism. And many have discovered again that even in tragedy-especially in tragedy - God is near." -President George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, January 29, 2002 There's an old New England church saying from the time of the Revolution: "The devil's greatest success is convincing people he doesn't exist." The United States is certainly at sail; at sea on a turbulent ocean. But we, not they, are in control. And the world will see that that turbulence will abate, because of our will, our values, our might and our strength, not theirs. ***************************** In order for America to succeed in the world in the cause of Liberty, Americans must first believe that we can. Americans may be disappointed if we fail, but we are doomed if we don't try. "The minute you start talking about what you're going to do if you lose on foreign policy, military policy, or national security issues, you have lost." -Reagan Administration Secretary of State George P. Schultz "Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier." - Colin Powell ***************************** Some people think that this Site is too serious. To them, we say, we try to show both the somber and humorous side of important issues and affairs and , as America's greatest humorist, Mark Twain, once said, "The source of all humor is sorrow." Heard on the Tonight Show, featuring Jay Leno in his "Jaywalking" interviews with Americans in Burbank and Los Angeles, 1992-2006: Q: "In what country will you find the Panama Canal?" A: "I don't know." [Showing a picture of LBJ] Q: "What President is this a picture of?" A: "Jefferson." Q: "Where was the Vietnam War fought?" Simultaneous Answer from three UCLA coeds: "Korea." Jay: "The equestrian events at the Olympics involve what kind of animal?" One L.A. man: "Lions." One L.A. woman: "Dolphins."   Jay: (Asked two weeks before the games began) "Where will the 2004 Olympics be held?" One L.A. woman: "I know it begins with an 'A"...uh...(beams) Athens." Jay: "Athens, where?" The woman: "Athens, Georgia."    Jay: "Who invented the airplane?" One woman: "Uhh...Boeing." Another Melrose, California woman: "Uhh...the Cartwright brothers." Jay: "Who invented the lightbulb?" One lady: "Uhh...Albert Einstein." Jay: "When was television invented?" One woman: "Uhh...18...uh...59." Jay: "Who invented the telephone?" One Melrose, California woman: "Uh...AT&T." Jay (Showing a picture of Washington in uniform crossing the Delaware with his men) "What is this a picture of?" A second grade Oregon schoolteacher: "The Jews...uh...leaving in boats?"   And heard on WB-TV's Blue Collar TV on 9/16/2004: "The definition of 'European': Two rednecks talking in the woods, one to the other: 'Move a little away, yur a pee-in on my boots." ***************************** ****************************** Because of the quality of the Association's intelligence sources, our Breaking News and Analysis Sections on the War on Terror, Veterans' Issues and National Security Issues, including our three Newstands, are monitored daily for stories by the national news media and by government officials. If you doubt us, or you want to hear about what's really going on, or is about to happen, first, in any one of these areas, read our entries every day and then check out how often the same story is repeated, at a later date, by the established media. This Association is proud of its three Newstands and our label for them of "Breaking" News and Analysis. *************************** Our United States Navy Veterans Association Staff recognized the honor former Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney of Canada paid to America in appearing at our National Memorial Day Ceremony in Washington for 2003. At that Ceremony we had the honor of waving the British flag in tribute to our British allies in Iraq. It's too bad we could not also have waved the other two flags of our own continent, Canada's and Mexico's, but so be it. The choice was theirs.... Que sera, sera.   ********************** The United States Navy Veterans Association does not copyright this Site, or the words printed on it, a practice, when it comes to non-profit associations, we frown on. Education of the public in America ought to be truly free, because it makes all of us better, and bigger, as citizens, and that is good for all of us. So use the information provided on this Site as you will, without restriction. **************************				UNITED STATES NAVY VETERANS ASSOCIATION A History and Commentary   The United States Navy Veterans Association traces its roots back to Mobile where, under Alabama's summer sun in 1927, a small group of decorated Spanish-American War and World War I naval veterans came together on Independence Day and associated themselves into an affiliated group of five veteran organizations, the Pensacola Navy Airmen, the Northern Florida Association of Navy Veterans of the Spanish-American War, the Northern Florida Naval Veterans of the Great War, the Alabama Naval History Association, and the Jacksonville League for Naval Preparedness.   This Association, which shortly began to informally call itself the Naval Air Veterans Group, because of the dominance of its primary member organization, the Pensacola Navy Airmen, first became active by controversially promoting the drive for naval air power and the construction of aircraft carriers as necessities for a country facing potential enemies on two oceans. Although the British Royal Navy   actually commissioned an aircraft carrier in World War I, the H.M.S. Argus, in the 1920's prototypical aircraft carriers and some seaplanes alike in the U.S. were still called "flying boats," and although a seaplane naval air station was established at Pensacola, Florida in 1916,    the Association still met stiff opposition to these proposals for true naval air power based on aircraft carriers from the Department of War, the Department of the Navy and from the isolationist feelings predominant in the country during the 1920's and early 1930's.   Between 1939 and 1942 the five original groups officially came together as one unified veterans' organization called the Naval Air Veterans Association.  Even though most of its members were Navy airmen, the membership retained their interest in U.S. Navy history and U.S. naval preparedness. And although  they were only a small organization during World War II and during the period of military downsizing in the immediate aftermath of the war, the membership of the Association became active again, while other veterans' and military organizations stood against us, or took no position, in support of America's purpose in being in South Vietnam    in the 1960's and 1970's, a position of which today's  Association is still proud. It is, in real time, absolutely outrageous to the membership of the Association that any President of the United States would voluntarily elect to publicly meet and greet any member of the Communist Politboro rubbish which currently dictates policy in Vietnam, or that the USG would share intelligence with them, or train their military or naval forces. This outrage is only reinforced by the hypocrisy on our side, at the same time, of lecturing our allies in the War on Terror on the need for more democracy in their own countries, and the hypocrisy on the Vietnamese side of providing  semi-slave labor there in order to sell cheap consumer goods to the U.S., the very practice Karl Marx condemned in Das Kapital, "surplus labor," i.e., slave labor at slave wages, saying that that practice was the one of the primary reasons for his promotion of  the communist state.    Following through on its initial commitment to strong naval power, the Association was also extremely effective in its support of President Ronald Reagan's national defense program which successfully culminated in the bankruptcy of the Soviet Union and, more importantly, its military infrastructure. The elimination of the Soviet threat to America, along with the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II, rank as the greatest U.S. defense achievements of the 20th Century. But the destruction of Soviet-style communism, by policies so professionally and successfully crafted by both the Nixon and Reagan Administrations, still has some unfinished business in the world: in Castro's Cuba (and its spreading semi-allies, as of 2007, in Latin America), in Kim Jong Il's North Korea, in the Politboro's Vietnam, and, in a totally different socio-political-economic dimension of their own, with regard to the Communist regime in Beijing. The members of this Association also supported the unsuccessful insertion of U.S. Marines into Lebanon in 1983 as peacekeepers designed to minimize the anti-U.S. Syrian presence there, and the successful attempt, with U.S. troops and Marines in Operation Urgent Fury later that year, to overthrow the thug prime minister Maurice Bishop of Grenada, who sought, as Hugo Chavez of Venezuela does in 2007, to take his nation on a violently anti-American and pro-Fidel Castro course in the western hemisphere. When the going got tough in the struggle for Reagan Administration foreign and national security policy proposals and activities this Association had supported, unlike some other veterans' organizations, we did not blink, and we did not waver, in that support.   During the Bill Clinton Administration, the overwhelming majority of the individual membership of the Association opposed as policy, and also,  as a function of the Association's  public education on issues of interest to veterans, but not in the function of attempting to influence election politics, many of the foreign, national security and military policies of the Executive Branch. By and large, the Association did so becaues it saw those policies, in general, as promoting a vision for the United States where our Nation would have a weakened sovereignty, and a weakened ability to exercise its own right of  self defense . We opposed, and oppose now, that vision because of  the nearly unanimous belief  of our members that no great nation can retain its greatness if it lets others make its national security decisions for it. President Clinton, in an interview with Jim Lehrer of PBS-TV's Newshour with Jim Lehrer on July 7, 2004, said in fact that our outline of his positions in the preceding paragraph constituted exactly what his vision for American national security was, and is: "I think that in general I saw my job as the first President whose full term would be served after the Cold War in a global information society where we were interdependent....I saw my job as to try to move the world from an unstable condition of independence toward a more integrated cooperative world community. Therefore my approach was to cooperate wherever possible and to build institutions of cooperation...and to cooperate wherever possible but to act alone if we had to. [The Association notes, for the record, that its research shows that the Clinton Administration acted unilaterally in America's self defence only twice during eight years: once, when we bombed some caves in Afghanistan after the CIA had told the White House it was unlikely that Usama would still be there, and, second, when we bombed what later turned out to be a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum.] I think what the [George W.] Bush Administration saw was a world they thought was full of dangers and problems, the worst of which in their mind was Saddam Hussein, and that they should act alone whenever they could, and then cooperate when they needed to, and there's a big difference. They got out of the Conference of Nuclear Test Ban Treaty [sic].... They were opposed to the International Criminal Courts, to strenthening the Biological Weapons Convention. They bagged the ABM treay to build a missile defense even though we don't know whether it works or not. [Cf.  U.S. Senator John Edwards (Dem. -NC), campaigning for Vice-President in Des Moines, 7/14/2004: It is "needless" [means 'without need'] for America to "go to war alone."] ...[S]ince we're moving into a completely interdependent global environment, we're better off building a world...when we're not the only military superpower." President Clinton also went on to suggest that his vision for American foreign policy was becoming a vision for all future Democratic candidates for President, and we think that there is a good chance that his analysis on that subject is accurate.   Former President Clinton's interview answers constituted quite a mouthful. Bill Clinton was certainly the greatest 'policy wonk' America has ever had as President, and his discourse, as is usual for him, refects a great amount of thoughtfully, detailed and artfully worded statements. We think there is one thing he got wrong, though, in addition to being wrong on both the logic behind the national security policies he promoted, as well as on the policies themselves, and that is his categorization of the national security policies of the Bush Administration. Our analysis is that, in general, the Bush Administration was  extremely supportive of international cooperation, advocating such measures as adherence to the dictates of the WTO whether we liked it or not, an expanded NATO, and a strengthened NAFTA.  Even after 9/11, the Bush Administration  asked for the support of the international community FIRST, and only when it was not forthcoming, in Iraq, did we act and, even then, coalitions, albeit small ones,  were built. The history of these events is reported accurately, day by day, on our National Security Affairs and War on Terror Newstands, in archive and chronological fashion so anybody, including former President Clinton, and others like him who criticize this highly substantive site, can review those events. During the George W. Bush Administration  the Association supported the policy of  fielding an effective ABM system because such a system is justified on the grounds of self-defense of the United States from rogue nuclear states acquiring nuclear weapons in a seemingly growing environment of proliferation and, also, because such a system poses the threat to our potential enemies that they would have to bankrupt their in many cases totalitarian systems in order to successfully compromise such a system, and at the same time undoubtedly fail in the process. There are those who argue, of course, that it is cheap to build an offensive ICBM system, making it sound almost as if everybody who owns a convenience store could build one for $100 or so. This is nonsense, and those with access to intelligence data should know better. It costs hundreds of billions of dollars to build an effective ICBM or IRBM system with MIRVs which could penetrate an effective U.S. or NATO shield, and that cost would bankrupt any third world country, including China, which dared to try. Russia's immediate reaction to the Bush initiative was in fact the only logical one: President Putin proposed lowering the number of Russia's nuclear warheads, jointly with the U.S., not increasing them. We also currently and wholeheartedly support President Bush's defense policy to continue biological weapons research. If rogue states like Saddam's not only researched anthrax and biochemical development, but actually also used biochemical warfare on their own people [Saddam staged over 280 separate biochem attacks on the Kurds in northern Iraq, the major one being at Halabja, where Saddam murdered 5,000 Kurds, and on the Shiites in southern Iraq], and when there is absolutely no reliable method ( e.g. satellites) to determine the existence or whereabouts of stockpiles of such weapons, then the United States is fully justified in continuing research on such weapons to ensure anybody with them who threatens us could be met with a similiar, and therefore credible, deterrent.   Even satellites and CIA SR-71s cannot see inside Kim Jong Il's nuclear reactors, nor could they see into Saddam's Palaces.   The Association supported the decision to go to war against Saddam in 2003, and would have even if the decision had been entirely unilateral. Saddam's time to go, as a State terrorist enemy of the United States, was long overdue, even at the end of the Gulf War. He needed to be made an example of in the aftermath of 9/11. But U.S. military planning as to what to do in the aftermath of his fall in Iraq lacked political-military precision, and still does today, literally as you are reading this commentary. So we opposed the decision of the Bush Administration to limit U.S. Force levels in cleaning up the terrorist mess in Iraq after Saddam's overthrowal. We felt that decision was caused by the fact U.S. combat arms forces are too few wordwide, and that in turn made us then,  and makes us today, vulnerable as a Nation to foreign terrorism operating abroad. Sources as diverse as U.S. Senators John Kerry (D.- Mass.), John McCain (R.- Ariz.), Joseph Biden (D.- Del.), Hillary Rodham-Clinton (D.- N.Y.) and Joseph Lieberman (D.- Conn.) took positions similiar or identical to our policy advocacy at the time. When the going got tough, very tough, in the struggle for the foreign and national security proposals and activities of the George W. Bush Administration this Association had supported, unlike some other veterans' organizations, we did not blink, and we did not waver, in that support. As you can see from our History of the Navy Page, the politics of what the Navy should be goes back in fact to the time of the Revolution, and there have been two overiding themes in that history: a weak Navy or a strong Navy. But more importantly, in recent American politics there have also been two opposing themes about our larger foreign and military policies: Do we want to be loved, or do we want to be respected? (Hint: "I'd rather be respected," President Ronald Reagan once said.)  Do we want to be able to act in our own self defense, the defense of America and our way of life and our value of freedom, or do we only want  to act as part of , as President Bill Clinton put it, the "integrated" values of a world community. Concomitantly, we can rephrase this debate from even a third angle: Is it the mission of the United States to promote freedom throughout the world and, if it is the mission, or even if it is only a mission, is that mission a "must" or a "want," as they would phrase it in business school? Unlike other American veterans' groups, this Association has never wavered as to how we come out on any of these  debates.  We are not interested in acquiring the love of anti-American Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, and their supporters, as a goal of American foreign policy. A not so famous World War II poster pictures a group of Americans united, standing in front of our Flag. At the bottom of the poster it says" Victory for the American Way."  We see no reason why that does not apply as the goal of the War on Terror as well.  So, unlike others, we have not, and do not, alter our tack depending on the policies of a particular Commander-in- Chief for a weaker America, for appeasement of our enemies, or for a weaker national defense. The expression with approval former President Clinton raised in his interview of not having America as the world's only military superpower, the very same spectre also raised by Governor Howard Dean of Vermont in his 2004 Presidential campaign, is unacceptable to our membership as  fundamentally out of sync with traditional views of patriotism , the idea that America cannot remain great if it allows others, with their own agendas former President Clinton may trust, but which we do not, to make our national security decisions for us. In maintaining this consistency as a matter of policy advocacy (and not as an attempt to influence any election), it is not just the Navy we fight for, for we do not view the other Service Branches as our enemies, but America's national security as a whole. We may be in favor of a stronger Navy, but we are also at the same time in favor of a stronger Army, Marine Corps, Air Force and Coast Guard. But first of all, before all that, we are Americans. And we are steadfast, and will not change, in support of our Number One mandate for  policies that make America certainly the best country on earth, but, at the same time, also the strongest, with a national defense vulnerable to none. The natural tendency of all those in the world who have jealousy in their hearts is to hate those who are better off, but that does not say anything about those who may be comparatively blessed; it only says something about the jealous. If we must maintain respect for American values through the projection of power abroad, even through a Pax Americana, so be it. Like the Barbary pirates forcing Congress into a stronger Navy in the 1790s, that may not be something we wanted as an absolute, but it is something those who hate us forced on us, and it is something that therefore became necessary. While one group of naval aviator members began splitting away from the Naval Air Veterans Association in the late 1950s and early 1960s, to eventually form a group whose primary purpose seemed to be to throw R&R ("Raucous and Rowdy") parties, a smaller, more serious sub-group of naval veterans, which had theretofore called themselves the Association of Naval Veterans, or Navy Veterans Association, and who were affiliated with naval veteran chapters throughout the country ( and interested in naval power, not just naval air; outreach programs for needy vets; serious policy issues; and in expanding, not restricting membership) stayed with the then dwindling-in-size Naval Air Veterans Association. In 1991 that membership re-formed themselves, while still carrying on the purposes and historical traditions of the old organization and, in the process, became the United States Navy Veterans Association, adopting a new name which was more in consonance with the Association's enlarged legislative action programs for a stronger Navy, and not just for stronger naval air power. Today the Association has grown to a national organization with members in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Panama. It is one of the few military and veteran organizations in the country to actually have expanded its membership over the past decade, and today has a mission and posture which focuses more on the future of its membership and of the country than on the past. It is not that we are opposed to reunions; the contrary, in fact, is true; we sponsor many. But we also believe in the words of Coach Jon Gruden of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers that it is better to be focused on what's ahead in the front windshield than to be constantly looking in the rear view mirror. In attempting to maintain that focus, the United States Navy Veterans Association today intends to continue to provide emphasis on new issues of interest to the general public pertaining to national security, defense and veterans' matters. The Association may be "of" Navy veterans and "by" Navy veterans, but it is "for" all America's interests and all Americans. Accordingly, we view this as America's, and your Website, not just because the United States Navy community represents all patriotic Americans but also because, on this Website, we ask all the questions we have about military and veterans' affairs and all the questions, we hope, you have, and give the answers right here on this Site and, if we're not asking your questions, all you have to do is to post them on our Forum at the bottom of our Homepage, and we'll get you those answers.     The United States Navy Veterans Association, exactly like the Navy League of the United States, the U.S. Army Association, the U.S. Air Force Association, the VFW and the American Legion, is not officially affiliated with any agency of any government, although, just like some of those mentioned, we are privileged to have some very good friends in both the DoD and the Department of the Navy. The United States Navy Veterans Association is a U.S. Government qualified tax-exempt, tax-deductible veterans' organization, and, strictly speaking, not a "military" organization. There is an historical protocol in the U.S. Armed Forces that no person on active-duty openly criticizes the Commander-in-Chief, or the military policies of the Commander-in-Chief. That protocol is not spelled out in the Constitution, or in the laws of the land. Instead, it follows from the requirement of the UCMJ that subordinates must obey all lawful orders of a superior officer. To permit open criticism among the active-duty military of a superior military officer, including the elected Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, would imply that disobedience of a lawful order could be tolerated. The Association honors that logic, but not unreservedly. Our reservations on this subject deal exclusively with the publicness, the substance and the tenor of a contemporaneous criticism by active-duty personnel, all of which we feel should be substantial in order to warrant dismissal or punitive action by those in authority, as they were not in two cases since 1946: President Truman's firing of General Douglas MacArthur on 11 April 1951, and President Carter's firing of a lower ranking officer during his presidential term. The proscription in no case should extend to criticism of former Commanders-in-Chief where the criticism is subsequent to their actual term in elected office, although some would extend the protocol even that far. While the Association has many members, and welcomes many more, who are or have been active-duty members of the Armed Forces, the Association itself, as a U.S. Goverment specially qualified war veterans' organization, does not fall within the proscription of the protocol mentioned above. And we are proud that we do not. As Wellington reviewed his troops on the field at Waterloo in 1815, after he had defeated Napoleon, they began to cheer. Wellington turned to his ADC and said in British fashion: "Tell them to stop cheering. If they're permitted to cheer, then they're permitted to boo." Well, the United States Navy Veterans Association hopes that for the most part we can cheer. And we will try to keep the booing to a low roar. And, whether we boo or cheer, we are always doing so only in the context of an analytical discussion of policy or legislation, and not in the context of promoting, supporting or attacking anybody's candidacy for American public office.  And we will maintain, as an Association, Providence's great grant to America's manifest destiny to light the lamp of liberty for all the world to see: Freedom of Expression. For the full mission of the Association and a further description of what we do and what we don't, see our Mission Statement Page.   "Our country! ...May she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong." - Rear Admiral Stephen Decatur, USN, 1816   Fickleness of opinion, as to a fundamental subject of value, neither serves an individual well as a matter of character, nor a Nation. *************************************************    NEWS AND ANALYSIS : THE EARLIEST EDITIONS OF THE ASSOCIATION'S THREE NEWSTANDS  We comment in our Newstands, and on this Website in general, only in areas we believe that there is a body of expertise within the Association: military policy, foreign policy, veterans' issues and national security. Since we are not primarily a news organization, we also limit our news coverage to events which we believe will have a long-term or significant effect on one or more of the above four areas. What we have just said involves both judgment and prediction, and we are certain that history will prove us wrong at least as to some of the things we have to say. If you think we are wrong (or right) as to anything we have to say, the Association welcomes your comments as a  Entry on our Forum. And while we're on the subject of judgments and predictions, we mention we do not erase from this Site (although any website has the capability of doing so) any prediction or analysis we've previously made, on the basis it turned out to be wrong, although we may add to previous comments (commonly called an addendum). And, if you may be wondering, while the Association may have commentary on this Site on all of the four named issue areas, our Legislative Action Division only works with Government on issues covered specifically in our published Mission Statement. THE WAR ON TERROR NEWSTAND [WOT NEWSTAND] 'Remember, America, What Happened Here.'   "The War  on Terror will not be won on the defensive." -President George W. Bush  43rd President of the United States 9-11-01: Around 8:46 a.m. New York time, nineteen fanatical Muslim hijackers, all foreigners, all members of an organization called Al Quaida, drive two American jetliners into the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, causing the two towers, plus numerous adjacent buildings, to collapse, killing over 2800 people; the south tower collapsed just before 10 a.m.; the planes were travelling almost 600 mph at impact. At the same time two more planes controlled by the same animals, turn toward Washington,D.C.; one crashes into the Pentagon after failing to locate the White House, killing American men and women in service at their posts, all wearing the cloth of the Nation; the last plane, Flight 93, is re-seized by American patriots on board, martyrizing themselves in a fight with the hijackers, causing the plane's crash into the Pennsylvania countryside near Pittsburgh, killing all on board. The plot of the attack was personally designed by one man, Saudi citizen Usama bin-Laden, living at the time in Afghanistan as the head of Al Quaida  at the pleasure of the Taliban government there.  A total of 3025 people were killed as a result of the incidents on board the four planes, 500 on the upper floors of the WTC South Tower alone, where the plane had cut them off, and where only 18 could find the remaining intact stairwell, before it too collapsed. In addition to citizens of the United States, nationals of 85 other countries were also killed. 1400 died in the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Al Quaida's attack was actually part of a larger plot which originally involved flying five planes into targets on the East Coast, including CIA Headquarters, and five planes into targets on the West Coast of the United States.   President Bush was told of the attack by White House Chief of Staff Andrew card  in Sarasota, Florida, where the President was reading to 2d graders at the Emma E. Booker Elementary school as part of a readership program.  This photo was taken at that very second: He stood still for a few minutes, and then said at the School, after briefly collecting his thoughts: "Terrorism against our nation will not stand." On board Air Force One shortly thereafter, he received repeated Secret Service advice not to return to Washington, which Bush, after consideration some say was too lengthy, overruled. Later, while the President was visiting the site of the ruins of the World Trade center, a firefighter shouted out: "We can't hear you." The President shouted back : "I can hear you. We can all hear you....and [pointing to where the Towers stood] the people who knocked these buildings down are going to be  HEARING FROM ALL OF US  SOON."   Secretary of State Colin Powell was in Lima, Peru that morning attending an OAS meeting where the new Peruvian president was speaking when Powell was informed. Powell thought , 'I've got to go home.' It would take about an hour to get his plane ready, so he spoke before the assembly. He said: " A terrible tragedy has befallen my nation, but you can be sure that America will bring those responsible to justice. You can be sure that as terrible a day as this is for us, we will get through it because we are a strong nation, a nation that believes in itself." The others stood and applauded. Defiant, America will not be vanquished by these people. UPDATE: To hear and see this sub-human Usama bin-Laden, and one of his sub-human American citizen Muslim traitors, in their most currently available video (2006), talk about the  "Manhattan Raid," click here. For 9/11: The Day in Pictures, click here. 11-01-01: As announced on the NBC Nightly News for 11-01-01, State Department sources have confirmed they will single out young Arab and Muslim men on their visa applications to enter the U.S. Finally, as the Association recommended back in September! This is the first time in our recollection, other than in a state of declared war by Congress, that State has publicly announced that there will be an ethnic or religious profile for undesirable aliens seeking to enter the U.S., and we congratulate State for this bold, and necessary, in this case, step. It would be simpler, still, to follow the full details of our Recommendation and put the strict burden of proof on such a foreigner. We doubt they will be able to pass the test. State may be doing this, or a version of it, in fact and not publicly announcing it. Reliable sources have indicated to the Association that there may be as many as 56,000 illegal Mid-Eastern males in the U.S. and as many as 20 million illegals total. The Association has learned that the primary reasons the price of U.S. gasoline at the pump has dropped during this crisis is because of lower profit margins by American refiners and because of increased crude production by Russia, primarily, and some other non-Middle Eastern States. Putin has gone far, despite some mixed verbal messages he initially sent out, to prove during this crisis that he really seeks to be an ally of the U.S., and should be responded to accordingly. In addition to increasing crude production, he also took out a Russian spy station in Cuba, supported American moves to put temporary bases for the War in Afghanistan in former Soviet republics bordering Russia, and modified his objections to President Bush's decision to abrogate the 1972 ABM Treaty, all in the period following September 11. The Saudis, on the other hand, are reportedly putting pressure on Putin, as we speak, to cut Russian crude production, reminding us of the Pat Oliphant cartoon of Our Friends the Saudis showing the front view of a sheik smiling at us and a rear view of him holding his dagger poised to strike. The Saudis and the other Arab emirates on the Saudi peninsula likewise have not been aggressive enough in striking a blow at the terrorists' financial structures located in their countries. Hawadas are unlicensed, unregulated (outside the U.S.)moneychanging and money-by-wire transfer services, many of which are both owned and used by terrorists. They continue to flourish, especially in the United Arab Emirates, as well as in other countries in Africa and the Mid-East. Basically, for purposes of international financial transactions into and out of the U.S., these hawadas are accorded the same status and privileges of international banks because of their legal status in their home countries. They, along with Saudi-run, American-based, Muslim charities in the U.S. and abroad, were used to funnel money to the September 11 hijackers. Fifteen out of nineteen of those hijackers carried Saudi passports. Nor have the Saudis agressively gone after known terrorists if they are affiliated with the Al-Saud royal family. The Saudi royal family basically runs Islam for all practical purposes within the Kingdom, maintaining strict control of the holy sites of both Mecca and Medina, and appointing the clerics who manage the affairs of the Saudi Wahhabi sect. The Association has learned one Saudi royal prince also funded the September 11 hijackers. Nothing has been done to bring him to justice, or to bring justice to him. We question, in fact, whether the Wahhabi sect is a real religion at all, as we understand that word, and in the sense that no religion is real if it is run by a political government. The FBI is now making telephone calls to colleges inquiring about the current status and addresses of foreign Arab and Muslim students. Good, but this is still a far cry from the random surveillance of these foreigners the Association called for in one of its Recommendations to the Nation. 11-09-01: Usama bin Laden brags and chuckles, like a frat boy come back from a successful egging, on tape in Kandahar, in the name of his Islamic god, of his mission to kill Americans on September 11. In murderous detail, he talks with one of his boys, Talid al Harki from Saudi Arabia, about the plans for, and the results of, the attack on the WTC. 11-13-01: The Taliban abandons Kabul       and retreats south toward Kandahar. 11-14-01: President Bush today enacted by Executive Order secret militay tribunals to try foreigners accused of terrorism. These tribunals can try only foreign terrorists; they afford all defendants a full and fair trial, and guarantee the defendants the assistance of competent legal counsel. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced America will bomb retreating Taliban soldiers, unlike the U.S. policy in the Gulf War vis-a-vis retreating Iraqi soldiers. We say "Good!" The Taliban frees two American Christian AID workers, who are then airlifted to Pakistan by U.S. Forces. If the Taliban had been stupid enough to murder these two young women from Waco, Texas, there would truly have been no mercy shown to them in this War. 11-15-01: The Aviation Security Bill authorizes the hiring of more air marshals, but there is no specific quantification, as demanded in our Recommendations to the Nation. The Bill also federalized security checkers at U.S. airports, a position on which the Association made no Recommendation on way or the other. The cost to the flying public will be $2.50 per flight. If this is truly a national security measure, the Association does not believe it is only the flying public who should pay for it. United Airlines announces that all its pilots will be armed with stun guns. The Association also recommended, you may recall, stun cockpit doors. 11-16-01: Muhammed Atef, one of Usama bin Laden's two top lieutenants, has been killed by U.S. bombs. This Egyptian played a key role in organizing the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon. U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX), speaking on the floor of the U.S. Senate, has it right, as far as the Association is concerned: we are going to secure air travel so that the American people retain "freedom of movement." (But for more on Hutchinson, this time meriting our displeasure, see the entry in this Section on Breaking News and Analysis - The War on Terror, for 1-11-02.) Prime Minister Blair of Great Britain publicly announces his postion, identical to that of the Association announced above on this Homepage 11-01-01, that Putin has been cooperating so much in this War on Terror that Russia needs to be considered a true ally of the West. Blair should contact the Association so that we can write his speeches for him. Putin announces Russia will not cut its production of crude oil, as requested by the Saudis, dealing our "allies" in OPEC a serious blow. The Association questions whether OPEC itself should be considered a terrorist organization. 11-23-01: Spain says it will not extradite Arab terrorists to the U.S. unless we guarantee they will not be given the death penalty. Although we should honor foreign extradition policies as much as possible, enough is enough, and Spain should be told so: Turn over these murderers or try them yourselves, or face the consequences. [UPDATE 9-18-03: Spain was finally delivered the message in 2003. The State Department, saying to Spain that American patriotic and veterans' groups (Did they mean us?) were demanding action on Al Quaida, caused Spain to arrest and charge this month 35 Al Quaida ringleaders on Spanish soil, including an Al Jazeera TV correspondent. The Spanish indictment said that Al Quaida had long used Spain "as a training and preparatory ground for terrorist attacks." About time you admitted it, Spain. Now, do something about it other than talk. These people are coming across your southern border with Africa at will, and you've done next to nothing to date.] 11-28-01: The Justice Department says that all young foreign Mid-Eastern Muslims in the U.S. will be questioned, but not as suspects. This is very, very close to the random surveillance the Association asked for. One young foreign student at the University of South Florida, a seeming hotbed for both Islamic fundamentalist students and Islamic fundamentalist lecturers, was questioned by the media about this new policy. He said: " It reinforces my opinion about America." The TV interviewer then asked: " And what is your opinion about America? " The Mid-Easterner's ominous answer: " I'll keep that to myself. " [ Tampa Fox-TV 6 p.m. News, 11-28-01]. This student's opinion was eerily repeated many times over on NBC-TV Dateline for 12-7-01 by scores of women and underage Pakistanis who obviously hate the U.S. On the show, Pakistani women said they "worshipped" Usama bin Laden and the Pakistani young men said he was a "hero." One Pakistani said no matter what it took, he would "do this" and follow in bin Laden's footsteps. Our opinion: How do these America-haters get their visas in the first place? If you hate France and Frenchmen, what are you doing in France as a tourist or student? These Mid-Easterners should be asked on their visa applications what their opinion of the U.S.A. is. If they say it's a nice place and they'd like to visit ( which they all will ) , they should be hooked up to a polygraph and if the repeat of their answer shows deception, they should be shown the door. 11-29-01: Attorney General John Ashcroft announces that Permanent Resident Aliens and applicants for Permanent Resident Alien status can get U.S. citizenship by snitching off Islamic terrorists. This idea strikes us as something that might have been developed by those zany producers of " West Wing," and we question its efficacy. Should we have offered, in 1945, Herman Goehring, Hitler's chief henchman, U.S. citizenship if he told us whether Hitler was hiding out somewhere? Money, maybe, but not American citizenship and, if he took the money, of course, his family should have been permitted to keep it, and then we should have executed him. [Goehring cheated his death sentence imposed by the Nuremburg Military Tribunal by biting into a poison capsule he had hidden in his mouth, prior to his scheduled hanging, showing more guts, we add, than bin Laden has shown to date.] In sum,if these PRA applicants are anti-American, they shouldn't be here in the first place. U.S. citizenship should not be a bribe for evildoers, or a way for them to redeem their former affiliations. Ashcroft's announcement, we have learned, is actually an implementation of the " Responsible Co-Operators Act," passed into law by the previous Congress under President Clinton. 12-8-01: The Taliban surrenders Kandahar, effectively ending Taliban rule in Afghanistan: Our Recommendation #1, made on September 15,2001, accomplished. (The Association needs to add here, unfortunately, another Recommendation: The U.S., or the U.N., needs to get a grip on post-Taliban infighting in Afghanistan, and keep a grip on it, or we will be facing the same nonsense from these people again, and in short order. Already, as we speak,Ismail Khan, a pro- Iranian warlord who controls the west, is receiving arms from anti-U.S. Iran; General Dostum, a former Communist and a warlord, controls the northwest; and Pakhtun warlords are poised to take over Kandahar. These developments of autnomy for these mutually antagonistic warlords are what brought the Taliban to power in the first place.) The new interim government expected to be installed in Kabul shortly is expected to ask the U.S. and the U.N. for expanded numbers of peacekeeping troops for Afghanistan, and this is a recommendation the Association obviously believes should be responded to affirmatively. It is true that peacekeeping, or whatever the politicians wish to call it, is problematical in that it may tend to be open-ended, but in this case, that's something that we may just have to accept. John Calvin believed, correctly, that once you get into the cause of making peace it constituted a great endeavor, and that great causes make for great enemies. 12-9-01: The Justice Department has been shutting down Al-Quaida hawadas in the U.S., the functional equivalent of our Recommendation for seizing their assets. [For more on hawadas and what they are, see our BREAKING NEWS AND ANALYSIS Section above for 11-01-01]. One such hawada, as reported by ABC Nightly News for this date, Al-Barakatt(which also happens to be the major bank in Somalia), has been funnelling a minimum of $20 million a year in profits (at 5% per transaction) to Al-Quaida. These hawadas in the U.S. are used by working Muslims here to send small dollar amounts (an average of perhaps $400 per month) per transaction to their families in Africa and the Mid-East monthly via the Al-Quaida hawadas there. (There is no Western Union in the Mid-East.) Since the money must also flow by wire to the Al-Quaida hawaras and network in the Mid-East, we also ask again: What are those countries doing to shut down those hawaras? The Association would also like to put a brand new perspective on this problem you probably won't hear from anybody but us: Anti-American terrorists can create a hawada network in the U.S. and the Mid-East, because of "freedoms" the U.S. and their host countries allow them. But Anti-Terrorist Americans cannot create hawadas to funnel cash to pro-American causes in those same foreign lands, because their anti-American governments would regulate them to death if they tried. Our NAFTA says, eventually, American banks must be allowed to operate freely in Canada and Mexico. We say to these Mid-Eastern, and other, dictators: What's good for the goose is good for the gander. No country should be permitted to have a regulatory and foreign policy system which at the same time preys upon American open-hearted economic freedom and combines that with the inability of any American to operate economically or financially in their country. 12-11-01: President Bush announces the U.S. is pulling out, officially, of the 1972 U.S.-Soviet ABM Treaty, a move we supported on this Homepage in 2000. President Putin of Russia announces the move is a "mistake," but that it will not affect the U.S.-Russia post-cold war relationship. Putin needs to be congratulated and rewarded. Usama bin Laden is shown on tape circa this date supplied to Al Jazeera TV, saying: "The end of America is imminent... whether I am alive or dead." We think you're going to get your wish, Usama... at least as to the part about soon being dead. 12-15-01: According to ABC-TV Nightly News this date, the INS has admitted there will be lengthy background checks for foreign students from a long list of Arab, Persian and Muslim countries, effectively incorporating a large part of Recommendation #7 the Association made to the Nation on September 15, 2001. ABC reports there are currently about 600,000 foreign students in the U.S. One of them, a Pakistani, complained on the broadcast that: "This means America is no longer the land of the free. It means it's the land of the Americans." One INS spokeswoman responded: "These people are our guests. We expect them to play by our rules." Our response to the Pakistani: Is Pakistan the land of the free? Does it permit and protect American visitors coming there en masse to speak out against Islamic fundamentalism? We doubt it. Open up your country so that the American visitor can do what he or she wants, when he or she wants to, and to whom he or she wants, and we'll do the same, again, for you. 12-25-01: The government of Somalia has closed Al-Barakatt, Somalia's major bank and a key financier of Al-Quaida, in response to U.S. pressure.(See above in our Breaking News and Analysis Section for more on Al-Barakatt and below in our "Let Every Nation Know...." Section for a brief history of the U.S. in Somalia, bin Laden and 1993.) Somalia is still controlled to this day by Islamic warlords. The Association has learned that the new air marshals will be prioritized on "long-haul" flights. This prioritization is a mistake, in our opinion. As we mentioned on September 15, these flights need to be selected randomly. (The U.S. cannot afford to put air marshals on every flight.) By announcing what type of flights the marshals will be on simply gives the terrorists the information necessary to avoid those flights. We cannot, we believe, have true freedom of movement in this country on airlines again with the package of security we are pointing toward today: search everybody in general, suspect single American citizens buying one-way fares, paying cash; and for every non-white, female or non-American you question , you must question a white single American male to avoid a charge of racial or sexist profiling. We need true profiling instead: If statistics on violent crime among a given ethnic group in one's country shows there is more violent crime among that group, profile them. Period. Not males in general. Not people paying cash. Not people buying one way fares. While airline security is analyzing the latter's shoes,we've allowed the terrorist from the former group to sneak through. Second, profile the foreigner, PRAs included, if they are Arab, Persian or Muslim in background. Period. As to foreign airport security with flights into the U.S., tell them to adopt the same standards, or ban all flights of their national carrier into and in the United States. 12-28-01: The Association has learned that the only countries with more madrasas than Afghanistan are Pakistan and Lebanon. These "schools" are really camps where young Islamic militant men are trained in the Koran and to hate America, and to kill America. Many of the madrasas have been, and continue to be, funded either by Muslim charities in the U.S., or by the Saudis out of their oil money. 12-31-01: The average price of foreign crude per barrel fell to $20 as of this date, substantially lower than in previous years (but not low enough, in our opinion). As of 9-11, the Association feared OPEC would take the occasion to jack up the price of crude, something they in fact tried to do, and are still trying to do. Many outside OPEC (including primarily Russia) tried to keep the price down in sympathy with America. Money talks, as they say, and b...s... walks, and the USNVA wants to thank our friends abroad. The Association has also learned that 15% of America's heroin now is coming from Afghanistan, and their exports of this drug to the U.S. have picked up since the fall of the Taliban. These people are getting rich selling smack to America's kids. The Karzai Government in Afghanistan has declared the growing of opium poppies there to be illegal, but this is meaningless: Karzai's pro-U.S. government has neither the capability nor the will to enforce, at all, this decree. These drug dealers are all terrorists just like Usama bin Laden, in our opinion, and all drug dealers...all of them... should be dead men walking, just like Usama, courtesy of the United States. 1-1-02: The Association has learned Richard Reid, aka Abdul Rahman, the Al Quaida shoe bomber, came to Islam as a convert while in jail in Britain, where many Muslim clerics preach. Many of these mullahs are wanted for anti-government crimes in the countries they come from, but are allowed political asylum in Britain, even though they continue to preach hatred against both America and the U.K. Abdul Al Hakh Bakr, a fundamentalist Afro-Caribbean Islamist, and the imam of Reid's mosque in London, is one such cleric. U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair has had three Muslim clerics removed from proselytizing in the jails and prisons since 9-11 for ranting against America. In our opinion, the British Government should remove all of them. The Association has also learned Reid actually scouted targets in the Mid-East as an Al-Quaida operative. Update 1-30-03: Reid was sentenced today by a federal judge to life in prison without parole. At his sentencing Reid said he was a "soldier of Islam" and promised vengeance on the United States and its people. UPDATE 5/27/2004 on Muslim clerics in Britain: Abu Hamza Al-Masri, a one-eyed jihadist sheikh with no hands was arrested in London this morning, but not because the British were after him. The U.S. Justice Department was. It indicted him for terrorism, and specifically for operating fundraising operations in the U.S. supporting an armed terrorist camp in southern Oregon, fundraising operations which previously went unnoticed by U.S. law enforcement, while at the same time, and instead, they were attacking patriotic U.S. police and firefighter and veteran fundraisers for fraud. (What a joke!) The British will try to extradite Al-Masri, and he will fight that extradition. If he is extradited, he'd only be one of thousands of these Muslim clerics we mentioned in the original story who ought to be. 1-5-02: Charles Bishop, a demented, probably suicidal 15-year old American citizen of Arabic descent (his father is bin Bisharra, a fugitive narcoterrorist from Massachusetts), and a sympathizer of Usama bin Laden, deliberately steals (after his flight school gives him access to the key) and flys a Cessna 172 prop trainer plane into the 28th story of the Bank of America Building in Tampa, Florida. Although Bishop crossed the airspace of MacDill AFB, CentCom's HQS, prior to the crash, not a single MacDill plane was available to intercept him. Two F-15s from Homestead AFB in Miami were scrambled but got there too late. Bishop was tailed by one unarmed St. Petersburg-based USCG helicopter which just happened to be in the air. Our opinion: the U.S. needs the capability, and the will, to shoot down any plane, regardless how small or large, which is veering off course or unauthorized to be in the air in our airspace, and which fails to immediately comply with a radio or visual signal to land. In Bishop's case, luckily, no one was killed other than the perpetrator, which probably accounts for the underreporting of this national security story. Tampa Bay law enforcement authorities, as of date, are still officially refusing to call this an act of "terrorists," but, in our opinion, it certainly was an act of a "terrorist" and an act of violent "terrorism." The following excerpts are from Bishop's suicide note, which speak for themselves: "...Osama bin Laden is absolutely justified in the terror he has caused on 9-11. He has brought a mighty nation to its knees! God blesses him and the others who helped make September 11th happen. The U.S. will have to face the consequences for its horrific actions against the Palestinian people and Iraqis by its allegiance with the monstrous Israelis - who want nothing short of world domination! You will pay - God help you - and I will make you pay! There will be more coming! Al Quaeda and other organizations have met with me several times to discuss the option of me joining...." The Association has also learned that Bishop wanted to drive the Cessna into CentCom HQS at MacDill AFB, but wasn't sure from the air exactly which building it was. We'd also like to make certain addenda here to our 9-15-01 Recommendation to the Nation #5 barring foreigners from flight school training in the U.S., which would not have covered Bishop: Small planes need to be mandated by federal law to be outfitted with devices which make them invulnerable to hot-wiring; flight school training in the U.S. for anyone under the age of 21 needs to be barred; and it needs to be a felony for any person to permit a flight student to possess the key to the airplane. 1-6-02: The Association has learned that federal deficit spending, caused overwhelmingly by the necessities of the War on Terror, will last through at least FFY 2008. 1-7-02: Polls in Latin America after 9-11 have shown pretty consistently that about 60% of the people oppose supporting the U.S. War on Terror. In the opinion of the Association, America's War on Terror is Latin America's War also. Norte America, America Central y Sud America have a common culture and a common value system. This hemisphere is Una America, verdad, and Latinoamericanos outside Los Estados Unidos need to get on the train, or be left behind. 1-8-02: The Association has learned we are currently spending about $1 billion per month on the War on Terror. If we could push that up to about $3 billion per month temporarily, accompanied by a temporary pro-rata increase in the overall Defense Budget across the board, we think we could probably pull America out of the current recession in about 6 months. 1-9-02: Our ratings as to local foreign governments needed to root out Al Quaida and its sympathizers with their own forces within their own borders: Yemen  : Has the will to do the job; not very efficient. Philippines   : Has the will to do the job; not very efficient. 1,200 U.S. Special Forces already there, (Donald Rumsfeld: "I would be surprised if it were over 600," 1-20-02) U.S. troops will be there, as combat soldiers, by 1-26-02, to help fight Abu Sayef, the Al-Quaida affiliate in the Muslim regions of the southern Philippines. We have it on the best authority, of course, that our troops will be "advisors," and "under the command of Philippine officers." Abu Sayef is not a new phenomenon. Its roots go back to the Moro National Liberation Front, founded by Nur Misuari in the late 1960's as an Islamic fundamentalist, anti-American, pro- Gaddafi group in Mindanao and Basilan. Abu Sayef has recently added a new twist to raise money for terrorism. They kidnap Westerners (11 have been murdered so far; one American was beheaded) and then Gaddafi pays them millions ($25 million so far) and calls it ransom, and acts like he's helping the West. Abu Sayef currently holds two American conservative Christian missionaries, Martin and Gracia Burnham, from Kansas. 5,000 Philippine troops have been fighting Abu Sayef for 6 months as of date with, we point out, no result. [UPDATE 5-20-03: President Bush and Philippine president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo    announce today that there will be a new, "unspecified" number of U.S. troops inserted into the Philippines to combat terrorism in its Muslim majority southern islands. President Macapagal-Arroyo is pro-U.S., but has to deal with a substantial anti-U.S. nationalist sentiment throughout her nation. She has announced she will not run for re-election in 2004. She also says that she thinks Abu Sayef currently is finished, but that a new threat is arising from the Moro International Liberation Force - MILF.]  Somalia  : Has no will to do the job; needs U.S. Forces. Indonesia  : Has no real will to do the job, and will not give consent, under any circumstances, to U.S. Force entry; therefore Al Quaida will be able to hide there, and rebuild there indefinitely, especially through its three local affiliates, Islamic Jama'a, Laskar Jihad and Abu Sayef, other than the fact Indonesia is xenophobic and would take that xenophobia out, to some degree, on non-Indonesian Al Quaida operatives.  [Singapore  , Indonesia's next door neighbor, which probably gets the gold medal for a democratic, free enterprise police state, is a U.S. ally, we should note, in reporting on and chasing down anti-American Indonesian-based Muslim fundamentalists] ; U.S. Force involvement in Indonesia would cause a massive anti-American reaction there, so expect no U.S. troops in Indonesia, but do expect increases in U.S. military aid for that country to fight terrorism in country, but also expect terrorist attacks on Westerners in Indonesia to grow, perhaps to the point that the Sukarno government will be forced to clamp down on its own domestic terrorists for fear of losing the very important revenue Western tourism constitutes to Indonesia. 1-10-02: The Association has learned that Iraqi intelligence has approached the Bush Administration, offering to help find Usama bin Laden, in exchange for laying off Saddam Hussein. Our opinion: fat chance. [UPDATE 7-25-03: As this Newstand implied in the above story, there was no historical connection between Saddam and Al Quaida. But Saddam was a terrorist, and neither one, Saddam or Usama, would put it entirely out of their mind to assist the other.] 1-11-02: Many U.S. Senators have expressed the opinion, to our chagrin, that the Airport Security Act the Senate, to our chagrin again, rammed down the throat of the House of Representatives, doesn't mean what it says. Both Senator Diane Feinstein (D-California) and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Texas) have said it's not just citizens who can speak English, as the Act says, who can be hired as the new federalized airport security guards. This opens the way to employ the 7,000 (out of 28,000) non-citizen, non-English speaking checkers who currently work in airport security, at about twice their current salary ($25,000 versus $12,500). The Association understood that the intent of this Act was to provide added security for the American people, not merely double the pay of a new federal union of incompetents already working as screeners. Obviously, we were wrong. 1-12-02: President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan announces that all Pakistani madrasas (see above, entry for 12-28-01, for what madrasas are) will be licensed and regulated. Meaningful? Remains to be seen. We'll be watching and reporting to you. Musharraf also announced he was abolishing a number of Islamic terrorist organizations sponsoring the insurgency in Kashmir against India. 1-13-02: 1-800-CRIME-TV (America's Most Wanted), in conjunction with the USG, is offering up to $25 million for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of foreign terrorists. This is a good program and it, and programs like it which specifically target foreign terrorists, are far more effective than people in U.S. law enforcement who use the War on Terror as a mask to simply up the ante (for themselves) on "crime" in general. 1-13-02: The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, in an attempt to quickly and quasi-secretly bypass Congress, is creating a national I.D. card, by working with the Justice Department and the General Services Administration to create a system with a massive database encompassing every citizen, a system which doesn't even target foreigners. The card, which the motor vehicle administrators have decided will be used in every state, will use biometrics, probably a 3-D facial scan and, perhaps, fingerprints, and will be linked to the Social Security database at a minimum. As we said in our 9-15-01 Recommendation #15 to the Nation on the War on Terror, Government should do nothing to alienate any freedom, and especially freedom of movement, of the average American citizen, for otherwise the terrorists will have won. They will have forced us to turn America into a police state, just like their countries have always been, run by dictatorships or oligarchies. The 9-11 attacks should not mean the end of American privacy. We have a right to our lives without government collecting information on our every move. Living in a fishbowl may be safer (we doubt it) but it's not really living. The President and Congress should step in and stop this Orwellian (and, possibly illegal, scheme, since this type of decision seems to be called for in our system to be made by legislators, not by a bunch of DMV bureaucrats making up rules for our lives behind the peoples' back) by saying: "No, not over our dead bodies!" Our analysis, we point out, seems to be re-inforced by the massive failure of the "Face-It" facial identification system designed to catch criminals used by the Tampa, Florida Police Department. After nine months of implementation on the street in Ybor City, the computerized Face-It system failed to make a single hit; routinely identified men as women, and seemed to be easily fooled by things like changes in facial hair and slight turns of the head. The Tampa police seem to have lost interest in this machine promoted by a private contractor, Visionics (which also is trying to sell the machine to the Defense Department). There is also, we point out, much in suggested new technology that does not fall in the category of violating fundamental American freedoms. Explosive and drug detecting beagles and labradors do not; explosive detecting machines for people or luggage do not. The difference is that these technologies specifically target the individual who has the specific intent to commit violence in the act; the other technologies involve fishing expeditions suitable only for police states. Hey, America, read our lips: these foreigners are suicide bombers. If they want to put a bomb on a plane, and then get on, they're going to. The Aviation Security Act and these technologies like face scanning don't target these people or how they act; they target how American bureaucrats think they should act. Target the Arab, the Muslim, the Persian, the former felon with a NCIC violent or drug record by name, at our airports. You'll save a lot of money, end a lot of innocent aggravation, and you might actually stop a terrorist. 1-15-02: Attorney General John Ashcroft lays out, in a very detailed, professional and objective way, the three count criminal complaint against John Walker, aka John Walker Lindh aka Abdul Hamid aka Suleiman al-Faris, the American Taliban traitor. This was important, as it is also important that no American citizen be lightly or frivolously charged as a terrorist, or be charged in a secret military tribunal. If Walker personally caused the death of CIA officer Johnny Spann, that's one thing; but even if, Walker should still be tried publicly in a domestic U.S. court. 1-15-02: In our 9-15-01 Recommendation #3 to the Nation on the War on Terror, we recommended that the U.S. tilt toward India  in the subcontinent if Pakistan did not cooperate in our efforts against terrorism. Four months later, on balance, it is our opinion Musharraf has cooperated, and we need to get involved, all it takes as a peacemaker, to prevent India, with its substantially overwhelming conventional and nuclear forces, from wiping out Pakistan in a new war. 1-16-02: The Saudis have quietly floated the idea for U.S. Forces to leave all bases in Saudi Arabia, a move we think is probably now a question of when, not if. As we have repeatedly reported in our War on Terror Section, the Saudi royals have consistently obstructed the War in more ways than one. All hell may break loose in Saudi Arabia (and probably will; a recent intelligence poll there showed a staggering 95% suport of bin Laden; the Ayatollah Khomeini once called the Saudi royal family "vile and ungodly," and unfit to be in charge of Islam's holiest places, a view still widely held by Muslim fundamentalists today both inside and outside Saudi Arabia) if we leave, but it is still probably cleaner to deal with the Islamic terrorists who might take over there, then to continue to coddle this corrupt Al-Saud family.   Saudi Prince Turki Al Faisal "The U.S. helped Saudi Arabia liberate Kuwait from Saddam."   - Turki Al Faisal, Former Head of Saudi Intelligence, NBC-TV Dateline, 8-25-02. Association Comment: "We liberated Kuwait. You helped US." 1-18-02: Hundreds of the most vicious, most evil, most murderous Taliban and Al Quaida fighters have been brought to the U.S. Navy Facility at Guantanamo as prisoners. [President Bush: "These are killers...."] We may see up to 1,000 of them there. We don't know what's going on here, and we're not sure anyone else does either. These animals should have been indicted, tried and executed in Afghanistan for their crimes, if necessary, by a U.S. military tribunal, unless, of course, we're planning on letting them escape into Castro's countryside and let him deal with them (and maybe we are). Resettle them into the U.S.? If we're not going to do any of the above, what are we going to do with them? Interrogate them, and then let them go, so they can do it all over again? And while we're on the subject of interrogation, do we really think these Muslim Hannibal Lectors are going to provide us any useful information absent being tortured, which we've said we wouldn't do? Release the Saudi citizens to the Al Saud family, as Saudi Arabia, in its latest slap in the face to the United States in the War on Terror, has suggested, so that they can release them to set up shop again in the Mid-East? (And while we're on the subject of releases, we note that we indicted our American Taliban, John Walker, but that none of the 25 countries that these terrorists come from, have indicted any of their own nationals.) Try them one by one at Gitmo? And then what, execute each one, one by one, on Cuban soil? Bringing these guys to Gitmo, the whole concept of their status, and what to do with them, all of this has been a very poorly thought out process, surprisingly, given the brilliance of the other stategic and tactical decisions of the Administration in the War on Terror. [UPDATE 5-03: The State Department has pressured the DoD to release many of the Al Quaida prisoners at Gitmo to their home countries. Reports of intelligence gained from these captives has been in large measure overblown. At the same time, the DoD has moved to try many of the others not released as "war criminals" - free counsel, plus counsel of their own if they choose, trial by military tribunal, proof beyond a reasonable doubt, death penalty only by unanimous vote of the tribunal, public trial unless Top Secret classified intelligence is offered, and only then during those points in the trial, all probative evidence, including hearsay, admissible, automatic right of appeal all the way up to the President - Well, we opposed this whole deal at Gitmo for the reasons we originally stated. We've tried to state the best case we can make, here in this Update, for the DoD's trials. But it's still too complicated, and that's the original problem we saw; that problem won't go away; and we stand by our original opinions. FURTHER UPDATE  7-1-03: The announcement of the first six of these Gitmo prisoners to be tried was met with widespread criticsm today by lawyers in America and throughout the world and, more threateningly, by British and Australian government sources. In our first article above on the Gitmo prisoners, we criticized the entire process, because we knew this was going to happen. We said then, and we repeat it now: these terrorists should have been shot to death immediately in Afghanistan as and when we came across them. That's the language they understand, as the continuing attacks on our troops in Iraq today offer proof positive. Weakness, any sign of less than overwhelming and immediate self-defense, is a welcome signal to these animals to attack us, and the forces of civilization, more. And you don't have to go abroad to know what they think. You can find the same mindset , the same exact anti-American attitude, in the philosophy and speech of the commonest crack or meth dealer on any of the meanest streets in America, if you care to venture that far, and we don't recommend that you do. It's not that the Iraqi terrorists we see today, for example, would not claim victory if they drove us from Iraq. They would. but for logistical reasons only. Their real goal is the destruction of American values, and our way of life, nothing less, just like it was the goal of Khruschev when he pounded his shoe at the U.N. and yelled "We will bury you!" And these terrorists are fanatic in that belief. That is the reason Saddam was a threat to us. And that is the same reason why they are. UPDATE 7-21-03: The USG announces that Gitmo prosecutions will be suspended against British and Australian nationals, and that even if those prosecutions are renewed, the USG will not seek the death penalty against any Australian national.       ] [UPDATE 10-23-03: There are about 600 prisoners at Gitmo as of today. The International Red Cross is again saying these poor dears are being mistreated by the Bush Administration.]   UPDATE  3/24/2004: Our Pentagon sources tell us that, of the remaining GITMO P.O.W.'s, possibly "about 400" will be released by the end of the year. Six will be tried by U.S. military tribunals, and about 50 hard core terrorists will remain at GITMO indefinitely.   Update 4/1/2009: President Obama Orders Closure of GITMO Detention Center, Eventually Newstand Staff President Obama has ordered the closure of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center for terrorists without specifying any particular date on which it will be closed.  As you can see from our articles immediately above, and  since this is an update, that the Association opposed the opening of GITMO Detention Center (GDC) in the first place, saying that it was a meaningless gesture with prospective counterproductive consequences, designed to take  foreign terrorists from their country of origin, where they were openly operating against the interests of  the United States of America with armed force, using extra-legal means, to a place where they could be processed in some sort of a semi-legal situation indefinitely.  Our original article, which went back to the year 2002, said that this was foolish, and that this was a black and white situation, and that the same terrorists should have been killed outright on the battlefield, as in when they raised their hands, their fists or their guns, against the interests of the United States of America in their respective home or host countries.   Just as we predicted back then, this is exactly what turned out to be true.  Of course, President Obama has not adopted the position of the Association as to why GDC should be closed, but this Newstand believes that must have factored in his thinking.   GDC was a stupid idea from the beginning and it is a stupid idea today. The ultimate solution to these truly vile terrorists, however, does not lie simply with the closing of the GITMO Detention Facility.  The ultimate answer still lies with our original reasoning and that is that terrorists who operate as foreigners in a killing fashion against Americans or American interests anywhere in the world, need to be hunted down and killed, wherever they are.  If by the United States Armed Forces, so be it.  If by the allies that we can involve in this joint enterprise, which should be a joint enterprise worldwide against these people, so be it.  That should be done and this Newstand appreciates President Obama’s  statement in his  first full blown interview with any news media in the world,  Al Arabiya, in 2009, that that is what should be done. It is not, however, being done. 1-19-02: You may have noticed that, since the inception of this War on Terror Section, the Association has refrained from reporting on, or commenting on, the current Palestinian - Israeli dispute. You may have wondered why? It was because we were requested to "from the highest levels" of the USG, and we honored that request because we believe, and still believe, America cannot successfully prosecute its own War on Terror without, at the same time, maintaining support for that War from at least some important Islamic governments. We cannot any longer honor that request. Israeli sources have pointed out to the Association overwhelming evidence linking the Mullah-run government in Iran, Hezbollah (the pro-Iranian-Syrian terrorists in Lebanon), Islamic Jihad, the PLO (the U.S. had treated the PLO as a terrorist group until 1988), the Palestinian Authority and Yasser Arafat personally with an on-going scheme to import both tactical and strategic weapons of substantial destructive force into the West Bank for the clear purpose and ability of killing masses of Israeli civilians, while at the same time the PA maintains it is in favor of the "peace process." Suicide bombers continue to murder more Israeli civilians every day. The father of one of these barbarians, who was killed in a murderous attack on Israeli children, had this to say: "My son is a martyr. I call on others to take his place, and there are five who will take his place until every Israeli and every American is dead." This same bum's mother shrieked with joy at her son's funeral. The portraits of these killers are on every billboard in the Gaza and the West Bank, and they are worshipped by almost every man, woman and child in the Arab-Muslim world, the same way you can find drug-dealing murderers worshipped in many communities in the Americas. It is the opinion of many respected criminologists that true crime, real true crime, is genetic. Bin Laden's father, for example, a crook and member of the Saudi Al Saud royal family, who gets most of his money ripped off the top of U.S. oil royalties, had 14 wives and 50 children (Hey, America, wake up as to this demographic: if they outnumber Israel 50 to 1 today and that is the fundamental nature of their threat, and it is, what will the nature of their threat to the U.S. be in 25 years? We imprison, in the U.S, criminal males who view women as sex objects, for life, in many cases. Why don't they?) and bin Laden's mother, now divorced from bin Laden's father, is married to al-Atta, who is from the same family group which produced Mohammed al-Atta, who flew one of the planes into the WTC. Bin Laden himself has had at least four wives. It is our opinion that there will be no true peace until these criminals, all of them, are eliminated from the face of the earth. Meanwhile, the European Union and the Saudis have told the USG that Arafat needs to be welcomed as a "peace partner." Every Saudi public school student, the Association notes, has a statement in his or her civics book which reads: "Here is a Jew, hiding behind a tree or stone. Come and kill him." What a crock of crap! In Saudi Arabia, which is a freak of geology sitting on a lake of oil, the state-run version of Islam, Wahhabism, has preached an almost medievalistic anti- Semitism since the Al Saud family took over the country in the early 20th Century. Enough is enough. America needs to stand up to these named persons, for they are truly as evil as Usama bin Laden and Al Quaida, and justice demands that we say so, and render the same verdict on them, come what may. The terrorist work, by the way, of Hezbollah, Hamas, the Al Aqsa, the Al Quaida, all of them, would not be possible without major funding from oil revenues (original source: the American automobile driver) received by Libya, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. (And, Mr. President, it's O.K. to quote from our Website as in your 4-4-02 Press Conference but, at least, give us a plug!) 1-20-02: It is more than foolish, in our opinion, to say, as U.S. Ambassador to Japan Howard Baker said yesterday that we need to give the new Afghan interim government of Hamid Karzai (or any government, for that matter) whatever money they ask for ($15 billion in Afghanistan's case) without any guarantees the money won't be stolen. The USG has done this time after time since 1946, and we, and the world, have been burned more times than we have fingers and toes to count. Baker should study his history better. When the USG gives welfare to non-working citizens domestically, those citizens are "run" on a computer periodically to make sure they are actually unemployed. Why should our citizens be held to one standard of truthfulness in the spending of welfare, and foreigners another? It's the U.S. taxpayer footing the bill in both cases, and the USG should have the same moral obligation to that taxpayer in either case. It's not that hard to make sure foreign governments are spending their USG, World Bank, Ex-Im Bank, U.N. or I.M.F. welfare money without fraud, waste or corruption. Put U.S. auditors in there as needed, at the foreigners' expense, to report how the money is being spent monthly. Any problems, even little ones? Stop the flow, permanently, that month. No country excluded, while under the rule of that government. U.S. Congressman Alcee Hastings (D-FL) calls this giving of money to Afghanistan "welfare for warlords." And so it is. 1-23-02: Our bottom line on this President after four months of the War on Terror (and this may change) is that, on balance, his policies have shown exceptional thought and strategic balance, demonstrated in the penultimate fact we have prevented a second substantial attack on our shores. At the same time, no one can seriously deny the broad and noble purpose of our military intervention in Afghanistan. There, Bush's military policies have succeeded in casting out a brutal, backward regime that inflicted great suffering on its own people. In its place, a humane, representative government has fledgingly begun to take root. With the continued support of the USG and other nations choosing to follow our lead, that government has a chance to bring lasting progress to a people who have known no real peace for decades. Bush's collapsing of the Taliban also allowed for the rout of the Al Quaida terrorist organization that had taken advantage of Afghanistan's vulnerability. Thanks to these policies Afghanistan already is a better place, and the world is at least marginally safer. Our acts of war have been undertaken by this President in pursuit of clearly identified national, as well as humanitarian, purposes, and Bush's, and the Nation's, goals are gradually being met. 1-24-02: For the record, the official State Department list of countries whose governments support terrorism, as of date, includes: Libya, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, North Korea and Cuba. We wouldn't take anybody off this list until all terrorist within their borders, or anybody who has ever been a terrorist within their borders, are brought to justice. In fact we'd add a few names to the list: Syria,and its client state, Lebanon, where Syria has 25,000 troops posted (the government of Lebanon is, and will remain so indefinitely, unless the USG does something about it, a puppet of the terrorist government of Bashir Assad's Syria, a function of the pullout of U.S. Forces after the blowing up by Hezbollah of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in the 1980's); Palestine (if you consider the Palestinian Authority a government) and Somalia (even though it doesn't have an effective government). 1-26-02: Some frequently asked questions, and answers, as to how the War on Terror is going, as of date: Q: How are U.S. led forces trying to find Al Quaida leader Usama bin Laden and former Taliban ruler Mullah Mohammed Omar? A: The Pentagon has stopped giving updates specifically on how the hunt for the two figures is going and where it believes they might be. The focus of the campaign now is to eliminate remaining pockets of Al Quaida and Taliban resistance and hunt for leads. Intelligence has pointed to a handful of places commanders want troops to look at. Troops are systematically going through that list of places, watching, collecting information and figuring out the best times and places to strike. Q: Why aren't planes bombing, and does that mean the air campaign is over? A: There have been no bombing raids since 1-14-02, but bombing could pick up again at any time. About two solid months of airstrikes knocked out Taliban defenses and helped Afghan fighters on the ground rout the Taliban from all major cities, then Al Quaida fighters from their stronghold in the eastern Tora Bora mountains, but some of these fighters are now regrouping into pockets, and when those pockets are identified, expect U.S. Forces to go after them. Both reconnaissance and bombers continue to fly daily. Q: Where are U.S. Forces deployed now? A: There are more than 5,000 Americans deployed across Afghanistan (4,100 in Kandahar alone); maybe 1,000 more in neighboring Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan; and thousands of sailors are aboard Navy ships patrolling the Arabian Sea. The largest concentration of troops inside the country is at the base set up at Kandahar airport, where they manage prisoners being interrogated and do patrols. Small teams operate in other locations around Afghanistan, working alongside allied forces in some places and alone in others. [UPDATE: As of 5-03, there were 8,500 U.S. ground troops in Afghanistan; 11,500 total Coalition Forces (including U.S.); fighting was still going on, and U.S. Forces were still suffering casualties, a total of 76 deaths and another 192 wounded as of that time.] Q: How many places are left to search? A: Because Al Quaida and Taliban holdouts move around-and coalition forces continuously get new intelligence from reconnaissance and prisoner interrogations-the places to check and the number of places can change daily. Q: Of Al Quaida's top leadership, how many have been killed or captured? THIS FEATURED PRESENTATION LAST UPDATED: 9/11/2006 A: Original Top Echelon: Usama bin Laden:         -Saudi - believed to be hiding in the tribal areas of northwestern Pakistan as of September, 2006. He has given up both cell phones and internet contact, and the USG cannot currently find him. The  USG Reward for this man as of September, 2006 is $25 million dollars U.S. - DEAD OR ALIVE. In his  video released by Al Jazeera TV 9-10-03, bin Laden urges U.S. Forces in Iraq to "return to their mothers before they are returned in coffins;"urges risings in Iraq to kill all Americans there, and calls the Bush peace plan for the Mid-East a "roadmap to hell." The opinion of this Association is that we need to kill this man. We need to rock his world, and the world of all his supporters and accomplices. "Adolf Hitler is still alive," as Simon Wiesenthal used to say,"he's just waiting for history to forgive him, so that another monster like him can rise in his place."   Ayman al-Zawahiri: -Egyptian - bin Laden's doctor and  top advisor-as of September 2003, with Usama in Waziristan. On 8-3-03, Al Jazeera releases a tape on which al -Zawahiri exclaims: "America has not seen anything yet."  Mohammed Atef : -Egyptian-3rd in command-dead Terrorist operations: Abu Zubaydah:  - 30-year old Saudi-captured in Pakistan in Lahore by the CIA, 4-1-02. [Association Note: Zubaydah, in captivity, some say in the U.S., the Association has learned from intelligence sources, threatened on 4-23-02 that Al Quaida operatives have "dirty" nuclear devices and intend to use them on the United States and Israel. Since his arrest Zubaydah has been singing like a canary. As of August, 2003, Zubaydeh began implicating Saudi princes by name in the 9-11 attack, whereupon the House of Saud began saying thet Zubaydeh was given drugs or tortured to make him confess. (The Saudi accusation that the USG used drugs on a prisoner or tortured a prisoner to elicit a confession is groundless and outrageous.) On 7-1-03 intelligence sources related to the Association that, of the 600 foreign terrorists currently held at Gitmo, Zubaydah will be one of the first six to be tried by a U.S. military tribunal there. It will take a 2/3rd vote of the tribunal to convict, and a unanimous vote for the death penalty to apply, with full right of appeal. ] Abu al-Rahim al Nashiri:   - Saudi- captured in an undisclosed location, early November, 2002   Abu Musab Zarqari - at large, heads Al Quaida's terror against American Armed Forces in Iraq Abu Zubair al-Haili: - Saudi - captured in Morocco 6-02    Tawiq Attash Khallad - Yemeni - at large Zaid Khayr - at large Mohammed Salah - Egyptian - dead Ramzi bin Al-Shibh - Yemeni - Coordinator of the 9-11  attacks. Captured after a major gunfight in Karachi, Pakistan, 9-11-02, along with another Operations operative, Tawiq, the mastermind of the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Aden. Al-Shibh was in American hands by 9-16-02.  Tariq Anwar al-Sayyid Ahmad  - Egyptian - dead Hattam al-Yemini - Yemeni - killed by a CIA Predator fired missile in Pakistan 5-14-2005.   Bin Laden security chiefs: Saif al-Adel - Egyptian - at large. As of May 2003, has reportedly moved up to the Number 3 position overall in Al Quaida, and is being harbored by the Iranian mullahs in nothwestern Iran. He was the chief planner of the 5-03 Riyadh bombings.  Amin al-Haq - Afghan - at large   Training camp commanders: Abu Mohammed al-Masri - Egyptian-at large Ibn Al-Shaykh al-Libi - Libyan-captured  in Pakistan in a tribal area northwest of Peshawar by Pakistani forces, April, 2005 Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi - captured Special Weapons Research: Midhat Mursi - Egyptian- at large   Finance officers: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed: -Kuwaiti-captured in Quetta,  Pakistan by Pakistani Intelligence, 2-28-03 (Nice looking guy! You should see what his eight wives look like.) Khalid was the one who personally slit the throat of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. He was being detained indefinitely for questioning during the Bush Administration at Guantanamo. As of 2009, the ObamaAdministration has scheduled him for trial in the federal district court in the Southern District of New York (New York City).   Shaykh Said - Saudi - arrested in Pakistan, 2003  Abu Jafar al-Jaziri - dead Abu Salah al-Yemeni - dead Abu Rahim Riyadh - captured Ahmad Said al-Kadr - Egyptian - at large Yasser Al-Jazeeri - North African - Arrested in Lahore, Pakistan, 3-15-03    Religious scholarship: Abu Hafs - Mauritanian - dead Public Relations: Sulaiman Abu Ghaith - Kuwaiti - at large   Aides: Abu Basir al-Yamani -Yemeni - at large Abd al-Aziz al-Jamal - at large Bilal bin Marwan - Saudi - at large Saqar al-Jadawi - Saudi - at large Ahmad Omar Abdel-Rahman - Egyptian - captured Mohammed Omar Abdel-Rahman - Egyptian - dead Additionally, as of date, former leader of the Taliban Sheikh Mohammed Omar's status remains unknown. (Future information on these individuals will be updated in this specific Section. As an update for March, 2003, we can already unfortunately tell you that the Department of Justice has gotten into the habit of calling each one of these animals, upon their capture, a "top operational chief." Their correct categorical and organization chart placement within Al Quaida, on the other hand, is accurately listed in this Entry.) Q: Given that breakdown, what is the ability of Al Quaida to strike again at the U.S.? A: Bin Laden's terrorist network around the world has certainly not been destroyed, in any way shape or form. Tens of thousands of terrorists remain at large in at least 60 countries and , while they may be on the run for the time being, they are not going to settle down to quiet lives as accountants, and are instead working as we speak to reconstitute the organization and to resume its terrorist operations. Finding or capturing the Al Quaida leadership, we point out, is in itself a daunting task. Keep in mind the words of the great martyred Afghan Northern Alliance leader Massoud to CIA Counter Terror Director Cofer Black: " We've been fighting Al Quaida for four years and I've never captured one of these bastards." They do not readily surrender, and they do not negotiate. Q: Would the Hamid Karzai government be able to last without the presence of foreign troops? A: No, it would not. Warlords would overrun it, and soon the Taliban would be rearing its ugly head again. Karzai has asked the USG to see to it that his government's security force, currently numbering 4,500 foreign troops, 2,000 of whom are British, and which does not include U.S. Forces, be expanded. The USG, however, does not intend, currently, to participate in the "security force," and our allies, including the U.K., are already beginning to whine that they have committed too many units already to the security force. 1-29-02: We want to sum up the Israeli-Palestinian situation as of date for our viewers: The USG believes neither side can militarily prevail over the other and therefore there must be a Palestinian State living side by side, peacefully, with a Jewish State in Israel. The Palestinians, deceitfully (because they mouth support for the peace process) believe that, with Arab and Persian assistance, they can eventually militarily prevail and drive the Jews into the sea. Arafat in English may say one thing, but in Arabic the next day in front of his own people he says things like: "It's ours, it's ours, and to Jerusalem we go, her martyrs in the millions." [Arafat in Ramallah, 2-6-02] The Sharon government is willing, barely, to buy the U.S. position (but has its hawks wanting to return to a Greater Israel), provided the Palestinian State is permanently demilitarized (something the Palestinians will never permanently accept). Nor will the Palestinians accept permanent Jewish settlements in the West Bank nor a failure to have Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian State. Our prediction as to the future: Indefinitely continued stalemate with escalating violence until the pressure for war becomes unbearable. 1-29-02: Some excerpts from President George W. Bush's State of the Union Address pertinent to the Association's comments on this Website: "Our cause is just, and it continues. Our discoveries in Afghanistan confirmed our worst fears and showed us the true scope of the task ahead. We have seen the depth of our enemies' hatred in videos where they laugh about the loss of innocent life. And the depth of their hatred is equaled by the madness of the destruction they design.... My hope is that all nations will heed our call and eliminate the terrorist parasites who threaten their countries and our own. Many nations are acting forcefully.... But some governments will be timid in the face of terror. And make no mistake about it: If they do not act, America will.... States like [North Korea, Iran and Iraq], and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.... And all nations should know: America will do what is necessary to ensure our Nation's security.... Our war on terror is well begun, but it is only begun.... Afghanistan proved that expensive precision weapons defeat the enemy and spare innocent lives, and we need more of them. We need to replace aging aircraft and make our military more agile to put our troops anywhere in the world quickly and safely. Our men and women in uniform deserve the best weapons, the best eqipment, the best training, and they also deserve another pay raise.... And we have a great opportunity during this time of war to lead the world toward the values that will bring lasting peace. All fathers and mothers, in all societies, want their children to be educated and live free from poverty and violence. No people on Earth yearn to be oppressed, or aspire to servitude, or eagerly await the midnight knock of the secret police.... Steadfast in our purpose, we now press on. We have known freedom's price; we have shown freedom's power, and in this great conflict,...we will see freedom's victory." Amen! ...And fom the Democratic Response to the State of the Union Address delivered by U.S. House of Representatives Minority Leader Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-MO):                    "These terrorists wanted us to know them. Well, we know them now, but they do not know us, and they do not know what they started...." Amen again! 2-1-02: The Association has learned from credible sources that Al Quaida cells have planned , and are continuing to plan, simultaneously co-ordinated airplane suicide attacks on American nuclear power plants, designed to sow mass panic in the streets of America. The primary organizer of these planned attacks is a Saudi Al Quaida member named Fawaz Yahya Al Rabi'i, (DOB: 1979), travelling on Yemeni passport 00452004. Such attacks, if successful, would produce a tragedy ten times greater than the WTC because our nuclear power plants are not structured to withstand an aerial or bombing attack, which could cause meltdown, spreading nuclear contamination for a radius of hundreds of miles. Moreover, the taking out of even one plant also brings with it the probability that the electrical power grid to which it is connected would also go out, at least temporarily. These grids are highly vulnerable because there is no automatic computer bypass to transmission lines capable of sustaining the kind of  overload which might be produced by a downed plant. All these grids need to be modernized, which was proposed by the Cheney Energy Report of 2001, but  that costs money, to both prevent plants from attacks and also for automatic bypasses of downed plants to strengthened transmission lines, as a high priority of the domestic War on Terror. Right now, the federal government wants the states to pay the costs,  the states want the federal government to pay the costs, and the power companies want the consumer to pay the costs, so nothing is being done. There are a total of 144 nuclear power plants in the U.S., and a total of 4.5 million people live within a ten mile radius of those plants. If all those plants were attacked at once in a fissionable event without meltdown (which probably would not occur), all those people would have to be evacuated, or they would die of cancer. The ten mile radius evacuation would have to be enforced for at least 50 years to be on the safe side. if, on the other hand, Al Quaida smuggled an Hiroshima size nuclear bomb in a suitcase into New York, or any other major city, and set it off, 100,000 people would be killed outright by the blast, with an additional 100,000 to 200,000 killed over time by radioactive disease. As with Hiroshima in 1945, if people still wished to live in that city, they could do so, and knowing the American people, they probably would. This information was acquired on the same date Al Jazeera TV released a new tape of bin Laden, presumably made in October, 2001, saying: "The battle has switched to inside America and will continue until victory or until we meet god.... America will be led into an unbearable hell and a choking life." None of America's nuclear power plants (86 are vulnerable), the Association notes, screen workers for terrorist ties and the USG does not keep records as to how many of those employees are foreigners, nor does it attempt to identify them as such. 2-6-02: President Bush, in his 2002 State of the Union Address, decided bluntly to put our enemies in Iran, Iraq and North Korea, and their terrorist allies, on notice. President Bush likes moral clarity in foreign affairs. So do we. Some of the bleeding hearts around the world [King Abdullah II of Jordan, Iraq's neighbor to the south, is the only world leader to date to specifically endorse Bush's words] have been complaining that labelling these three states an "axis of evil" is inaccurate. We'd like to set the record straight: North Korea and its lunatic father and son leaders have sponsored terrorism against American interests for over 20 years. Iran and Iraq's foreign ministers met just last week to coordinate their foreign policies. The lunatic mullahs who run Iran are some of the most anti-American, tyrannical and murderous people on the face of the earth, and probably will have nuclear weapons within three years. They finance and sponsor terrorism against Israel in the Mid-East and against America throughout the world; the lunatic Saddam Hussein, ditto. His son, Uday, who is poised to take over Iraq if his father dies, is even a bigger psychopath than his father. All three of these states are building ballistic missiles capable of hitting the U.S. with either nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, and all three trade in ballistic missiles. If this isn't an axis of evil, than these three groups of tin-horn Hitlers have certainly provided an access for evil to flourish. Others, like the French Foreign Minister, have complained that the Bush Policy is "simplistic." It is indeed simplistic to pick fights with evil just because evil people want to kill you or enslave you or at least force you to knuckle under and collaborate in their evil, when one might choose the far safer path of shrugging one's shoulders and sending one's Jews off to the camps, as one's new masters in government request. The French enjoy peace and prosperity today because of the simple-minded determination of Great Britain and the United States to fight the Nazis and to die by the hundreds of thousands in order to make the world safe for, among others, future French foreign ministers. Simplicity works. Against evil, it may be the only thing that does. Others have complained that the Bush Policy will cause our allies to abandon us. How will we ever manage without the Saudi Navy? They might in fact abandon us - until it is clear we have won. Others have said that the Arab street will rise up against us. The "street" in any given Arab country consists of 278 state-sanctioned mullahs already preaching death to the Americans and the Jews, five state-controlled newspaper opinion columnists preaching ditto, 577,000 state security officers making sure nobody says anything to the contrary and 73 million people who would very much like to be living in New Jersey. In Kabul, they cheered and kissed our soldiers. In Baghdad, they'd love to have the chance. Others have said the new Bush Policy will mean, eventually, an open ended quagmire like Vietnam with our troops coming home in body bags. Of the past six American military expeditions, four - the Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan - largely if imperfectly succeeded. In each success, we were told that wars cannot be won from the air or by superior technology. They cannot - fully. But they can be won enough - when you have Armed Forces that are by an order of magnitude technologically superior to the armed forces of the rest of the world put together. Finally, others have said that the new Bush Policy is dangerous and expensive and may end in disaster. All this is true, but it is still a far better thing that we are doing than we have ever done, and far better than any alternative. 2-9-02: The I.N.S. says a new computer program put into place as a result of 9-11 to track foreign students who violate their student visa requirements will not be in place for another year, and even then the I.N.S. will not have enough officers to arrest more than a few of the projected number of violators. The I.N.S. plan may also be sabotaged by U.S. colleges and universities which refuse to cooperate. We knew something like this would happen when on 9-15-01, we made our Recommendation #11 to the Nation. Instead of this penchant for over reliance on computers establishing probable cause for offenses the Government seems to have, we proposed, instead, random surveillance limited to Arab and Iranian males in the U.S. Our proposal was measured, would have been a lot cheaper, and probably more effective than the I.N.S. plan, which now seems won't be effective at all. 2-12-02: WAR WITH IRAQ President Bush has made the firm determination to eliminate Saddam Hussein in his first term, the Association has learned. We think it's likely he'll follow some, if not all, of the Recommendations we made as to how to do so, in one of our Forum entries on the Homepage.  Vice-President Cheney will be dispatched to ten Mid-East countries next month to tell our "friends" there to get on board. Given the seriousness and the sensitivity of this mission, the U.S. press was not invited to join him by the White House. The important states here, by the way, are Turkey and the states of the Arabian peninsula. One thing Cheney will also do is tell Sharon to lay off Arafat at least until its over in Iraq, because the heat of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict makes it difficult for the USG to keep our Arab allies in line, or even to have Arab allies in the first place, but internal political pressures within Israel (Benyamin Netanyahu is poised to take over the Likud leadership if Sharon, of all people, is perceived as being too soft) will likely not make Sharon too accomodating.  Saddam Hussein has long flounted U.N. resolutions.   Saddam is 65, and has, we point out, many enemies in the prominent families of Iraq, many of whom he has murdered over the years because he thought they threatened his power base. He officially came to power in 1979, when he took over in a coup against one of his relatives, but a little background on Iraq is in order. The modern history of the country really dates from 1958, when a vicious anti-American general, Abdul Ariq Kassem, took over in a coup during which King Faisal, the young, pro-western Hashemite king, was murdered. World Tone News called it at the time "an important news story" in American theatres. That has turned out, almost 50 years later, to be an understatement. Saddam was at that point a pro-Soviet socialist Ba'athist (and anti-Kassem on personal grounds) who wanted to unite the entire Arab world in a socialist and Arab jihad against the United States, which has been a driving force in his foreign policy ever since. He later had Kassem murdered. He avidly studied both Marx and Lenin. During his years in power, he built presidential palaces for himself worth over $2 billion, with money from Iraq's oil revenues, was affably greeted by, among others, almost all the leaders of the Soviet Union for his pro-Soviet stances, Kofi Annan, Jacques Chirac and Reagan Administration special envoy (now Secretary of Defense) Donald Rumsfeld. When Saddam started a war with Iran in the 1980s which lasted eight years, in which Iraq was outnumbered 3 - 1, which cost Iraq 200,000 soldiers dead, and which neither side won, the Reagan Administration loved it. Although no one said so out loud, this Newstand can safely say the Reagan Administration rightfully refected an American  feeling of 'a pox on both your houses,' and anything to stop Iran's Khomeini. The United States, and its coalition, liberated Kuwait, which Saddam had invaded, in 1991. On-going bitterness between him and two American administrations followed, as the U.S. imposed no-fly zones on Saddam's air forces in both northern and southern Iraq, and vaguely attempted to help the anti-Saddam Kurds in northern Iraq. Saddam began to flirt with non-Iraqi Muslim jihadists and terrorists. BY 1995, the CIA had put together an operational plan, with proposed USG assistance, but no troops, with one Iraqi armored commander and Kurdish forces, to stage a coup d'etat against Saddam, and to kill him. 36 hours before the plan was to go into effect, then-President Bill Clinton personally pulled the plug. Saddam is feared rather than loved by the Iraqi people. He is vain to a point (his palaces, bought with his oil wealth, have solid gold doorknobs), dyes his gray hair black, has a paunch he covers up with $5,000 Savile Row designer suits (he's not the only world figure do do so; former President Bill Clinton does the same thing), and intends to rule Iraq forever; but he is not a hedonist. Saddam is a sizable man (6'1", 230 pounds), which counts for a lot in Iraqi politics, but limps from a slipped disk in his back. He is grooming both his sons, Uday, truly a murderous, alcoholic psychopath (paralyzed from the waist down because one of his enemies shot him); and Qusay, Qusay Hussein   to succeed him if the time should ever come. Saddam is basically a secular socialist, but he has recently reconfigured the Iraqi flag to showcase the words Allahu Akbar - "God is Great." Bottom line , Saddam's simply a thug. UPDATE: 5/23/2005: The dictator Saddam in captivity in Baghdad, in his underpants, 2004 - He doesnt't have as much of a paunch, anymore, in the opinion of our Editors. 2/14/2002: Echoing the beliefs of the overwhelming majority of the Association's members, President Bush announced a new anti-drug policy. He linked drug users with terrorists, which is both fair and accurate. When people purchase drugs, the President said, they put money in the hands of terrorists. As part of the policy, the USG will triple antidrug funding to Peru, and hopes to resume drug surveillance flights there in March. The Association believes we shouldn't be surprised, either, if we see an enlarged U.S. Forces effort in Colombia also, in a stepped up war against the drug running Colombian guerrillas, the FARC. 2-13-02: The Association has learned from verified sources that federal aviation authorities and technology companies will, within the next two months, begin testing a vast air security system designed to instantly pull together every passenger's travel history, living arrangements and a wealth of other personal and demographic information. The system in place currently is called Computer Assisted Passenger Screening, or CAPS and, if you haven't been singled out by it as an innocent American traveler, consider yourself lucky. The Government tries to keep its profile indicia a secret, probably because it intuits the major weakness with the system, as with the new system, is the validity of those indicators but, we know what they are, and we'll tell you: males travelling alone; buying one-way tickets; paying cash for a ticket; and no prior travel history. Since CAPS went into effect, millions of innocent Americans have been, in effect, "arrested" at our airports or airports abroad, and hundreds of millions of dollars have been stolen (if the suspect was carrying over $2,000 in cash) by our own Government from more innocents under civil RICO Act provisions, until Congress stopped that practice in 2000 (for federal law enforcement officers only), whereupon the FBI immediately asked Congress to re-institute it. Not a single terrorist was ever caught by a CAPS indicator. CAPS did "profile" nine out of 19 hijackers on 9-11-01, primarily because they either bought one-way tickets at the counter, or because of questions about their i.d.s (as foreigners). None of the nine were even questioned and CAPS failed to even profile the other ten. Some law enforcement people say this proves CAPS works. It proves, in fact, the opposite. No terrorist was stopped; none was questioned, although in America the day before, perhaps 1,000 innocent Americans were questioned because CAPS profiled them. Ten of the terrorists weren't even identified by this computer system. So, in America that one day of 9-10, the country wasted tens of thousands of dollars or more with CAPS questioning innocent Americans, and failed to stop a single terrorist. We would have done better, and more cheaply by far, if, in the 24 hours leading up to the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon, we had simply refused to let any Arab or Muslim male get on a plane. The new system will include a thousand or more profile indicators and, again, both the Government and the technology companies are trying to keep them a secret. But, again, we know the major ones, and we'll tell you: the old four, certainly; whether or not you have a credit history; prior or current travel to "odd" destinations; an address where any person on a watch list previously lived; coordinated travel with males (plural) who are not relatives; prior association with anyone on a watch list, sifting through "seven layers" of your associates; links between individuals travelling on different, but simultaneous, flights; whether you own your own home; whether you own a car; your projected income; whether you own a telephone; what magazines you subscribe to; links to restaurants, hotels or parts of any country thought to be favored by terrorists; and phone calls to anyone who ever has been a criminal suspect. If the indicators create suspicion, your face will be compared to your database driver license photo to see if it matches. From the listed indicators of your "threat," you can imagine how many databases these police state characters intend to search, and how extensive that search will be. All air travellers will be color coded based on a total threat score of points: Green, for no problem; Yellow, question; and Red, apprehend. Additionally, every passenger on every flight would receive a number, from one on up, on a curve no less, rating his or her "threat" level vis-a-vis every other passenger on board; the pilots, flight crew and any air marshal (of course) would know everybody's number. The technology companies, when questioned about the new system, reply with a lot of mumbo-jumbo designed to prove how "scientific" the system is. One guy talked about a mix of "transaction analysis" and "behavior analysis." Another talked about a "night-and-day difference" from CAPS. We think he means the new system uses a thousand indicia, instead of just four. Another talked about scientific "models of normal activity." Another, at HNC Software, talked about "neural networks (he's talking about computers) which can learn patterns and relationships, and thus prevent fraud." Another one of these guys told us that his computer's networks were keyed in to the terrorist who was constantly changing his behavior patterns to throw off the law. What about the lazy terrorist?, we'd like to ask. The problem with both systems, old and new, Association security analysts say, of course, is not in their science but in their non-science. All the indicators being used come, in fact, not from science, but from some law enforcement officer's intuitive judgment that there is a relationship between that indicator and the probability that the indicated person is a criminal. Some of these judgments boggle the logical mind for their lack of a logical nexus; others, taken together, prove that just about everybody is guilty. The bottom line is that most, if not all, of these screens to decide who is "normal" (which is what all profile indicators are) are put in place by a self-appointed elite (in a democratic society, we add) who are decidedly abnormal themselves, but who define "abnormality" as simply anyone who acts differently than they do. Let's ask some questions: How do you like being singled out as a terrorist if your're a male; if you can't get credit; do you determine who previously lived at your address?; because you're a renter who can't afford a house; because a prior DUI means no car ownership; because your boyfriend or husband has a felony record he didn't tell you about; because you don't look like your driver license photo; because you're poor; because you subscribe to an Arabic language magazine; because you once visited your mother in Podunk, Idaho; because your favorite restaurant is where a terrorist once dined; because you once called your brother who, a year later, robbed a bank; because you and a friend happen to be flying on two different flights at the same hour? (Of course, racial profiling won't be used in the new system, the technology companies say, because it's illogical. It won't have to be, we say: once black Americans get a dose of this system, we doubt any African-Americans will ever fly again.) And how do you like it, Mr. or Ms. single, white Republican patriotic American, when you're on a flight with a bunch of nuns and the stewardess serving you your cocktail in First Class knows you're ranked #1 as the terrorist threat on board? And how about that feature that has computers telling airlines to arrest you, no questions asked? That one sure involves due process. Let's also give you an actual example of how these police state assumptions might actually work in real life: According to the wealthy owner of Montreal's poshiest sushi restaurant, he saw, in the last month, a disreputable looking, "poor", "gangster-looking" single male, with a one-day old beard, wearing a skull cap, and with his hands in a bag he was holding, coming out of his restaurant's men's room, and quickly exiting. The restaurant owner accosted the man in the street, practically tackling him. The arrestee: renowned movie star and (as far as we know) patriotic, and multimillionaire, American movie star George Clooney (nephew of Rosemary Clooney), who had just spent $200 on lunch in the restaurant, and tipped the waiters $60 to boot. There is nothing, our fellow Americans, that science can due to alleviate these problems with the assumptions about criminal behavior built into these systems, because science did not create these assumptions. Those assumptions were created by security types gone overboard; security types who love a system which justifies them questioning everybody, and who transparently create assumptions about behavior designed to "scientifically" justify such a result. "Due Process of Law" and "Freedom of Movement" are not parts of their vocabulary. Rick Steeves, acclaimed tour guide and tour guide author, has said on PBS-TV that he wants "travel to be accessible." Well, Rick, all travel is not accessible to the average person and, if it were, you'd be put out of business (and we love ya', Rick). The reason Rick's business exists is because of the outrageous difficulties both governments and local businesses put in the way of unfettered, free travel for the average American. Steeves is right about one thing, though, and that is that unfettered travel for Americans is good because that travel provides an educational experience par none, and good unto itself because, in our opinion, it teaches "us" about "them," and whether they are our friends or our enemies, and we do have both. All travel, regardless whether it is for a three year old or a 90-year old, involves political education (that is why dictatorships historically try to restrict it), and the Association clearly stands for the unfettered freedom of that education for all Americans. Here's the deal, America: a recent Gallup poll in the Arab-Muslim world showed overwhelming, and we mean overwhelming, majorities who denied Arabs or Muslims flew planes into the WTC; hated both America and President Bush; and said they'd be willing to strap a nuclear bomb on their back to nuclearize either Israel or an American city. We may have the stray Timothy McVeigh, that's for sure, but the real threat, the real political deal, today comes from the Arabs and the Muslims, and we don't need CAPS or CAPS II to tell us that. We need real security in our American public transportation system that focuses on the real threat as a matter of common sense, not a computerized system whose greatest claim to fame is that it's "equal" and "randomly" assesses everybody. "Everybody" is not the threat. CAPS is bad enough. The new system is un-American. Congress and the President should deny it any funding, even to test. That's our opinion. You can contact them, using the appropriate link at the bottom of our Homepage, and tell them what you think. P.S.: The indicator about an Arab male using a debit card to buy five seats on one flight for four other males sitting separately from him might work, but we won't hold our breath. True science can assist us in making predictions as to whether a terrorist attack has surreptiously occurred, for example, in emergency room entries in a given city, but true science is nowhere to be found in these assumptions built into these systems discussed here. [Ed. Note: What about charters? Very few Americans know, though probably every foreign Islamic terrorist knows, that all American charter flights are exempt from airline security checks, although there is a proposal on the boards to subject charters with 17 or more passengers to them. Charter flights are up 28% post 9-11, while non-charter U.S. flights are down 10%, which is proof positive American airline passengers and, we might as well add, terrorists, don't like CAPS I or CAPS II. If charters continue to be exempted from current anti-terrorism checks, look for charter airlines to "take off" even further. And why do private aircraft not even have to file flight plans? Speaking of exemptions, there's a major terrorist loophole big enough for a truck to drive through.] [UPDATE 8-1-03: Although consistently opposed by the Association in this Article, and throughout this website and in other policy proposals we made, and for the specific reasons we have always cited as being flawed in conceptualization, CAPS II is basically being begun to be implemented at our airports by the Transportation Security Agency as of date. We still oppose its conceptualization. It targets entirely the wrong people. Groups like the ACLU opposed it for entirely different reasons. The Administration, especially the Department of Homeland Security, made lukewarm efforts, reported on this Newstand, in the years 2002 and 2003, to turn the direction of CAPS II on to some of the paths this Association suggested, but they failed, in the final analysis, to have the political will to stand up to people like  Tranportaion Secretary Norman Mineta. Initial reports from our airports suggest that airport federal security workers, simple folks all, are using the CAPS II computer records to simply single out air travellers for the 3rd degree for having bad credit (70% of Americans have bad credit) or for bouncing  a bad check. Stay tuned.]   [UPDATE 10-4-03: CAPS II is already going into effect, with most major airports in the U.S. scheduled to fully have the system by 2004. Our opposition to the stupidity and counterproductivenes of the variables selected by humans to be placed into the system as indicators of terroristic propensities contiue unabated. We heard  an INS officer interviewed recently for a TV Newshour say: "Don't take it personal. Terrorists and smugglers look exactly like you." The problem that officer had is that he never defined the word "you," nor could he.] UPDATE 10/14/2004: Secretary Mineta, and his TSA, threw themselves an 'awards' party this year. The taxpayers paid for it. Cost: Millions of dollars. The wording of the  awards given imply the awards were from disinterested third parties. The awards actually were from, exclusively, the TSA, to, exclusively, the TSA. Part of the awards were bonuses driving up the Treasury deficit even higher, for 'a job well done.' These people are, in this Newstand's opinion, nuts. This Association, a registered U.S. charity, does not give awards to itself and then pretend they're from somebody else. This Association, a charity, does not pay for people to write or sing the words to the "Star Spangled Banner" on this website. This Association does not pay out of program service funds, or any of its funds for that matter, huge amounts for wine and cheese for its members at any of its meetings, not to mention a phony 'awards' ceremony. What's good enough for a simple American veterans' group ought to be good enough for Mineta's TSA. One American charity, a wine and cheese association headquartered in New York City originally founded by the late Julia Childs, as we spaek, is under, at a minimum, intense media scrutiny for doing exactly what Mineta's TSA did. The implication of that scrutiny, as this Newstand's staff reads the article in the New York Times, was that criminal charges should be brought.   UPDATE 3/24/2009: Steeves Up to It Again in Iran   Newstand Staff                                          Rick is apparently at it again with his newly produced video travelogue promoting the country of Iran which is widely being featured on PBS TV as of date.  In it, Rick says things like, “Khomeini gave the people of Iran hope, and that he opposed Western decadence.”  This Newstand assumes that the purposes of these travelogues that Rick produces are to encourage American visitors and tourists to visit Iran and in the other countries of choice.  It is the opinion of this Newstand that the Ayatollah Khomeini gave nobody whatsoever “hope” in Iran, other than those Persians who were already anti-American in their heart.  It is also the opinion of this Newstand staff that there is no Western decadence going on in the United States of America that we need to be apologetic for whatsoever, as opposed to the current dictatorial society the Persian Mullahs and this low-life anti-American Khomeini imposed on Iran. While the Association has not posted Iran on its Travel Advisories Page on its website, because the Association believes that most of the people of Iran are good people who do not harbor anti-American feelings in their heart, this program that Rick Steeves produced is outrageous in its political statements and should not be a cause for any American citizen to want to visit Iran.  Iran has a long history going back thousand of years before the birth of Christ to “god emperors” like Xerxes, megalomaniacs who perceive of themselves as the greatest gift to humanity ever made, and as divine, and as representing a divine kingdom desiring to conquer and enslave Western civilization.  This tradition goes back a long way in Iran and Persia, which was Iran’s old name. If you do not believe us, you can ask the likes of the Spartans or the ancient Greeks.  This tradition lives and breathes today in the hearts and minds of people such as the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the Grand Council of the Mullahs who rule Iran today.  There is no quarter whatsoever that can be given to these sorts of hostile anti-American enemies, and anybody in the foreign policy mechanism  of the government of the United States which says otherwise is mistaken.  These individuals seek the imposition of their dictatorial ways of life on our ways of life in the West by force.  Those kind of criminals are not to be negotiated with under any circumstances.  As Leonides of Sparta at Thermopylae said, “If you want our spears, come and get them.”   There is no other negotiation their people need.   It is not about their weapons.  It is about them.     2-13-02: Al Quaida gunmen come to within 50 yards of the U.S. perimeter guarding the U.S. base at Kandahar airport, in a well organized night assault. 2-14-02: President Musharraf of Pakistan,  in Washington for meetings, has asked President Bush for $3 billion in debt writeoff for Pakistan and $5 billion in new aid. The Association supports these requests. See our entry in the War on Terror Section above for 1-15-02, but also see our entry for 1-20-02. Musharraf also wants Air Force planes, both fighters and bombers, to be provided, for use against India. This request needs to be moderated. Musharraf also said "There is no room for theocracy in Islam" (Bravo!), but refused to endorse Bush's "axis of evil" theory as applied to Iraq, Iran and North Korea. 2-14-02: The Sheikh of Bahrain has declared himself a "constitutional" monarch, and made other internal political moves designed to shore up his position in expected future turmoil in the Islamic states of the Mid-East. Bahrain is expected to fully support the coming war against Saddam Hussein. The backfield's in motion, folks, and we'll bring you the real news and analysis of substance here first. Meanwhile, 72-year old Yasser Arafat pulled a gun on his security chief, 48-year old Jibril Rajoub, impliedly threatening him with death. Feeling the pressure, Yasser? Hamas also this date, in a major escalation of hard core weaponry, attacked an Israeli tank column in Gaza with Iranian-supplied anti-tank rockets, automatic weapons and machine guns, killing three Israelis. 2-18-02: U.S. bombing raids in Afghanistan, suspended since 1-14-02, re-commence. The targets were neither the Taliban nor Al Quaida, but anti-interim government warlords' forces near the southeastern city of Khost. The interim government of Hamid Karzai has requested that U.S. ground forces be part of an extended peacekeeping force for Afghanistan, but the Association believes this is unlikely. Instead, U.S. ground forces will probably be used primarily to root out the last remnants of Al Quaida and the Taliban, and the U.S. will put pressure on its allies to provide the extended peacekeeping forces. The U.S. is, however, providing technical assistance to build a new Afghan army with fighters loyal to the central government, but since we're basically starting from scratch, this is a process that could take years. 2-20-02: Al Quaida, using Moroccan operatives, has targetted the U.S. Embassy in Rome, and perhaps the civilian population of Rome itself, for cyanide attacks, the Italian government has announced. Association analysts say Italy was targetted for four reasons: One, the ease with which Arabs without identification can move about the country (Europe has rules on paper for all foreigners to report in to the police about once every 30 days, but Islamic illegals have blithely ignored those rules for years); Two, the support of Prime Minister Berlasconi for the Bush position on the War on Terror; Three, Muslim fanatics' view of the Catholic Church, which has great influence in Italy, as a sponsor of the anti-Islamic Crusades dating back a thousand years; and Four, the support of Italian-Americans as a demographic group, for Bush in current U.S. polls. 2-21-02: [WARNING: This Entry may not be suitable for children.] The Wall Street Journal has announced that Daniel Pearl, 38, a Jewish journalist for the paper, has been murdered by his Pakistani kidnappers. Pearl had written a story right before he was kidnapped that the crackdown on Islamic terror in Pakistan by President Musharraf was not all it had been cracked up to be (and it is not, as we have pointed out in this Section on the War on Terror). Pearl was also investigating links between Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, and Al Quaida. These barbarians slit Pearl's throat, then decapitated him, and then stabbed his dead body repeatedly. Agents of the Pakistani Security Service may have been involved. The motivation of the animals who killed Danny Pearl, an American Blue Grass music fan, was to intimidate Pakistan against the U.S., and to frighten Jews the world over. His captors, in their second e-mail, said they will kill any American or Jew they can lay their hands on. We, too, at the Association, are heartbroken at his death. His martyrdom, at the hands of these Muslim fanatics, makes a mockery of everything these bullies allegedly believe in. We at the Association believe that justice cannot come too swiftly or too strongly for these truly evil people who, like most evil people the world over, claim they're good people, and the sadistic execution of this Wall Street Journal reporter should silence all those who try to draw a moral equivalency between terrorists, killers and drug dealers on the one hand, and civilized societies on the other. May God Bless Daniel Pearl. [Ed. Note: Daniel Pearl's body was discovered on 5-16-02.] 2-22-02: The de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, announces he is opposed to any U.S. "attack" on Iraq. An Italian court convicts the head of Al Quaida's transportation division in Europe, a Tunisian, Ben-Khemais, for conspiracy to transport explosives in Italy. Sentence: 5 years! Outrageous! This animal should have been, and should be, executed. In China, on the same date, President Bush pretended the USG and China are partners in the War on Terror. At best, China is a half-partner. But Bush's dipolomacy may still work, especially if we win the War on Terror. Bush, however, could not get China's Communist rulers to commit they would not sell ballistic missile technology to Iran, an axis of evil country, and China will, the Association predicts, continue to sell that technology to that mullah-run anti-American government. 2-23-02: Jonas Savimbi, 67, a freedom fighter in Angola, and the leader of the UNITA party, has been murdered by the forces of the MPLA, the socialist and terrorist group that has ruled Angola, on the west coast of Africa, since the Portuguese withdrew from their former colony in 1975. Savimbi, a pro-American and believer in free enterprise, founded UNITA in 1966 to oust the Portuguese, but the socialist MPLA, supported by Castro's military and intelligence forces, actually seized control of the capital, Luanda, in 1977. Since that time, the MPLA dictator, "President" Jose Eduardo dos Santos, has tightened his one man control over the country, rigging an election against Savimbi in 1992. Savimbi was recognized by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 in a visit to Washington, and UNITA had the support of CIA covert assistance groups. USG policy began a subtle, and hypocritical, in our opinion, shift to acceptance of the MPLA after the Soviet Union fell, and the MPLA leadership began accepting "fees" from U.S. oil companies to drill in oil rich Angolan waters. You may not think Savimbi, or Savimbi's death, or anything that happens in Africa, is important, but it is. It is a sign of things to come, or which might come. 2-24-02: A Colombian presidential candidate, Ingrid Betancourt, has been kidnapped by the drug-dealing terrorist group FARC in a rebel-infested area. This would be like a U.S. presidential candidate being kidnapped by a group of terrorists in, say, Alabama, during a campaign stop. Colombia is closer to Miami than Chicago is. UPDATE: As of 5-5-03, Betancourt had still not been heard of, and FARC had seized 60 government hostages, and had begun a practice of murdering the kidnap victims as a matter of policy, if government troops were closing in on them. It is outrageous to this Newstand that elements of the world media like the BBC would refer to these FARC murders as "executions." UPDATE 7-2-2008: Betancourt, after six years in captivity in the hands of the anti-American thug Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez backed FARC, was freed today by Colombian troops in a military operation  with assistance directly provided by US intellelligence. Both the Newstand and the Association are ecstatic at her freedom. Betancourt, back in 2002 at the date of her capture by these thugs, was a relatively minor central-left Colombian presidential candidate. Today, at her press conference upon release, she neglected to thank the United States and the Bush Administration for its role in her freedom, and also neglected to say "Viva Columbia." 2-25-02: The Association has learned that the hunt for bin Laden is becoming frustrating within the highest circles of the USG. The latest conventional wisdom is that bin Laden is still hiding somewhere, probably in a cave, near the Afghan-Pakistan border. A big part of the belief that bin Laden is not dead is that there is no "chatter" to the effect that he is, in intelligence cables. 2-26-02: The I.R.S. will be donating two worn out computers they had intended to throw away, to the Karzai government, so that the Afghans can monitor the expenditures of the billions they are about to receive in foreign aid. This is not exactly what the Association had in mind when in our 1-20-02 entry on the War on Terror we called for "U.S. auditors" to monitor those expenditures. 3-02: U.S. Special Forces trainers arrive in Yemen. (See immediately above, our entry for 1-9-02.) 3-13-02: The USG says we do not recognize the re-election of Robert Mugabe, 78, with 22 years in power, as President of Zimbabwe, because of the taint of a fraudulent election. According to Mugabe's government, he won with 56% of the vote over his opponent, the reformist Morgan Tsivangirai, 49. A few notes on Mugabe: He's a terrorist, in our opinion, and always has been. Recently, he's been sponsoring Zimbabwean "veterans groups" to attack and murder white farmers in country in an attempt to drive them out and seize their land. The Organization of African Unity supported the legitimacy of Mugabe's re-election, as did originally the Communists who control the ANC in post-Mandela South Africa. But then South Africa and the generals who control Nigeria got frightened by U.S. and Commonwealth opposition to him and began running away from him. We need to do something about this thug; he is a truly evil person and we need to do something about him now. (Bush also, along with the EU, froze this scumbag's bank accounts, and forbade him from travelling to the U.S.) ZANU (Mugabe's party), whose ministers are all corrupt, unfortunately has plenty of people willing to step into Mugabe's shoes. 3-15-02: Well, amazing news here, the USG has a contingency plan for the use of small nuclear weapons against the axis of evil countries plus Syria and Libya if they attack the U.S. with biochem weapons. Well, amazing! And the liberals certainly don't like it. For everybody's information, the Pentagon has had thousands of contingency plans developed since 1940 for every possible circumstance and if we didn't have these plans, these same folks would be criticizing the USG for being caught with its pants down. The Bush White House deserves credit for fleshing out this idea, so we'd know what to do, and what the effect would be, if this scenario ever materialized, and for adding Syria to the list, as the Association suggested in its 1-24-02 War on Terror News and Analysis entry. 3-18-02: Britain doubles its forces to the combat force in Afghanistan, with 1400 new Royal Marine commandos (the 45th Royal Marine Commando Group). Good news, not because these British troops will be permanently used (or needed) for combat purposes against Al Quaida, but because they can be used for peacekeeping purposes, which the USG is reluctant to use our Armed Forces for. 3-27-02: The secret word on Cheney's trip to the Mid-East on Saddam: Private sources have told the Association that our "allies" in the Middle East told Cheney that they would make public statements against "American strikes" on Iraq but that if America took out Saddam quickly it might be O.K., or if the USG secretly built up opposition to Saddam within Iraq and, as a climax, took him out quickly, this might also be O.K. Our spin: "Good!" Our "friends" just told us how to do it. 3-28-02: Iraq pledges at the Arab Summit never to invade Kuwait again. They're scared. Saddam is frightened. By the end of President Bush's first term is the time to finish this menace off. That's our opinion. 3-28-02: The Justice Department announces it will seek a death sentence against Zacharias Moussaoui, an Algerian with French citizenship, the "20th hijacker," on conspiracy charges. There is a good case for conviction of Moussaoui. The problem is with the death penalty. The Chirac government has officially objected, something we, as Americans, should hold against them. If Moussaoui is sentenced to death, this case will go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and it will be over ten years before he is executed, if ever. The Association thinks he should be. 4-3-02: The PBS-TV Lehrer Report puts out a story that at least 6,000 fanatic Arab or Persian Muslim foreigners are felony or immigration fugitives in the U.S., on the run but still here, that the INS is searching for. While this is a high figure, it is just an estimate and Association research, drawn from intelligence sources, indicates the actual figure for this class of fugitives in the U.S. is much, much higher, perhaps as high as 30,000, and that most of these individuals are truly dangerous Al Quaida sympathizers. Our mistake, as we see it, is that we treat these monsters as primarily a law enforcement problem, "law enforcement" meaning the Constitution restricts the way we legally approach these people. These people are not a law enforcement problem. They are a military, and a war, problem. Accordingly we should track them down as a priority, and then kill them. 4-1-02: For the month of 3-02, 1,000 Israelis were murdered by Palestinian-Muslim terrorists, 250 per week. At the height of the Vietnam War, by comparison, we were losing 100 men per week, enough to cause us to flee Vietnam. We had a population of 225 million back then; Israel has a population of under 10 million today. Simple math tells us Israel cannot stand much more. 4-4-02: President Bush begins speaking out on the terrorist bombers attacking Israel. He says: "Suicide bombers are not martyrs; they are murderers...and governments like Iraq that reward the sons and daughters [of these murderers] with money [their oil wealth] are truly evil." [Association note: Saddam pays $25,000 per widow and orphan of any Palestinian suicide bomber killed. This money comes out of Saddam's oil wealth, which comes almost exclusively from oil royalties paid for by American and European auto drivers. As of date, the U.S. buys more oil from Iraq than any other nation. The Association has also learned that the Saudi Interior Ministry (their secret police) pays $5300 to the relatives of every suicide bomber. The Saudi Foreign Minister says that these are not subsidies for terror. He's a liar.] A suicide bomber, the Association points out, is not, contrary to popular opinion, a sole kid who got it into his head one day to make a bomb, went down into his cellar, put a few things together, walked into a randomly selected hotel, and blew everybody up. Suicide bombers are, instead, Hamas and Al Jamaa Brigade soldiers, part of an organized movement, a Muslim anti-Zionist, anti-U.S. cult of death; they are programmed by that highly organized movement, and supplied by that movement with their devices, psychological support, logistics, targets, and plans. 4-8-02: A few of the Association's considered opinions after contemplating the state of the War on Terror to date: All of us have thrown the word "terrorism" around a lot since 9-11, without any definition of it, but terrorism, meaning a deliberate attack on innocent people, has been around for over 2,000 years. Terrorism is designed to break the will of civilians to resist the political cause of the terrorist but, mostly, in world history, it has been defeated. Terrorism is not a criminal problem, and should not be treated primarily as a matter of crime, for that is a waste of time. It is , instead, a political, military and a war problem. Terrorists are all politicians who have declared war on another society, and should be treated as such by the attacked society, with no result acceptable other than the total destruction or unconditional surrender of the terrorists. Terrorists may not be prisoners of war as defined by the Geneva Convention, but they are most certainly enemies of war as defined by common sense. And it is a truism that if you support or comfort terror, then you too are a terrorist. Unfortunately, killing, simply, the top echelon of a terrorist network, is also not effective enough, because there are plenty of people to replace them. The terrorist seeks to instill fear in the common man, woman and child among his potential victims, that none of them know where the next bullet or bomb will come from. It takes a thief to catch a thief. To fight terror, the anti-terrorists must instill the same fear in the population that supports terror that they, likewise, and in equal measure, do not know where and when the next bullet is coming from. This is a lesson the U.S. should have learned from Vietnam, but didn't. It is a lesson the Government of Israel has still to learn, and a lesson the USG, in its war against terror abroad, should take heed. 4-9-02: The INS proposes new regulations limiting all foreign tourist and business visitor visas to 30 days. This regulation is, unfortunately, part of a pattern of proposals we have discussed in this Section, all of which have the consequence of restricting the absolute freedom of movement of the innocent American citizen, instead of enhancing that freedom, as we originally recommended in our 9-15-01 Recommendation to the Nation #15. How do INS regulations dealing with foreigners restrict Americans freedom to travel?, you ask. The INS reg applies to all countries, instead of targetting the troublemakers, which we would have been in favor of. This "target everybody" approach is basically reflective of a politically correct attitude in prosecuting the War on Terror coming out of Washington which seems to be deathly afraid of somebody yelling religious, racial, or country of national origin discrimination. That fear in turn leads to some very ineffective policies, or to policies which have some very deleterious long term unintended consequences for the innocent American public, our business travelers, and the American economy. Transplanted foreigners like Mossaoui aside, the people who are attacking us with terror are Muslims or people whose original country of origin is Arab or Persian. Non-Muslims did not drive planes into the World Trade Center, nor did Mexicans or Canadians. There is no reason to lump these countries in with the rotten apples. Target the Muslim, the Arab and the Persian on his visa application; you can interrogate him about his religious beliefs, it is constitutional, and if they complain or yell foul, ignore them; and do the work we pay you to do, instead of issuing blanket regulations. The unintended consequences for Americans and America in these blanket regulations are these: The way the visa game is played internationally, something the INS doesn't seem to comprehend, is based on tit for tat. If we limit every country's visitors to 30 days, each country is going to do the same to us, something they don't all do now. The average American tourist may not be able to see all of France or Italy in 30 days, and the American businessman in Germany or Russia or Canada may not be able to close a deal there for the sale of American goods or services within 30 days. But the German, Canadian or Arab business visitor to France won't be subject to any such limitation and thus his business will be at a competitive advantage over the American one. Both imports and exports will suffer, along with the jobs and the portion of the GNP dependent on them. And is it fair to say that the Japanese tourist with so much money to spend, can see Honolulu, Hollywood and the Grand Canyon, but then must return home, even though he wanted to go on and see Manhattan and Disney World? [Ed. Note: After extensive lobbying by the Association to the Governors of the States, we finally acheived a breakthrough on this issue: Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, the President's own brother, said he opposes this proposed 30-day rule on 6-19-02, for the same reasons the Association laid out in this entry.]  [UPDATE 10-23-03: France, Germany, and Spain have now been placed in a visa waiver progra. Canada has always been exempt.] 4-10-02: Saddam announces an Iraqi oil boycott of the West (for 30 days, he says) because of his hatred of the Israelis, showing off how rich he really is (Trust us, he can afford it.). For two months now, as the rest of the world blinked, to use the President's expression, the Saudis and their friends in OPEC have been increasing the price of crude exported to America. We feared they would do this immediately post 9-11. They didn't. They were scared back then. Now they're not scared anymore, and have decided to plunge this dagger into America's back. The Association's position is that it's time they were scared again. [The Association notes that the Saudi Foreign Minister said on ABC-TV's "This Week" on 4-28-02 that Saudi Arabia would not use oil as a weapon against the U.S., but it is our opinion that whenever they raise the crude price (including urging OPEC to do the same) more than slightly above breakeven, when the U.S. is under threat, just to distribute those profits to the Al Saud family, then they already are using oil as a weapon against the U.S.] 4-17-02: Usama bin Laden appears on a tape by Al Jazeera TV, believed to be made in 12-01, expressing glee for the American deaths on 9-11-01. Also, on the same date, former King Zog (now calling himself Zahir Shah) returns to Afghanistan from Rome, not as King, but as a "unifying figure," designed to provide more stability to the anti-Taliban interim government. Zog was forced to flee in the first place, a long time ago, because of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism against him in Afghanistan. To give you a credible insight as to how crazy these fundamentalists were, and are, when Zog signed, back then, a student exchange treaty with Poland, Islamic fanatics rioted in protest in their then parliament in Kabul and said, "This will mean Afghan girls dancing naked in the streets of Warsaw." 4-23-02: HEY, YOU GUYS IN THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION, QUIT QUOTING FROM OUR WEBSITE WITHOUT GIVING US CREDIT! This Association has made numerous entries on this Site, dating back to 9-15-01, attacking random surveillance at our airports, random surveillance incorporated into CAPS I and CAPS II, and the failure to simply target foreign Muslims as such as part of national transportation security for fear of what is called "political correctness," a fear that profiling based on national origin or religion was somehow unlawful. Well, obviously Director of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, or someone at the White House, was studying those comments, because we were just about the only group in America making those remarks. At a Press Conference on 4-22-02, Director Ridge, in a clear break with current Transportation Department policy, said that foreigners (He means, in Washingtonese, Muslim foreigners, just like we were saying all along, but we're just more bold in the terms we use.) were the real threats at American airports, and that random checks (including, again, we point out, the computerized theories of random checks built into the heart of both CAPS I and II) were a waste of money. He could've been quoting almost directly off the comments on this Website. Since 9-11, this Association points out, these computerized checks have harassed Jewish grandmothers in wheelchairs; forced U.S. Congressman John Dingell (D-Mich.), a 46-year U.S. House of Representatives veteran, to drop his pants; caused a humiliating carry-on baggage search of former Vice-President Dan Quayle, in which his toenail clippers were seized; caused another unnecessary carry-on search of U.S. Senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.); and caused a full-body search of a Florida Republican lobbyist flying from Tallahassee to Tampa; and countless other idiotic arrests and harassments of innocent Americans with nothing to gain by blowing up airliners, but were too frightened to complain about it. What Director Ridge didn't tell you, but this Association will, is that while these morons with the Transportation Department, as a result of their computer profiles, were searching anti-Hamas Jewish grandmothers at the airports at a national expense of millions of dollars per day, for each such search by each such moron, it meant millions of dollars, and one less moron, to catch the terrorist Arab Muslim trying to sneak a bomb on board one of our planes. When questioned, according to a story by the Media General News Service, proponents of these computerized systems, as well as those in the Transportation Department, simply responded by bragging that "these systems do not racially profile passengers for checks." And that is the problem, as Ridge pointed out. "If we're going to spend billions on people and technology, let's focus on identifying the high risks," he said. Ridge is, the Association points out, and very few people know, only a White House advisor, not a Cabinet-level Secretary. Nevertheless, he never would have made a speech of this nature without prior White House approval. His speech is what is known inside the Beltway as a "trial balloon," something thrown out there to see if it resonates with the American people in polling, and the Transportation Department, headed by Cabinet Secretary Norman Mineta, the same date, said they would not act on Ridge's comments. We need to see that they do. Write or email the White House, to whom both Ridge and the Transportation Department are responsible, to tell them you support Ridge's comments and that the Transportation Department and its computer consultants should stuff their reliance on CAPS II. The White House is the real actor agency in this, because they can make these policies currently with or without Congressional approval, and they'd like to know what you think.  [For more on CAPS II and what Ridge was really taking about, see our Entry in detail on the War on Terror for 2-13-02 above on this Homeport Page.] [UPDATE 5-4-03: Now that Homeland Security has also been made a Cabinet Department, and Ridge has been named its Secretary, and in obvious response to some of the original positions taken in this article, the Association has learned that under new policy from the White House, both Homeland Security and Transportation have been given joint responsibility for the continuing development of the CAPS II profiles. 'Bout time, in our opinion, given Mineta's views. Tom Ridge also told Tom Brokaw of NBC-TV News this date that no CAPS II data on individuals will be retained by the government, but we think by this he means merely information that you were in fact detained at the airport, but not arrested. The entire CAPS II profile system, in fact, is dependent upon government computerized information retention. The fact Ridge and not Mineta was designated the point man to talk to the media means that Ridge's views, not Mineta's, have to some degree prevailed with the White House.] 4-25-02: Crown Prince Abdullah, the ruler of Saudii Arabia, tells President Bush in Crawford, flat out , that the USG must alter its support of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon or there will be dire consequences. We've already said many times on this Homepage where we stand on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and on what the U.S. should do about these tin-horn oil monopolists in Saudi Arabia, and there's no need to repeat it again on this Entry. Bush neither agreed with Abdullah, nor did he disagree. He just listened. Abdullah left Crawford without even staying for the planned barbecue. On a different front, because they think they may have gone too far in their comments to President Bush (schizophrenia is common in the foreigh policy of many countries), the House of Al Saud is simultaneously sponsoring a multimillion dollar ad campaign on American TV emphasizing the friendly U.S.-Saudi relationship dating back to 1941. The Saudi ads say they are "stabilizing the price of oil in this time of crisis." That's an interesting spin!: they seem to be implying there are hotheads in OPEC who want to raise crude prices sky high, and the Saudis are keeping them under control. Let's get this straight: the Saudis practically own OPEC and any crude price more than slightly above breakeven means oil is being used as blackmail and as a terror weapon against the U.S. Period. Nine American cable TV companies have to date refused to run these ads, and May God Bless Them All. The Association has also learned from its own intelligence sources that the Al Saud royal family is secretly discussing among themselves an oil boycott of the U.S. if we don't do what they want. 4-28-02: There is a report by CBS-TV News that says that contingency plans for the upcoming invasion of Iraq (probably in 2003; possibly in 2002 or 2004)[The Association first predicted this in its War on Terror Entry for 2-12-02] estimate there will be 10,000 U.S. casualties (the actual figure, in our opinion, will be higher due to Saddam's addiction to biochem. WOT, 2-12-02) [Ed. Note: After somebody at NBC-TV read this Entry on our projected U.S. biochem casualties, the Nightly News with Tom Brokaw repeated it on 5-22-02, along with the Association's months' old report that the hijackers' 9-11 attack on the Pentagon was actually and originally aimed at the White House], 250,000 U.S. troops involved and, more importantly, no coup against Saddam. We have long called on this Site for, as part of this planning, a Shiite uprising first in the south of Iraq; a Kurd uprising in the north; and a coup or coup attempt in Baghdad by credible, prominent Iraqis who could form a post-Saddam government, all as predicates to an invasion, to keep U.S. casualties down. These sorts of preceding events are like the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945; they say to Saddam, like they said to Hirohito, Are you ready to surrender now?, or do you really want to force a U.S. land invasion on your country? They also mean Saddam must spend more of his Army to fight the uprisings and the coup, which means fewer Saddam troops to fight a U.S. invasion. These U.S. sponsored events would also "look good," in that they would put us on the side of internal popular uprisings against this dictatorial madman. It's not that it's impossible to overthrow Saddam without these events,and with merely a U.S. invasion; it is. If the purpose of that invasion is merely to secure future oil supplies at a low cost from Iraq, that's, moreover, a legitimate purpose. But we still need to ask, What do we do next? 50 years of American occupation of Iraq? Even 5 years of occupation, without the semblance of a pro-American, truly domestic Iraqi movement as the central government in Baghdad, would cause the U.S. immeseasurable long-term political difficulties in the Arab world. We need that Iraqi movement, as we did in Afghanistan, to legitimize any action we might take. After Saddam falls, the anti-Saddam forces in Baghdad should be made to coalesce, to grant autonomy to the Kurds in the north, and the Shiites in the south, to cancel Saddam's anti-Israeli policies, and also to, practically speaking, take Iraq out of OPEC, but at the same time to maintain control over Iraq's oil resources (located in the center and the south), thus granting the pro-Iranian mullah Shiites political and religious, but not economic, autonomy. It's the presence of the "no coup" feature of this CBS-TV report that has this Association worried. "No coup" may mean "no serious USG intelligence planning" for what we want in, or how we manage, a post-Saddam Iraq. That would be a mistake. We do not believe the Bush Administration would be that stupid, and we hope that we, unlike CBS-TV News, does not have to be corrected on this Website. Time will tell. [UPDATE 3-17-03: The Bush Administration began arming Kurdish rebels a few days ago for an armed uprisin in the north of Iraq against Saddam in support of invading U.S. troops. The arming of the Shiites for a revolt in the south does not look like it will occur Psychological pressure is being applied by the Administration in the hope there will be an Iraqi army coup against Saddam.] On this same date, CAPS I belatedly profiled two brothers onboard a Philadelphia-Orlando flight because they had both paid cash for a one-way flight. The Transportation Department called the flight back mid-air, inconveniencing hundreds of passengers. After interviewing (read: detaining) the two men it was determined they were legitimate and not terrorists and let go, without apologies to either them or to the other passengers, or compensation for their time, false arrest, or missed business contacts, and without apologizing to the Nation for the waste of the Nation's law enforcement resources while the real Al Quaida terrorists were still at large in America, making their plans and preparations for further terror. 4-29-02: The USG is beginning a crackdown on Muslim "501(c)(3) charites" in the U.S. aligned with Al Quaida. We want to congratulate the Bush Administration on this move. A lot of these I.R.S. approved groups call themselves innocuous names like the "Benevolence International Foundation" or the "Holy Land Foundation," and take in billions each year in the U.S. in tax deductible donations while paying no income tax themselves, and then using those donations received from an unsuspecting American public to fund terror against America. Talk about chutzpah! From the mid-'80s through the Clinton Administration, the big government crowd which was in power in the bureaucracy in Washington and in the state capitals, including the FBI, began a "random" crackdown on all sorts of U.S. based charities, sweeping up many obviously patriotic and innocent groups, lambasting, and slamdunking them. While these big government types, who saw U.S. charities as a threat to themselves, were concentrating on innocent American police, firefighter, veteran and other groups, these terrorist charities slipped right through their net, and made out like bandits, because, in part, they were both "exotic" and "religious," and the FBI and the AG offices didn't even raise an eyebrow. Just as with CAPS II, as criticized by Director of Homeland Security        Tom Ridge no less, these security types missed the boat in attacking home-grown charities, yelling "fraud" at the top of their lungs, when the real fraud was, and is, Muslim fanatical terrorism masquerading as everything else, including charity, and aimed at the United States. Liberals in American politics seem to have a penchant for believing that charity is an exclusive prerogative of government, a "my way or the highway" approach, so that the people who receive government charity, in the form of welfare, will be beholden to them, exclusively, at the ballot box. As part of that thought process, they often act like pit bulls attacking private charities, especially the small ones, and especially the ones that are not firmly in bed with big government. That idealogy, which we have accurately described, when it comes to government policy, constitutes a malfeasance of government. Texas, of all places, has a statute on the books today, Occupations Code Ch. 1804, for example, which places almost no restrictions or regulations on Muslim terrorist groups like the Holy Land Foundation, masquerading as 501(c)(3) churches, from fundraising in the state. At the same time it singles out U.S. veterans' groups, of all people, for special and discriminatory rules requiring signed receipts by indigent veterans and active-duty U.S. service personnel to whom assistance is distributed, audits of whom their members really are, and imposes prohibitory fees on the American veteran groups. In terms of priority regulation of charities, this Association thinks the Texas State Legislature has its head up its patoot. You can tell the Texas State Legislature what you think of that statute by clicking here and then leaving an email for Texas State Senate Business and Commerce Committee Chair Troy Fraser on his page.   Law enforcement in Illinois,  originally sanctioned by state Attorney General Ryan [and, as an update, subsequently by state Attorney General Lisa Madigan], brought a legal action against a veterans' group there (NOT the United States Navy Veterans Association or the VFW or the American Legion, although the theory of the Illinois AG's attack could theoretically be used against any veterans' group)  because "only 15%" or less of its funds raised  actually went to assist disabled veterans. The Holy Land Foundation, the Committe for Relief for Palestine, the Palestinian Relief Association, Interpal, the Sanibel Association and other Muslim terrorist fake charities, had raised mega-dollars in Illinois, with the money  raised providing payments to anyone who killed a Jew or American, and in many other states, for years at that same point, most of these jihadist 'charities'not even bothering to register under Illinois' charitable solicitation act. They said in their campaigns that the money was going for "peace in the Mid-East,"  making themselves sound like they were part of some sort of fictitional 'Little Sisters of the Poor' appeal. No Illinois law enforcement action, or any other state law enforcement action, was EVER brought against them. What is evn more hypocritical, if more hypocrisy on This subject of telemarketing could be possible, is that these same law enforcement agencies we referred to, have never, ever, brought any lawsuit against an American telemarketing firm, eg., AT&T or Capital One, for outsourcing millions of American telemarketing jobs to plces like India. No American charity telefundraising firm has ever even considered doing anything like that, yet they are the ones singled out by these prosecutors for discriminatory action.  Attorney General Ryan lost his own case against the veterans in the Illinois Supreme Court, but is appealing that decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, where a decision on this case is expected by October, 2003. [UPDATE on the Ryan case, renamed the Madigan case by the U.S. Supreme Court: This case was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court on 5-5-03 (Illinois ex rel. Madigan v. Telemarketing Associates, 53 U.S. 600, 155 L.Ed. 2d 793, 123 S.Ct. 1829 (2003)), and a little bit of explaining is in order. As we said originally, the Illinois AG argued the case based on the percentage of gross funds the charity received (from a professional fundraiser), and the Supreme Court did, in fact, quash this argument as violative of the 1st Amendment, but still sided with the Attorney General because they found a few affidavits in the court pleadings which suggested there had also been, in the solicitations made, some affirmative misrepresentations by telemarketers (apart from anything having to do with percentage splits between fundraiser and charity, although quite a few lawyers do not understand how those hairs can be split that finely) which may have been fraudulent . This case will now go back to the trial court system in Illinois, and we will continue to watch it.]   As we said above, this Association questions morally, intellectually and legally, the priorities of the politicians and law enforcement appointees making these adverse policy decisions to single out patriotic American groups for prosecution because they either receive more complaints about them and/or because if they politically get more powerful they may oppose the politicians or bureaucrats who heretofore targetted them for bullying. The Solicitor General's Office of the Bush Administration joined in the Madigan appeal as an Amicus Curiae for the Democratic Attorney General of Illinois, a measure of which the membership of this Association heartily dissapproved, because the whole case was anti-veteran, anti-Armed Forces, and masked the historical lack of action on the part of the self-serving prosecutors involved to do anything about the fraud of terrorist charities operating in the United States. But the Association does not turn its back on Bush Administration foreign or military policies we agree with because of that, because most of those latter policies point stellarly in the right direction for American national security. One always has got to weigh, in policy matters, the good with the bad, and their respective magnitudes, in making a decision. The latter statement, as you can see, is not meant to contradict the firm and historical position of this Association that any person in this country, entity or individual, has got the right to disagree with the government, local, state or federal, on anything, and that that disagreement, and the right to that disagreement, is one of the bedrocks of our Republic. Small charitable and patriotic organizations, veteran oriented or not, are one of the bedrocks of America's freedom of speech and charitable action. While they may be threat to monopolistic government, they are not a threat to free government. They are, in each and every case, a complement to it.   "The leaders of governments with long habits of control need to know: To serve your people you must learn to trust them." - President George W. Bush Inaugural Address, January 20,2005   UPDATE 5/28/2004: Al Quaida today has, acording to our sources, a minimum of 8,000 "foot soldiers" spread throughout the world, including the U.S., where they still openly raise funds through religious and other Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(3) fronts, poised to make one or more major chemical, biological, radioactive, bombing or terror events, and they are specifically exploring the possibility of all five. UPDATE 7/29/2004 on the HOLY LAND FOUNDATION: The Holy Land Foundation was indicted on July 27, 2004 on federal criminal charges of funnelling money to Hamas, a terrorist organization.  The Foundation had raised money for years in in Texas, New Jersey, California and Illinois without even once being sued by any state or local law enforcement agency for fraud for saying that the funds it raised were 'going for peace in the Middle East.'   4-30-02: Turkey has taken over command of the 4,500-man "peacekeeping" force, from Britain, in Afghanistan. This is probaby a wise move since it is the peacekeeping force that will probably bear the brunt of  in physically protecting the interim government in Kabul, and since Turkey, like Afghanistan, is a Muslim country. Britain, on the same date, decides to turn over all Afghan detainees it has held as prisoners of war, to the Karzai government. The U.S. press immediately played this up as showing disagreements between Blair and Bush as to how to treat these prisoners, when in fact it shows nothing of the kind. Britain doesn't have the manpower in Afghanistan to be trying, or holding indefinitely, these detainees. And since the Afghan Chief Justice has said of bin Laden, "Bring him before my court and I will see to it that he is quickly executed," we doubt that these terrorists will be treated more humanely by the Afghans than they were as British prisoners-of-war. The exact reverse is probably the case. This Association has long called for on this Homepage, going back to our first entry on transporting prisoners to Guantanamo,  these terrorists, instead, being dealt with swiftly in the country they were originally found fighting in. As you may have noticed, this Homeport Page is getting a little crowded so, for future updates on our popular War on Terror Section, please tune in to the WAR ON TERROR NEWSTAND. You can check out our Recommendations to the Nation as to what to do, and not do, in the War on Terror, made on September 15, 2001 (and dated), on our 2001 News and Analysis Page. You can then compare them with what was actually done (or not done) right here on this Homeport Page and on the War on Terror Newstand. VETERANS' ISSUES NEWSTAND [VI NEWSTAND] 1-11-02: The Bush Administration needs to be congratulated for proposing to spend $1 billion over the next five years to rehabilitate the country's 250,000 homeless veterans. It remains to be seen, however, if this money will actually be spent and, if it is spent, whether it will be spent on local programs which are truly effective. Florida alone has over 17,000 homeless veterans. 1-12-02: The Association has learned that the VA hospital system is reverting to a rationing of hospital access which is leaving more and more veterans out in the cold. As many as 4,000 veterans a month are being added to the waiting lists to see a doctor or for hospital care at many VA hospitals. In 1996, Congress opened VA hospital care to all veterans, not just those with service-related injuries or illnesses. But, truthfully claiming lack of facilities and resources, the VA has effectively overturned the law. Across the Nation, veterans are being told they must still prove that their condition is service-related (still as hard to do as it ever was, in our opinion) or there will be no room for them at the inn. Our prediction is even more dire: that in short order the VA will quietly begin adding another qualification to its triage system for care: that the veteran be able to prove indigency. To be fair to the VA, this is a "What else can we do?" situation. 1-24-02: President Bush proposes more than $48 billion in new military spending, the largest annual increase in 20 years, out of a total proposed Pentagon budget of $379 billion. Good job, Mr. President. This will be money well spent and, actually, is not a lot (and is light on the Navy, in our opinion), even with the Administration's projections that the military budget will grow gradually to a total of $451.4 billion in 2007. This still only amounts to about 3% of our GNP spent on defense versus 5% in the Ford Administration and 10% during both the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations. The War in Afghanistan alone, annualized, as of date (with about 5,000 troops on the ground in that and nearby countries and about 2,000 sailors offshore) is costing us $12 billion per year, so a $48 billion military increase would permit us to fight 4 Afghanistans simultaneously, for one year, but in fact, $19 billion of the increase, if passed, has been officially earmarked for the War in Afghanistan, according to Administration sources. Since we're spending about $1 billion per month now in Afghanistan, and since all new federal budgets go into effect October 1, a reasonable prognostication is that, currently, and given current circumstances, the Administration expects our troops to be in Afghanistan (and the region) through, at a minimum, April 2004. Other line items in the proposed military budget include: $10 billion for a military operations contingency fund; $1.2 billion for air patrols over the U.S.; $68.7 billion for weapons and equipment; $53.9 billion for research and development; $7.8 billion for national missile defense research and testing; A 4.1% increase in basic military pay; and A cut in troops' out-of-pocket costs for private housing, from 11.3% to 7.5%. The Association predicts that Congress will actually pass a larger Defense Budget than President Bush has requested, and the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has already testified to Congress that this proposed budget is underfunded by about $40 billion with major shortfalls, according to him, occurring in lack of new ship production for the Navy, and lack of new aircraft production for all branches. It is also the firm opinion of the Association that every Service Branch should fight for every dollar it can get in any national budget; but that no Branch should perceive itself in a zero-sum game for those dollars with any other Branch being perceived as the enemy; and that it is wrong for any elected official to put, or to try to put, any of those Branches in the latter position. [Update: Our prediction about Congress increasing this proposed budget was wrong. The actual budget signed into law on 10-23-02 was for $355.5 billion. Congress eliminated entirely  the $10 billion fund the President requested to fight terrorism without specific congressional authorization, reduced the missile defense iniative shield development program to $7.4 billion, and made some other cuts across the board.] 2-9-02: A step in the direction of our 1-12-02 prediction on new triage for the VA was taken by the Bush Administration, when they proposed in their new budget, a $1500 annual deductible for VA care for "Priority 7" category veterans. "Priority 7" category veterans are veterans with higher incomes than average ($24,000 if single or $28,000 if married), no service related disabilities, and no other qualifications such as Agent Orange or Gulf War syndrome illnesses, exposure to atomic tests, or a Purple Heart. At first glance you may think that this proposal is simply a way to keep the deficit down, or to make more money for the VA. You'd be wrong. The proposers know that the addition of the deductible will simply diminish the numbers of Priority 7s applying for VA care, which is the desired result. 121,000 less, is our estimate. The VA accurately claims there has been an explosion in its workload since 1997. Like all legitimate veteran groups in the U.S., the Association opposes this deductible. 2-21-02: The VA has announced that nearly 199,000 veterans, or nearly one in four, who served in the Gulf War, have filed disability claims as of date. Most are complaining of ailments which have collectively been called Gulf War syndrome. This is a stunning figure. The official position of the VA is still that there is no conclusive proof that any Gulf War syndrome illness was directly caused by the war. 5-1-02: The average veteran (perhaps the average American as well) in this country can't afford a new fee simple purchased house. This is wrong. This problem has been going on for a long while. We need a new Veterans' Bill of Rights in America. The problem, fundamentally, lies with the huge profit margins local developers are permitted to make on local real estate developments by the local governments which grant them that authority; but since that is taking place nationwide, it is a national, and a federal, problem. Local governments should step in and require lower buying prices as a condition of permitting these real estate developments, while at the same time requiring the quality of the development. Restrictions on the new-home prices set by local developers will simply mean that, instead of becoming overnight billionaires, they will have to settle for becoming overnight millionaires and, if that means more veterans can buy their own homes, that is something these American developers should accept as part of their patriotism. As you may have noticed, this Homeport Page is getting a little bit crowded so, for future updates on Veterans' Issues, please tune in to our VETERANS' ISSUES NEWSTAND. NATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS NEWSTAND [NSA NEWSTAND]                              [This E-Newstand is devoted to national security topics of a more general nature than those addressed in the War on Terror Newstand.] THE UNITED STATES MUST DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE OIL SITUATION NOW, OR FACE GRAVE FUTURE PERIL.  "SAND STORM" The NSA Editorial Staff would like to premier our Newstand with a segment on one of the most, if not the most, important national security issues confronting the United States in the 21st Century: oil.  We call this piece "Sand Storm." It was originally written in January 2002, and the original article (not the Updates, which bear their own separate dates)was last updated here on March 5, 2008.  We'd like to start the piece off with the necessary background in the form of statistics: One barrel (bl) of oil = 42 gallons. OPEC produces 45% of the world's crude.  As of the date of the original article, the Middle East produced 22.5 million bls per day, and, as of today, has estimated reserves, with improved extraction technology, an assumption made about all our reserve estimates, of 900 billion bls (66% of the world's estimated reserves) which, at the current rate of production, would be exhausted in about 50-100 years. Iraq has 10% of the world's oil reserves, 115 billion barrels. Kuwait has 9% of the world's oil reserves, 102 billion barrels. The United Arab Emirates have about 8% of the world's oil reserves today, 97.8 billion barrels. Iran today has about 13% of the world's oil reserves, 125.8 billion barrels. As of the date of the original article, Saudi Arabia produced 22.5 million bls per day; has estimated reserves today of 261.9 billion bls (about 25% of the world's total) which, at the current rate of production, would be exhausted about 50-100 years. As of the date of the original article, Russia produced 6.5 million bls per day; has estimated reserves today of 60 billion bls which, at the current rate of production, would be exhausted in about 40 years. As of the date of the  original article, Iran produced 3.7 million bls per day. Mexico and Venezuela, combined, as of the date of the original article, produced 10.5 million bls per day. Mexico today has estimated reserves of 52 billion bls; Venezuela 77.2 billion bls which, combined, at their current rate of production, would be exhausted in about 35 years. Currently, Venezuela supplies almost as much oil to the U.S. as Saudi Arabia does and is, in fact, the third largest supplier to the United States, and the fifth largest oil exporter in the world.  As of the date of the original article, Canada produced 6.2 million bls per day; has estimated reserves today of 178.8 billion bl which, at the current rate of production, would be exhausted in about 30 years. As of the date of the original article, the U.S. produced 7.8 million bls per day; has estimated  hard reserves today of 22.7 billion bls (about 3% of the world's reserves) which, at the current rate of consumption and importation, would be exhausted in 8 years. The U.S. consumes about 7.3 billion barrels per year. Gasoline for cars and light trucks accounts for about 45% of U.S. oil consumption. After they consume their own daily domestic production of crude the U.S. and Canada, combined, have a daily consumption shortfall of 8.8 million bls. As of the date of the original article, the U.S. imported about 56% of all oil used in the country. As of the date of the original article, the U.S. imported 1.75 million bls per day from Saudi Arabia alone, about 9% of total U.S. consumption per day. The average rated car mileage for new cars in use in the U.S. for 2002 was the worst figure in 20 years. Most Middle Eastern nations, and we'll throw in Venezuela to boot, would be making a profit as of 2006 after a breakeven point of about $4-$20 per bl at the wellhead. The breakeven point varies country by country because of differences in labor costs, and differences in the costs of capital infrastructure. The actual costs for certain countries, without profit, of pumping the oil to the wellhead, as of mid 2006, were, $19 per barrel for Iraq, $5 per barrel for Saudi Arabia,  $10 per barrel for Gulf of Mexico or Carribbean crude, and $20 for Nigerian crude. In 1973, before the OPEC oil embargo, the price of a barrel of OPEC oil, FOB, Saudi Arabia, was $2.59, and even at that price and time, they were rolling in profits. Within 12 months these anti-Americans had jolted the price to $11.65 a barrel, saying that they were doing so because of USG support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War. When the Ayatollah Khomeini, a vicious thug, took over Iran in 1979, OPEC started Round II, when they jumped the price per barrel from $14 to $34, virtually overnight.    A Reagan Administration led effort to weaken OPEC during the 1980's was put into effect, and prices went down. The post-1981 low price for crude was $10 per bl. As of March 2008 OPEC has jumped the price of crude to its all time high to date of $108 a barrel. Gasoline prices at that point in the U.S. averaged almost $4.00 per gallon. The price charged for crude accounts for 60% of the total price of gasoline at the U.S. pump. Everything else is a percentage add-on to the price of crude, about 20% of the price currentlygoing to U.S. taxes, and about 20% currently going to the western (primarily U.S. ) refiners. However, none of this is to say that U.S. based refiners, U.S. based companies, are not also up to their eyeballs in the fishy business of jacking up oil and gasoline prices unfairly to the U.S. consumer. Seeing the evil of what these OPEC foreigners are doing, and getting away with in raising crude prices, these U.S. based companies' attitude has been, generally, 'Let's get in on the act; let's ride the wave: let's cut back on refining in the U.S., creating artificial shortages, which in turn mean, with rising crude prices, more profit for us.' So foreign greed, motivated in part by anti-American politics, has spawned domestic greed, which is not so motivated.  Members of the Saudi royal family, especially one Prince in particular, Bandar,  are very close personally with President Bush, and we have noted an unfortunate tendency on the part of the President not to get tough with them.  Here's a hint, instead, as to the policy this Newstand would recommend as to OPEC: DESTROY IT, as the Reagan Administration ALMOST did. And when we say destroy, we mean destroy. No half measures.  If OPEC were an internal American cartel of companies, and it did what they do, a Sherman Anti-Trust Act criminal suit would be smacked on them so fast it would make their heads spin. The heart of of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act is simple, universal morality. How can it be moral, or legal, we ask, for foreigners to do things permitted by our foreign policy, that we would throw Americans in jail for in this country if they did those very same things here? These exorbitant, non-market set, prices for crude per barrel  are why some of these countries are so rich, and why we speak of "oil wealth." Some of these oil producing countries, like Mexico and Venezuela, have squandered their oil wealth in the past on corruption and graft. The Saudis have passed on the vast majority of their oil profits to just a few, the Al Saud royal family, which consists of about  30,000 spoiled princes and princesses and their sycophants. One of these "princes," Ahmad bin Salman, bought "War Emblem" one month before the Kentucky Derby with $900,000 cash of his share of this American-produced oil wealth, and then won the 2002 Kentucky Derby with him while the patriotic American crowd at Churchill Downs, on an ironic note, sang at the outset of the race "My Old Kentucky Home, by'n by hard times comes a-knocking at the door, then my old Kentucky home, goodnight...." Salman, who never did an honest day's work in his life, had bought an entire corporation in the United States, the Thoroughbred Corporation, so he could institutionalize his life of luxury here while millions of Americans slave every day to pay the gasoline prices that permittted him, as a young man, to buy and enjoy horses. [UPDATE: Salman died mysteriously in Saudi Arabia in July 2002, after War Emblem failed to win the Triple Crown. We hope it wasn't anything we said. Salman's cousin, Prince Sultan, was also killed in a mysterious car crash while driving to Salman's funeral.] While Saudi princes lead lives of luxury, per capita oil income in the Kingdom has actually fallen from $19,000 in 1981 to $7,300 in 2002 and several million Saudis are unemployed in this nation of 19 million. The Saudis have, nevertheless, also made some valuable infrastructure and financial investments. The Saudis alone have made a base profit from oil in the past 30 years of over $1 trillion. The Al Saud family is not popular in Saudi Arabia, as we have pointed out numerous times on this Site. A big part of the problem with their unpopularity is not unique to them, to oil producing states, or to Islamic states. In both right-wing and left-wing dictatorships, if people perceive a lot of natural wealth in the country which is not trickling down, in economic and social status, to the average citizen, as both Plato and Aristotle pointed out over 2,000 years ago, then that average citizen will turn to the extremist political movement of the moment, be it Nazis, Communists or Jihadists. If Saudi Arabia were to fall into the hands of anti-American Sunni fundamentalists, the United States might be left with no choice than to organize a coaltion to secure the oil reserves and production facilities of Arabia. UPDATE ON SAUDI ARABIA: Truly professional and scientific public opinion polls are hard to come by in the Kingdom. But one our Newstand staff trusts was taken in 2003: 49% of adult Saudis trust and believe in the 'sermons' and words of Usama bin Laden, and 57% believe the relationship between the Saudi royals and the USG is "too close." And, while mentioning Venezuela, we might as well say a few words about its current President, Hugo Chavez. Chavez was ousted by a Venezuelan military junta on 4-12-02, with the support of the Bush Administration and the CIA, after anti-Chavez demonstrators were gunned down on the streets of Caracas by Chavez' secret police. The next day the Army, in command, was forced to fire on pro-Chavez demonstrators on those same streets and, fearing the crowd, backed off and permitted Chavez to return to power on 4-14-02. Talk about a botched coup! Our CIA Caracas Station and Headquarters strategists and advisors should have better studied the Agency's successfully sponsored Chilean military coup d'etat in 1973 against Salvador Allende before taking this one on. (Allende, a Communist, was forced to hole up in the Presidential Palce in Santiago and then shot dead.) On the Chavez coup, on the other hand, it seems nobody had a plan. But we think it's still real, real likely the Bush Administration, which doesn't like botched jobs any more than the naval veterans of this Association do, will try again. Venezuela had long been a member of OPEC prior to Chavez' election to its presidency in 1998, but prior to Chavez it had largely ignored OPEC's oil quota system and OPEC's calls for more quotas. That all ended with Chavez, who took Venezuela firmly into the OPEC camp. Immediately after Chavez' reinstatement, both the spot price for crude, and the price at the American gasoline pump, jumped. Chavez is bluntly, an anti-American socialist and a Castroite (he sells Venezuelan heavy crude to Castro at $5 per barrel, under cost, while he sells that same oil to the U.S. at the current OPEC price of over $70 per barrel), whose primary appeal in Venezuela (where 70% of the population is poor and desperate and 10% is filthy rich, hardly the economics, as Aristotle said over 2,000 years ago, for a stable democracy) lies in his open advocacy of class warfare. Chavez embraces both Saddam and Gaddafi. He needs to be dealt with, just like Allende needed to be dealt with and, while this is still possible, it has now been made much more difficult to do by the failed coup of 4-12-02. In dealing with Chavez, the American public should keep in mind that "the management of U.S. foreign policy," as former Director of Central Intelligence William Colby, who oversaw the overthrowal of Allende, once said, "and the covert activities that are a part of that policy, are not a girl scout picnic." Lenin, likewise, said in 1918, "Revolution is like an omellette. You can't make one without breaking a few eggs." And we also point out this further example the Soviets have given us in the world of covert action, an example the USG shies away from following, but shouldn't: during the time of, and shortly after, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Hezbollah, the Islamic terrorist group in Lebanon, was kidnapping and murdering not just CIA officers, but also KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti) officers as well, in Beirut. After the Soviets discovered that one of their officers had been killed, the very next day the very dead and very mutilated body of a high level Hezbollah official was dumped unceremoniously on the doorstep of Hezbollah headquarters in Beirut, with a Soviet flag attached to what was left of his head. The kidnapping of Russians in Beirut stopped immediately and never started again, all Soviets who were kidnapped were immediately released, and Hezbollah apologized for their "misunderstanding." Chavez is not the only bum, by any means, to control the oil wealth of a Third World nation. There are more of them, in fact, than we can count on two hands that fall into that category. Another one is the dictator of Equatorial Guinea in west Africa,  Brig. Gen. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo,     a mouthful of sewerage who uses the oil wealth of "his" country almost exclusively to benefit himself, his family and his friends.  One credible report even accuses him of cannibalism.  In August, 2004, the South African government of the ANC put a South African on trial for trying to overthrow this creep. 8/17/2004 -  UPDATE ON CHAVEZ: Chavez won a referendum election on his presidency by 58% held on 8/15/2004, an election former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, a self-appointed expert on voting irregularities, said was "fair," and Chavez' Venezuelan opposition said was rigged by strong arm tactics at the polls as well as counting fraud. The fragmented Venezuelan opposition said that their exit polls showed that Chavez was being defeated by almost the exact same margin Chavez said he won by. Chavez specializes in promoting class warfare between Venezuela's poor and its upper classes. The intellectual and moral fraud of Chavez' socialism, in the opinion of this Newstand, is philosophically inherent in its fundamental premise that the rich need to be taxed out of existence, and their property given to the poor. This Newstand calls it a fraud because Chavez demagogically masquerades himself as being in favor of "freedom" by which he really means only majoritarianism, and the social equality of everyone enjoying poverty together. No society can have true freedom of political belief,  political association and political speech if those who believe in free enterprise are told they are not welcome, or are not permitted to succeed by reason of their skills, or where the free flow of private capital is restricted or abolished. That's why they call it "free" enterprise, and it is a true concomitant to any form of political freedom. There will be more capital flight, a lot more, from Venezuela as a result of this referendum. The only real thing keeping Chavez' regime afloat is the cash cow of Venezuela's oil revenues, out of which Chavez pays for relief programs for the poor, as well as leftist guerilla movements elsewhere in Latin America. Chavez views the high price for oil as a tax on the America he hates, and as a  paradoxical justice for that America, since the prices Americans pay at the pump in the U.S. going to Venezuela finance Chavez funded anti-American movements in Latin America. Unlike other prognosticators, this Newstand predicts that over the long term the Chavez referendum victory means that crude prices will again rise further. 10/14/2004 - CHAVEZ UPDATE: We didn't have to wait for the long term to have our prediction about Chavez' victory on the price of crude to be proven correct. As of this date the world spot price per barrel reached $55, the highest ever in the history of the world, thanks in large measure to Chavez' strong position within OPEC. We again point out that this Newstand had the only mainstream analysis predicting that prices would rise, and rise dramatically. ALL the other economic prognosticators said that Chavez' victory meant that world crude prices would  stabilize. We knew that was rubbish because, unlike the others, we have Chavez accurately categorized as one of the most vicious, anti-American blackmailng thugs within OPEC. Chavez' term will now expire in January 2007. His allies now contol the Venezuelan National Assemby and most state governments. Venezuelan regional elections will be held in September 2004 and elections for Venezuela's congress in 2005. Chavez' referendum may have been "fair" in a majoritarian sense, but that misses the point: Chavez' version of democarcy is in fact the same as Fidel's: political thuggery applied to anyone who believes in free enterprise, coupled with Fidel's undying hatred of everything America. 5/11/2006 -  CHAVEZ UPDATE: Chavez is now selling gasoline for 12 cents a gallon in Caracas, cheaper than water, and is holding mini anti-American street parties at gasoline stations there, where Venezuelans raise their fists in the air and chant threats at the United States, while laughing at the high prices Americans pay at their pumps so that the profits can go to guys like Chavez  to pay for his anti-American government sponsored activities throughout Latin America. This entire situation would be funny, if the national security of the United States were not at stake. 9/25/2006 - CHAVEZ UPDATE: It has come to the attention of the Association that the U.S. gasoline retailer CITGO is wholly owned by the Government of Venezuela, which means, in the case of one-man rule of any country, which is the actual situation on the ground in Venezuela today, ownership by Hugo Chavez. (Ownership of this company by the Government of Venezuela was acquired prior to Chavez' accession to power.) This month, this lowlife thug Chavez called the President of the United States "the devil" from the main podium of the General Assembly of the United Nations and, from the same forum, said his stench filled up the place. He crossed himself as he said these things, implying he was a Roman Catholic. (Trust us, this lowlife criminal thug, who consorts and cavorts with Marxists, Islamists, and anybody else who is anti-American, including Martians if they landed here and proclaimed themselves to be so, is no Catholic.) As could be implied from the entirety of this article "Sandstorm," it would be a good idea if American consumers stopped buying all gasoline at the pump which originated from OPEC crude. But that is not going to happen, and we know it. To be specific, though, the Association hereby recommends to all its members, all 66,000 of them, to boycott Chavez' CITGO gasoline at the pump, until such time as Chavez is overthrown or killed. This recommendation does not extend to the 7/11 convenience stores, which usually partner with CITGO as part of the gasoline stations. 9/27/2006-UPDATE ON CHAVEZ: Literally two days after we posted the Update immediately above, the 7/11 chain announced it was terminating its relationship with CITGO as a suplier of gasoline to its 2100 stores nationwide, effective 2008. Right on, 7/11! 5/11/2006 - CASTRO AND HU TO DRILL FOR COMMUNIST OIL 50 MILES OFF FLORIDA: After his warm welcome in the Rose Garden by President Bush, President Hu of Communist China proceeded on to Communist Cuba, where he and Fidel Castro tentatively announced a deal for a joint Chinese-Cuban consortium to drill for oil 50 miles off the south coast of Florida, north of Cuba. There are believed to be Caribbean oil reserves there worth 10's of billions of dollars. For years, U.S. Senators calling themselves environmentalists have blocked American drilling companies from new drilling in the Gulf of Mexico 100 MILES off the coast of Florida, on the grounds of the threat of ecological disasters and oil spills. As of today, not a peep has been heard out of those same U.S. senators about the threat posed by the Chinese-Cuban deal. This Newstand figures that's because this is Communist oil, and that makes it OK, whereas the other proposal involved  "American" oil, and that's what made it wrong. We should also explain what OPEC quotas are. Quotas are the primary tool OPEC uses to force up the price at the American pump. Quotas restrict crude production, thus letting the law of supply and demand force up the price of oil by itself. They also have the other effect of preserving the producers' reserves for later use, thus really creating a double negative whammy effect for the United States. One question we get is: Why doesn't the U.S. simply rely on its own reserves to meet our daily consumption, and tell OPEC to stuff it? The answer, apparent in the statistics themselves, is that if we did that, we'd run out of our own reserves in about 5 years. During that time, the price of gas at the pump would skyrocket, because U.S. crude costs a lot more to produce than Mid- Eastern crude. (It costs $100 million to drill a crude oil well in the U.S. on average, and those amortized costs, compliments of the U.S. oil companies, are all passed on, with profit margins attached, to the U.S. consumer at the pump. It costs far less to drill a well in the Mid-East because oil, which comes from Crustacean-era detritus, probably mostly dinosaur organic remains, deep in the ground, is "everywhere.") After we had exhausted our own reserves, moreover, OPEC would know that we had done so, and would likely drive the price of their remaining crude up even higher. So, when we use our own reserves, instead of theirs, which we're always tempted to do whenever they push "their" prices up, we're exhausting our own reserves (which we don't have as many of as they do of theirs), helping them preserve their reserves for future blackmail against the U.S., and still telling the U.S. consumer to pay an exorbitant price at the pump. This is the double negative whammy (actually a triple negative whammy) we talked about above. Our conclusions are that the the oil situation certainly constitutes a grave national security issue. The figures, though not widely publicized, don't lie, and point to the unmistakable first fact that energy independence for the U.S., absent going off the internal combustion engine as our primary means of transportation, is a chimera. We predict, instead, that we will see gradually escalating prices for both petroleum and natural gas through approximately 2070, when we will again face a major energy crisis which, at that time , we will no longer be able to postpone or ignore. UPDATES: On 3-13-02, the U.S. Senate voted down a mandatory 36 mpg by 2015 standard for the average sold-in-the-U.S. car. (The measure was opposed by the Detroit car manufacturers as well as the UAW and the Teamsters.) Children born today, assuming they're still living in 2070, are going to be in a panic, as all America will be that year (or thereabouts, given that all estimates of oil still in the ground are just that, estimates) about what to do about energy and transportation, unless something dramatic and substantial is done about it sooner. We owe it to that future America to do those things now, and not simply push it onto their shoulders. We simply propose (and it will be costly): that Democrats and Republicans need to unite in compromise in Washington: Unlimited drilling in the areas Republicans want plus a 40 mpg requirement on all vehicles by 2010, and even all that still won't be enough to achieve energy independence. In new legislation passed on 4-26-02 on Energy Efficiency, both Houses mandated the Transportation Department to mandate within two years new U.S. mpg requirements. They also mandated ethanol (from America's Midwest) be added to American gasoline. What's ethanol all about? In simple English, it's a debate about whether ethanol additives to gasoline (made from corn) will raise or lower the price of gasoline. The proponents and opponents of ethanol come out on both sides of that issue, and each are backed by their own sets of economic analysts. On the other hand, ethanol additives will undoubtedly lower slightly American imports of foreign oil. UPDATE 8/13/2004: The current oil price, FOB, shipment from the Middle East, hit a new high of $47 per barrel today. This price is largely set by OPEC's oligopolistic determination of worldwide production. There has been no noticeable effort recently of any so-called 'American ally' within OPEC to reduce the price of crude exported to the U.S. OPEC is an oligopolistic  organization as we have said, which, if it existed within the context of American law, would draw a criminal Sherman Anti-Trust Act indictment in a New York minute. In OPEC's case, this Newstand's opinion would be too bad the Anti-Trust Act doesn't provide for the death penalty. Why are foreign governments permitted to impact American victims criminally in a way, If americans did the same thing, they'd be thrown into prison for the rest of their lives, and given, at the same time, a 'free ride' in terms of our foreign policy? UPDATE 5/30/2004: Gasoline on the street in Tehran, a city of 12 million, today is $.40 a gallon, so, trust us, today's prices of gas in the U.S. are not to blame on the American owned oil companies, which have no presence in Iran, or on the Bush Administration, which is hated in Iran. The Iranian price is what the creeps who run Iran charge their own people, and that's still at a substantial markup over cost. Caviar, after oil, is the Iranian mullahs' holier-than- thou 'We hate the Shah because he got rich quick' government's second biggest export. The State, its mullahs, or the private sector's crooks getting rich quick. What's the difference? What right does any government have to control the process, and how would that control be better than the work of the free market? These are reasonable questions. UPDATE 8/23/2005: The White House announced today that the Transportation Department, by executive order, will phase in regulations between 2008-2011, requiring that minivans sold in the U.S. have gas mileage standards of 21 mpg city and 23 mpg highway, and that small SUV's have a standard of 19 mpg city and 28 mpg highway. On the same date, former Republican presidential primary candidate (1988) and Christian evangelist Pat Robertson called publicly for the assassination of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. Neither of these acts, in the opinion of this Newstand, in and of themselves, would have the separate desired effects of, respectively (a) creating U.S. purchased consumer automotive vehicles which would substantially reduce our dependence on foreign oil or (b) eliminating Venezuela as a key proponent within OPEC of politically and economically socking it to the U.S. (B) would require, at a minimum, the pre-positioning of a domestic Venezuelan political force, pro-U.S., capable of taking over the country from Chavez, administering it in a popular way, at least over the mid-term, and at the same time capable of ending the violent class warfare within that country so successfully propounded by Chavez. The specificity of a private U.S. citizen or private U.S. group calling publicly for the assassination of a foreign head of state or head of government may be, moreover, in the opinion of this Newstand, inappropriate. But that does not change the fact that something probably has got to be done sometime about Chavez, the new Castro of Latin America, for the same reason something had to be done about Noriega, had to be done about Saddam, and why the purposes of the Bay of Pigs were also an admirable goal.   UPDATE 5/10/2006: Brazil announced in April 2006 that it was totally free of foreign oil imports because of its new ethanol program. Brazil derives its consumer fuels now primarily from ethanol processed from its domestic sugar cane. Ethanol can be processed from almost any agricultural plant, including grass. Ethanol run cars in Brazil get 50+ mpg. Many of those autos are made by the Ford Motor Company. The only thing that makes ethanol run automobiles viable is gasoline prices at $3.00-$4.00 per gallon or higher, because of all the factors we have presented in "Sandstorm." With a plentiful supply of plant  products to use as the raw material, something both the U.S. and Brazil have, and with sufficient capitalization investments in the necessary infrastructure, such as refineries and pipelines, this Newstand's analysts estimate the price of ethanol could be brought down into the $1.00-$2.00 per gallon range. That is, providing the refining companies do not hike up the prices to maintain their own profits, something we know they are perfectly capable of doing. Somebody, also, in the U.S., would have to ante up for the tremendous new investment in ethanol infrastructure if  popular ethanol based fuels were to become a reality. The USG doesn't want to do so, as that dollar outlay would just be added to the current national debt. The executives of the large American oil refining companies, who possess the expertise to make that investment, don't want to do so either, as it would mean throwing away their huge investments in petroleum refining and pipeline infrastucture. Regardless of what we do, the opinion of this Newstand has not changed: The U.S. needs dramatic action on this subject, and it needed that action yesterday.   FOR DAILY QUOTES ON THE RETAIL PRICE OF GASOLINE FOR MOST U.S. METROPOLITAN AREAS: CLICK HERE. 1-27-02: The Pentagon has asked the White House for approval to set up a new four star CINC to be called NORTHCOM, to be headquartered at Peterson AFB, Colorado, to coordinate the Armed Forces used to defend North America. Such troops will not be used in a law enforcement role in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. NORTHCOM's commander will also be the commander of NORAD but SPACECOM, also at Peterson, will be a separate Command with a separate four star at its head. The Association supports this request. 2-17-02: The Association has learned that the Navy's test of a new sea-borne, mobile ABM system on 1-25-02 was much more spectacularly successful than had been previously reported. Prior land-based, stationary ABM tests had often gone awry. In the Navy's test, the Aegis radar system aboard the guided missile cruiser U.S.S. Lake Erie detected the launch of a medium range Aries test missile fired from Kauai, Hawaii about 300 miles away. Even so-called medium range missiles can travel thousands of miles and become spacecraft for part of the trip. After detecting the launch, the Aegis systen automatically plotted an intercept course and then launched a new version of the Navy's Standard Missile called the SM-3, which can reach the exosphere above 300 miles, where ballistic missiles fly and can be intercepted. The whole test was only designed as a "fly-by," only a test of the system's electronics. But things went better than planned. The SM-3's kinetic warhead performed flawlessly. It separated from the SM-3 in outer space, located the approaching target dead on, and then flew directly into the missile's path, and obliterated it. The Aegis-SM-3 system would not be designed for use against ICBMs, which are much faster than IRBMs. But, if proven successful in future tests, it could be very effectively used to provide a theatre wide defense against IRBMs currently in the possesion of North Korea; against the 300 IRBMs China currently has pointed at Taiwan; against IRBMs in the possession of Iran designed to threaten Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey; and against IRBMs in the probable possession of Saddam Hussein designed to threaten just about everybody. The overwhelming success of the 1-25-02 test is good news for the Navy and good news for the United States. There was another spectacular, land-based, identical success of the Aegis system on 3-15-02, which was, and is, also excellent news for the United States, but does not detract at all from the advantages of the mobility (and therefore the difficulty to destroy) of a sea-borne system. UPDATE, LATE 2002: The Bush Administration announces that future U.S. ABM tests and their results will no longer be made public.  4-1-02: President Bush has ordered, without Congressional approval (not needed, under current law) a new high tariff on foreign imported steel, to resusitate the U.S. steel industry. The Association is in favor of resusitating the U.S. steel industry, something we badly need, so as not to be dependent on foreigners for this crucial ingredient in both our national defense and our national economy. We're just not sure this is the best way to do it. The WTO, with the U.S. as a signatory, for one, will probably strike it down. Even if that were not to be the case, the real cause of this problem lies in cheap labor for steel production abroad versus high cost labor for U.S. steel production. The USG needs to address that: We suggest we use the same WTO-approved methodologies for foreign production: eliminate all witholding taxes on U.S. steelworkers (and reduce those employees' personal income tax accordingly); segregate those employees out from SSA and SSI; and exempt U.S. producers from workmens' comp laws (all of which would cut U.S. manufacturers' labor costs in half, and then monitor U.S. steel prices to the public to make sure these savings were passed on and those prices came down to the foreigners' current level. These are tough measures, and we doubt the Steelworkers' Union would approve, but this is the only long-term solution. 5-1-02: U.S. Senators John Kerry   (D-Mass.)  and John McCain  (R-Ariz.), in the opinion of this Newstand's Editorial Staff, speaking for themselves as individuals and not for the Association proper,  seem to have  a penchant for proposing and supporting legislation which has the consequence of making life easier for Communist Vietnam , legislation which the American left euphemistically refers to as "reconciliation."  Reconciliation, the Editorial Staff of this Newstand would like to say, between the North and the South at the end of our Civil War, was a noble cause. Reconciliation with Germany and Japan, for the sake of a better and democratic world, at the end of World War II, was a noble cause. Reconciliation with the Russians who denounced the dictatorship of international Communism and its imperialism, was a noble cause. "Reconciliation" with thugs like the people who rule Vietnam today with an iron fist, with the Castro's, the Sandinistas, the Khomeini's, with the jihadists who despise the essence of democracy and despise the cause of America, with people who believe government has the right to regulate freedom of speech, of belief, of religion and of association, that is not a noble cause. It is an ignoble one.    These two Senators are holding up a bill in the Senate, already passed by the U.S. House, called the Human Rights Act, which criticizes the Communist government of Vietnam by name for its repeated human rights violations. McCain, at least in 2000, had the guts to call the  exactly what they are, "gooks," although he later qualified his remark by suggesting he might only have been referring to the North Vietnamese Communists who actually mistreated him while he was a Vietnam War P.O.w.      UPDATE: The Association tallies that 1815 Vietnam veterans are still missing and unaccounted for  as of August 5, 2005.   By State and Country:                                                               EAC Alabama  34   NH Hampshire 6         Alaska 2   NJ 51         Arizona 18   NM Mexico 12         Arkansas 20   NY 118         California  183   NC Carolina 44         Colorado  29   ND Dakota 10         Connecticut t 28   Ohio 83         Delaware  4   Oklahoma  40         DC Columbia  9   Oregon 39         Florida 60   PA 98         Georgia 35   RI Island 8         Hawaii 7   SC Carolina 29         Idaho 10   SD Dakota 7         Illinois 73   Tennessee  33         Indiana 58   Texas 120         Iowa 28   Utah 16         Kansas 30   Vermont  5         Kentucky  14   Virginia 48         Louisiana  24   Washington  45         Maine 14   WVA Virginia 17         Maryland  26   Wisconsin  30         MA 41   Wyoming g 5         Michigan  55   Canada 2         Minnesota  37   Panama 1         Mississippi  12   Philippines  4         Missouri  38   PR RRI Rico 1         Montana  19               Nebraska  19   Civilians*  8         Nevada 8                         TOTAL MISSING: ANDUNACCOUNTED FOR UNACCOUNTED FOR             1815              *These 8 civilians working for the USG have no known home of record.       Association members who have visited Vietnam to search for MIAs (which this Association believes still may be alive there and, in any event, have never been accounted for) received nothing but discouragement and harassment from the Vietnamese Communists during their search.   Some historical background on Senator Kerry's support for this type of legislation:   When John Kennedy came back from World War II, he wrote a book about the war, While England Slept, which made the point that democracies needed to take it upon themselves to protect themselves against menacing dictators, and also lauded England for standing up, in the final analysis, all alone, to Hitler. When John Kerry came back from Vietnam, he wrote a book, The New Soldier, which, again, in the opinion of this Newstand's Editorial Staff speaking for themselves as individuals and not for the Association proper, lauded a vile anti-American dictator, Ho Chi Minh, and the Communists in Vietnam, with an anti-war hippy philosophy about why every American soldier had the right to support them too, and to despise America.   The title to Kerry's book forms a perhaps unintended  mockery of the words, "the summer soldier," Thomas Paine used during the Revolution in a treatise  chastening American patriots to a better effort. Paine's words were ordered to be read to our soldiers on Christmas Day, 1776, by General Washington, immediately before they crossed the Delaware in the middle of a cruel winter, to destroy, as they did, Hessian occupying forces at both Trenton and Princeton.   Paine's words will live forever.     The Cover to John Kerry's Book     With Our Flag Flying Upside Down in Disrespect         This Association supported America's purposes in being in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and called for stronger military intervention against North Vietnam at that time. The Vietnamese Communists constitute, along with Castro, in our opinion, one of the last vestiges of old-school Communist dictatorships on the face of the earth, and we are still in favor of any action which makes their stay left on this planet as short as possible. You can contact Senators Kerry and McCain to tell them what you think about their legislative action simply by clicking on their pictures and going to their websites where you can leave each of them an email.   Senator John Kerry, 5/23/2004: "The American flag does not belong to the Republican Party."   That's true. But it also certainly doesnt belong to people, any people, flying it upside down. 5-2-02: Congress proposes making the Director of Homeland Security a Cabinet position. We support that part of the proposal because it per se would give the new Secretary more clout. This Office should not merely remain (nor should ONDCP), under any circumstances, as a room in the West Wing for a White House Think Tank. The White House already has plenty of sites on the web, including this one, it can turn to for think tanks on national security issues. The devil is in the details, however. Unless you give Homeland Security operating agencies under him, he's got nobody directly to boss around, and therefore his Office would still have no legs. So Congress proposes to give him Customs (now under Treasury) and the Coast Guard (now under Transportation). This Association, on the other hand, has long proposed making the USCG a separate branch under Defense, and unifying Customs and INS under State (so Americans entering or leaving the country don't have to be harassed by two or more separate agencies), while at the same time cleaning up the unholy mess INS has become, but we can reluctantly settle for the Congressional proposal, which is likely to pass. A better idea, though, to give Ridge some legs, would be to name a full slate of operational agencies he would have direct control over in a Presidentially declared National Emergency Threat, with the President being able to specify, at the same time, which of those agencies the new Secretary would temporarily control. The new Secretary also needs to be specifically be given the authority (the "big stick," as Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-Ct) correctly calls it) to order the CIA and the FBI to "clear up" any discrepancies in their reporting; to find out everything either of them knows about a report of the other; and to report to the President accordingly. If not by statute, this all needs to be included in an Executive Order. This is not, as former U.S. Senator Gary Hart accurately advised against in Congressional testimony, "one central keyhole for all intelligence;" It is, however, as is currently needed, a central keyhole for all intelligence affecting the Islamic fundamentalist terror threat specifically against the American homeland. As you may have noticed, this Homeport Page is getting a little bit crowded so, for future updates on National Security Issues, tune in to our NATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS NEWSTAND. And stay tuned. ***************             NEWS AND EDITORIAL COMMENT Where do you get your news stories from? Our own News Divisions, which monitor other news organizations and also have their own reporters and sources, and we follow the same Truth in Reporting Standards as any other major American news media organization. What makes us different is our pro-American perspective.  You may also be wondering where the editorial content on this Site comes from. It comes from our National Editorial Boards for our four Newstands, which consist of nationally appointed officers of the Association. Their required mandate in editorial commentary is to reflect the consensus views of active-duty, Reserve and former active-duty and Reserve Navy personnel in general, and of the membership of the Association in particular, in which case they identify their opinions as being those of the Association, including, sometimes, the use of the pronouns "we," "our" or "us." Those three individual Staffs are also granted the editorial privilege to state their own opinion on a subject which is not necessarily the opinion of the Association, providing they identify those individual Editorial Staff opinions as such. We use the word "consensus" here, by the way, since it is by definition a vague word, to mean a strongly held opinion of a large majority of  a particular class of people, and not necessarily unanimity. The one exception to what we've written here about our opinions deals with the subject of the right of non-profit organizations in the United States to fundraise, a subject the current National Executive Board of the Association takes very seriously. On that exclusive subject opinions made on this Site, wherever they may occur, and regardless of what words are used to express them, reflect the unanimous views of that Executive Board but only as individulals, nothing more, nothing less. We also should mention that our Newstands have a feature very few others do: In the interests of free speech, and of the notion that the Association is not trying to influence any member of the public as to issue advocacy without them hearing the other side of the story, both of which ideas this Association takes very seriously, we weblink specific stories, within the story itself, to points of view different from our own, so check them out. You won't find that in the major media, or from anyone else who sometime seem to believe that news and information consist entirely of their own self-serving propaganda. Regardless of whether it's Tom Brokaw, your state Attorney General, or your local minister preaching at you, our Combined Editorial Staffs believe, contrary to conventional practices, that America would be a much more civil place if those in media information and advocacy dissemination chose, with their own resources, to offer equal time to those with different or opposing views. We need to comment here, also, on our Newstands and political campaigns. All our Newstands may, from time to time, report germane and newsworthy policy proposals on national security, war on terror and veterans' issues, from candidates or officeholders who subsequently become candidates, and those Newstands may editorialize about those proposals or policies, and we may even editorialize about how an officeholder has done his or her job with respect to policy matters, and may quote from one more than his or her policy or political opponents. All this is part of legitimate, and non-partisan, reporting. Neither the Association, however, nor any of its Newstands, is affiliated with or influenced by either a candidate, candidate's committee or a political party (which is the Webster's Dictionary definition of "non-partisan"), and we neither endorse candidates nor do we advocate, explicitly or impliedly, that anyone, member or non-member,  support or oppose any candidate for U.S. public office. To put all that in more legalistic terms, the Association neither sponsors; endorses; is connected to; affiliated with; controls, or is controlled by; funds, in whole or in part, or is funded by, in whole or in part, any political action committee, party, candidate or political organization. To put it another way, the Association reports the news and provides commentary, including commentary and news about policies or policy proposals past and present, of people who may be candidates for public office. During an election season, when we make this reportage, we try to afford opposing candidates, if any, roughly equal coverage. These are First Amendment Rights afforded us as persons under the First Amendment, and as a broadcast station under the FECA and BCRA, and we challenge any agency of government to take us to court if they disagree. None of that reportage or commentary promotes , supports, attacks or opposes the candidacy of the person himself or herself, and should not be interpreted as doing so. On the Association's History of,  and Commentary on, the Association Field at the top of this Page, we also discuss the Association's support for certain national security policies since the inception of the Association. Again, these are endorsements of policy, and not advocacy to support or oppose, nor an attack on, or a promotion of, any candidate for U.S. public office, and should not be construed to be so.  Last, we need to mention that the Association, its Newstands, and each staff member of each Newstand, have never, in any way, shape or form, taken a penny from any government agency to run or promote any news or analysis story. And we never will.   OUR VIEWERS Our intended demographic on this Site, by the way, does not age-discriminate. We have viewers in the 18-34 age group, and we want to keep them, and we have viewers in the 80-105 age group, and we want to keep them too. And we have viewers in between, and we want to keep them. We don't "dis" anyone here, unlike some national TV news networks. The average viewer spends about 15 minutes per visit on this Site, is a repeat viewer, and, after first tuning in, turns to our latest Newstand entries, and we try to say things there that are equally informative and appealing to the 18-year old and to the 105-year old American. Our demographics show that most of our readers are are in the higher educated and upper income bracket categories. We currently are getting about 60,000 unique visitors per month on the Site. Each viewer visits an average of 3 Pages on the Site. Our current Googgle HomePage Rank is 3/10. This rank tracks with other rankings of mainstream website viewer tracking organizations which do their own tallies, which show our site somewhere in the 30% highest of all www sites. However, Google also gives this Site the 7th top Page Rank among "NavyVeterans" sites listed by Google. Google also bans this site in China, at the "suggestion" of the Chinese Communist Party. Alexa ranks our site as the 3rd most popular site in "all veterans' categories" among Alexa listed sites, and the 2nd most popular "Navy veterans" site, with an average alexa user review of 4 stars out of 5. (Alexa uses our alternate url: navyvets.tripod.com for indexing this site.) For Tripod's Monthly Graph of our unique visitors from 2004 -2006, click here. *****************   LINKS OF INTEREST                                USNVA Military Moms Service - You don't need any other! If you want to talk to other military moms , just leave them your e-mail on our Forum at the bottom of our Homepage or on our "Searching For..." Guestmap at the bottom of our Links We Mentioned Page. Or, if you are a military mom, and want to talk to one of our experts on the subject, please contact the Chair of our new Military Moms Committee, Melissa Anderson, at melanderson@NavyVets.org. She'd be happy to talk to you about any subject touching on military moms, and to answer any of your questions.  Department of Veterans Affairs - The Association is an Official Partner of the VA and can be found on its Partners Section on its Website.        Number of times Foreign   MiddleEasternHackersClub.net (not their real url) have tried to sabotage this Site: - 204 Number of times   they've succeeded: - Once.