Category Archives: Military

May 15, 2013

Rock legend Ted Nugent shoots bow and arrows with veterans, talks technique before rock show

Posted on May 15, 2013 by ifnm| Leave a comment

“Not a day goes by when I’m not contacted by someone doing something to help the military in their family,” Nugent said. “They call me and say ‘Hey Ted come by this hospital’ or ‘Hey Ted, we’re having a barbecue’ or ‘Hey Ted, we’ve got some machine guns, come shoot up some ammo.’ Now what am I going to do, say no thanks?”


Ted Nugent, left, shows Doug Largent a different technique for drawing back a bow at Exodus Place in Grand Rapids Tuesday. Largent, a member of the veterans reemergent program at Exodus as well as the assistant chef, said meeting Nugent was a ‘dream come true.’

As soon as Ted Nugent’s trademark camouflage cowboy hat poked into the cafeteria at Exodus Place in Grand Rapids, Doug Largent’s eyes lit up.

Nugent, in town to play a three-pronged rock show at Van Andel Arena with fellow musical veterans REO Speedwagon and Styx, stopped by the facility to shoot bows with the men on their way back into society after struggling with homelessness or prison, many of whom are veterans.

Exodus Place implemented bow and arrow shooting in February sponsored by the National Archery in the Schools Program (NASP), which has brought the men together, providing them with something to focus on, Exodus pastor Ray Townsend said.

“These men finally have a target in life,” Townsend said. “They can focus on one thing, that bullseye. It’s been amazing the change it’s made in their lives.”

That rings true with Largent who was overjoyed when Nugent gave him some one-on-one bow instruction.

“I’ve been a Ted Nugent fan since I was 17 and my first concert was Nugent,” Largent said. “Ted Nugent is such a down-to-earth rock star and so friendly.”

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Posted in Military, Ted Nugent

Murder of U.S. Marine in Afghanistan Raises Red Flags About War

Posted on May 15, 2013 by ifnm| Leave a comment

During a meal after training, one of the U.S. government-backed Afghan troops indicated to Buckley, Jr. that local forces knew the group of Americans was set to leave soon. It made the U.S. Marines nervous — especially since government policy apparently keeps American forces disarmed while on base with armed Afghans. Buckley, Jr. had already terrified his parents by suggesting that he would not be coming home alive.

Before being murdered by an AK47-wielding “tea boy” on a base in Helmand Province, Lance Corporal Greg Buckley, Jr. (shown in inset) told his parents about a sense that he would not come home from Afghanistan. He was right. Now, his heartbroken family and a growing group of supporters across America want justice.

In an interview with The New American, the then-21-year-old Marine’s father, Greg Buckley, Sr., also raised troubling questions about the U.S. government’s war in Afghanistan, the controversial policies governing American forces there, and much more. He says it is time for politicians to do something for U.S. troops — and for American soldiers to come home now.

“As Karzai has said many times, they don’t want us there. So why should we even be there?” Buckley, Sr. asked. “There are reasons we are there, and one day our government might tell us the truth. But that day might be too late. We are losing too many soldiers out there in Afghanistan. Our government needs to respect our soldiers, give them more protection, or return all of them home immediately.”

On August 10 last year, two days before Lance Cpl. Buckley, Jr. was finally supposed to return home for a surprise visit with his family, he spent the day following orders to train Afghan security forces. Even though he already knew well from personal experience that the Afghans did not want him or his fellow soldiers in the country — many of the locals loathe the American presence with a passion — Buckley, Jr. did what he was ordered to do.

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Posted in Middle East, Military, Murder

May 10, 2013

Military Families Allege Muslim Cleric ‘Damned’ Dead Navy Seals at Ceremony

Posted on May 10, 2013 by ifnm| Leave a comment

Family members of Navy SEALs who died on duty in Afghanistan claim that an Islamic cleric cursed the servicemen’s bodies at their memorial ceremony.

Family members of Navy SEALs who died on duty in Afghanistan claim that an Islamic cleric “damned” the servicemen’s bodies at their memorial ceremony.

Three families of Navy SEAL Team VI special forces servicemen, along with one family of an Army National Guardsman, appeared at a press conference on Thursday. They revealed information about how and why their sons along with 26 others were killed in a chopper crash in Afghanistan on August 6, 2011, a few months after successfully raiding Osama Bin Laden’s compound and killing the 9/11 terrorist mastermind.

The families of the servicemen say that America’s enemies were determined to strike back at our special forces for Bin Laden’s death, so they are questioning why military brass sent their sons into battle “without special operations aviation and proper air support” immediately after President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden announced to the world that SEAL Team VI killed Bin Laden.

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Posted in Islam, Military, Radicals

May 1, 2013

Their War, Not Ours By Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted on May 1, 2013 by ifnm| Leave a comment

Congressional war hawks, led by Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, are cawing for air strikes and no-fly zones, which would mean dead and captured Americans and many more dead Syrians.

“The worst mistake of my presidency,” said Ronald Reagan of his decision to put Marines into the middle of Lebanon’s civil war, where 241 died in a suicide bombing of their barracks.

And if Barack Obama plunges into Syria’s civil war, it could consume his presidency, even as Iraq consumed the presidency of George W. Bush.

Why would Obama even consider this?

Because he blundered badly. Foolishly, he put his credibility on the line by warning that any Syrian use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line” and be a “game changer” with “enormous consequences.”

Not only was this ultimatum unwise, Obama had no authority to issue it. If Syria does not threaten or attack us, Obama would need congressional authorization before he could constitutionally engage in acts of war against Syria. When did he ever receive such authorization?

Moreover, there is no proof Syrian President Bashar Assad ever ordered the use of chemical weapons.

U.S. intelligence agencies maintain that small amounts of the deadly toxin sarin gas were likely used. But if it did happen, we do not know who ordered it.

Syrians officials deny that they ever used chemicals. And before we dismiss Damascus’ denials, recall that an innocent man in Tupelo, Miss., was lately charged with mailing deadly ricin to Sen. Roger Wicker and President Obama. This weekend, we learned he may have been framed.

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Posted in Middle East, Military, Pat Buchanan, Republicans/Neo-Cons

April 11, 2013

Almost 100 Million People In America Aren’t Smart Enough To Enlist In The Military by Steve Sailer

Posted on April 11, 2013 by ifnm| Leave a comment

Moreover, we have a whole bunch of our fellow American citizens who aren’t of the cognitive quality currently necessary to fight for their country. Shouldn’t we be worrying more about what kind of living they’ll be able to earn before we care about solving Mexico’s problems?

Because the pundit class in America is related to so few people who want to enlist in the military, there’s negligible media awareness of how hard it has become to join up. A major hurdle is scoring high enough on the AFQT cognitive test.

The Pentagon isn’t in any hurry to make its intelligence requirements explicable to the media. The conventional wisdom is that intelligence testing is a racist hoax or it just applies to academia, not the real world, or whatever. The fact that the military is obsessive about cognitive testing is something that simply isn’t in the reigning worldview, and the military is fine with that. It likes testing and it dislikes outside interference, so the more convoluted its jargon for talking about its intelligence requirements, the better.

For example, the entrance exam is, in one sense, the ASVAB, a 9 or 10 part 3-hour test. But a 4-part subset of the ASVAB called the AFQT determines whether you’ll be allowed to enlist or not. (The non-AFQT ASVAB subtests influence assignments, such as to vehicle repair.)

Are you losing interest in this topic already as you try to keep ASVAB and AFQT straight? The military doesn’t mind if outsiders are baffled and bored. In fact, it kind of likes it that way. And if potential recruits can’t keep this stuff straight in their heads, well maybe they aren’t military material.

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Posted in Education, Military, Steve Sailer

March 26, 2013

The Disasters That U.S. Intervention Created by Sheldon Richman

Posted on March 26, 2013 by ifnm| Leave a comment

U.S. officials say the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were key to national security after 9/11. Even Barack Obama, who built a presidential campaign on opposing the Iraq war, claims it did much good after all. Nonsense.

Americans have forgotten about the Iraq war, which began 10 years ago this week, and the Afghan war, the longest in American history, but the U.S. government is still throwing its weight around in both countries.

The Iraq war, the pretext for which was nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, officially ended in 2011 with the withdrawal of virtually all of America’s combat troops. But the havoc wreaked by the U.S. invasion and regime change goes on. Over a hundred thousand Iraqis were killed in the war itself, but many more died in the aftermath from sectarian violence and the obliterated infrastructure. (Iraq had never recovered from the destruction inflicted by the U.S. government in the 1991 Gulf War and in the decade of sanctions related to it.) Millions fled their homes.

The U.S. occupation unleashed bitter sectarian violence, complete with U.S.-trained death squads, leading the numerically dominant Shiite Muslims (who are friendly to Iran) to cleanse the Sunnis from Baghdad. A Sunni insurgency against the occupation inflicted heavy casualties until American money managed to have the guns turned on the al-Qaeda affiliate, which was not in Iraq before the U.S. invasion.

On the American side, the deaths approached 4,500, with tens of thousands shattered in body and spirit. For the U.S. taxpayer, the price is over a trillion dollars, with billions lost to sheer corruption in the so-called rebuilding.

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Posted in Democrats/Progressives, Government, Middle East, Military, Radicals, Republicans/Neo-Cons

March 22, 2013

Pat Buchanan: Was Iraq Worth It?

Posted on March 22, 2013 by ifnm| Leave a comment

This generation is eyewitness to how a Great Power declines and falls. And to borrow from old King Pyrrhus, one more such victory as Iraq, and we are undone.

Ten years ago today, U.S. air, sea and land forces attacked Iraq. And the great goals of Operation Iraqi Freedom?

Destroy the chemical and biological weapons Saddam Hussein had amassed to use on us or transfer to al-Qaida for use against the U.S. homeland.

Exact retribution for Saddam’s complicity in 9/11 after we learned his agents had met secretly in Prague with Mohamed Atta.

Create a flourishing democracy in Baghdad that would serve as a catalyst for a miraculous transformation of the Middle East from a land of despots into a region of democracies that looked West.

Not all agreed on the wisdom of this war. Gen. Bill Odom, former director of the National Security Agency, thought George W. Bush & Co. had lost their minds: “The Iraq War may turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in American history.”

Yet, a few weeks of “shock and awe,” and U.S. forces had taken Baghdad and dethroned Saddam, who had fled but was soon found in a rat hole and prosecuted and hanged, as were his associates, “the deck of cards,” some of whom met the same fate.

And so, ’twas a famous victory. Mission accomplished!

Soon, however, America found herself in a new, unanticipated war, and by 2006, we were, astonishingly, on the precipice of defeat, caught in a Sunni-Shia sectarian conflict produced by our having disbanded the Iraqi army and presided over the empowerment of the first Shia regime in the nation’s history.

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Posted in Government, Middle East, Military, Pat Buchanan

March 11, 2013

Afghan Leader Says U.S. Abets Taliban’s Goal

Posted on March 11, 2013 by ifnm| Leave a comment

Among Mr. Karzai’s critical comments on Sunday, which came at an early-morning news conference in honor of women’s day in Afghanistan, he charged that the American government and the Taliban, while using different means, had in effect colluded to keep Afghanistan unstable to justify a continued American military presence.

President Hamid Karzai leveled particularly harsh accusations against the United States on Sunday, suggesting that the Americans and the Taliban had a common goal in destabilizing his country. The comments cast a shadow on the first visit by Chuck Hagel as defense secretary.

The Afghan president’s discontent with his American allies has been a recurring theme over the past 10 years. Still, his condemnation now, at a critical moment for talks under way on the shape and scope of any American military presence here past 2014, has raised new questions about the two countries’ abilities to bridge their intensifying differences.

In recent days, Mr. Karzai has been the most critical about some of the policies that American officials have described as most important to their mission here, including the widespread use of Special Operations forces and a continuing say in how battlefield detainees are vetted and released. He has seized on both as violations of Afghan sovereignty, barring American commandos from Wardak Province and bristling at critical terms in a negotiated agreement on Bagram Prison.

A result was a last-minute refusal by American officials on Saturday to hand the Afghan government full control of the prison.

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Posted in Government, Middle East, Military

March 5, 2013

10th Anniversary of U.K. Whistleblower Almost Averting Iraq War

Posted on March 5, 2013 by ifnm| Leave a comment

As things turned out, a second UN resolution to authorize the war against Iraq never materialized and air strikes began on March 19. By the time President Obama declared the war against Iraq to be officially over on August 31, 2010, more than 24,000 members of the so-called “coalition forces” were dead, another 117,000 wounded, and 151,000 civilians lay dead, many by unspeakably violent means.

Ten years ago a shy, introverted British translator with skills in Mandarin leaked an e-mail she had received at her desk at Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham, England. The leak came close to averting the Iraq War and changing the course of history. The memo, sent from Frank Koza, chief of staff at the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), was essentially a direct order to Katharine Gun and others in her section to monitor, track, follow, and develop information from UN diplomats from six key nations that were waffling in their support of a UN resolution permitting action against Iraq because of its perceived threat against the peace and security of the world.

This violated not only the independence of the GCHQ from the NSA and the sovereignty inherent in that independence, but also various laws against interfering with diplomats representing their countries’ interests at the UN. Further, the information sought would also likely have been personal in nature, with the resulting possibility of the threat of blackmail against those diplomats who refused to “get in line” and support the UN resolution for war against Iraq.

The Koza e-mail was, in short, a blockbuster, and it took Gun’s breath away. In an interview with Amy Gordon for Democracy Now! in September, 2004, she recounted what happened:

I was working for Government Communication Headquarters in the U.K., which is the equivalent to N.S.A. here in the U.S., and I was a Chinese linguist at the time, and this email crossed my desk in my in-box in January of 2003.

At that time, as we all know, it was a crucial time for the U.N. in its decision-making process as to whether or not a resolution was needed with regard to Iraq and its alleged weapons of mass destruction.

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Posted in Middle East, Military, Radicals, Terrorism

What ever happened to Nidal Hasan?

Posted on March 5, 2013 by ifnm| Leave a comment

Fellow soldiers that day “were killed and wounded by … somebody who was there that day to kill soldiers, to prevent them from deploying,” Staff Sgt. Shawn Manning said. “And if that’s not an act of war, an act of terrorism, I don’t know what is.”

Are you one of those Americans who wonders what happened to the Islamist terrorist who massacred U.S. soldiers at Fort Hood more than three years ago?

Or maybe you’re one of those Americans who assumes Maj. Nidal Hasan long ago assumed room temperature after being summarily executed for murdering 14 and wounding more than 32, while screaming “Allahu Akbar,” or “Allah is greatest.”

There hasn’t been much news on the case. The Big Media would obviously like Americans to forget about this case. The government would like you to forget about it, too. In fact, Attorney General Eric Holder declined to press terrorism charges against Hasan, inexplicably labeling the worst terrorist attack in America since 9/11 as a case of “workplace violence.”

As a result of this callous, politically motivated and criminally devious decision, the victims of Hasan’s shooting spree will not be entitled to the benefits of soldiers wounded or killed in the line of duty.

There is some news on the Nidal Hasan front.

Last week, the Army psychiatrist’s attorneys asked the judge in the case to move his murder trial off the Fort Hood post. They also want changes in the military jury pool. Since, under military judicial rules, one cannot plead guilty to a capital offense, Hasan’s attorneys are asking whether the judge would permit him to plead guilty to lesser charges that would not carry the death penalty.

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Posted in Eric Holder, Islam, Military, Multiculturalism, Murder, Terrorism