Well since you fired the first salvo, your conspiracy theories are idiotic, and only believed by rabid FDR haters... Can't even take a joke, (can't read just kidding?) prolly a little irritated that the truth is so hard to disprove with illogic...
MacBeth: What real, imminent threat did the US feel from Germany? Did we, in fact, commit the first act of war against the Germans by sending troops to Europe in response to their declaration of war?
No. Immediately after declaring war on the US, the Germans launched Operation Drum Beat/Roll ( or Thunderclap, depending on your interpretation) which was a wide-spread U-Boat attack on all previously off limits US vessels along the Atlantic Seaboard, in the Gulf of Mexico, and around the Carribean. As US forces had not had to learn the costly lessons the British had learned about facing U-Boats ( ie, convoys, extinguishing lights, not presenting targets against lit backgrounds, etc.) the attack was incredibly successfull, and has been argued as being more strategically destructive to US WWII efforts than Pearl Harbor, accounting for the destruction of over 400 US ships ( mostly oil/munitions bearing tankers and freighters) in an incredibly short time. This was the first act fof war between Germany and the US following Germany's declaration of war on the US. Ships were destroyed in US docks, yards off the coast of Florida in sight of boardwalks, etc., and led many Americans who witnessed them at the time to fear an imminent invasion of the US, as unrealistic as that was.
MacBeth is right. In fact, there were some German U-Boats within sight of Manhattan, something many people don't know, and Hitler had concrete plans to attack New York.
I don't know about worst president ever. There were some pretty bad ones and in many of our lifetimes, we had Nixon. However, I would say that this has been the worst cabinet ever. I give Bush props for his leadership once he composed himself after 9/11 and also for going in and kicking Taliban a$$es in Afghanistan. I just hate everything he (and his supporting cast) has done since.
I disagree a little. I think of any American in our armed forces fighting for me and my family and my country as heroes. A hero doesn't have to seek out their heroism...sometimes they are thrust into it kicking and screaming...sometimes they go scared and silent...but if they go, to me at least, they are a hero.
Hmm, follow up. Jessica Lynch Laments Military Portrayal Fri Nov 7, 2:36 PM ET Add Top Stories - AP to My Yahoo! http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=13&u=/ap/20031107/ap_on_re_us/lynch_hometown_2 By ALLISON BARKER, Associated Press Writer PALESTINE, W.Va. - Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch accused the military of using her capture and dramatic nighttime rescue to sway public support for the war in Iraq (news - web sites). Dramatic video of U.S. commandos whisking the former Army supply clerk from a Nasiriyah hospital to a waiting chopper April 1 helped cement Lynch's image as a hero. But the 20-year-old private told ABC's Diane Sawyer there was no reason for her rescue to be filmed. "They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," Lynch told Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday. "It's wrong." The network posted the excerpt on its Web site Friday. Lynch suffered broken bones and other injuries when her 507th Maintenance Company convoy was attacked after taking a wrong turn in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later said Lynch wasn't shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle. She was awarded the Bronze Star, Purple Heart and Prisoner of War medals while still in the hospital in Washington, D.C. Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. "I'm not about to take credit for something I didn't do," she said. "I did not shoot, not a round, nothing. ... I went down praying to my knees. And that's the last I remember." On Thursday, Lynch won admiration in her hometown for having the courage to reveal she was raped by her Iraqi captors. The attack is documented by medical records cited in "I am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story." The authorized biography, written by reporter Rick Bragg, is being released by Knopf publishing on Tuesday, Veterans Day. Family spokesman Stephen Goodwin acknowledged that the book discusses the sexual assault. "It's important to tell the story and let it be known, but she's not going to talk about it any more," Goodwin said. "She really doesn't want to say any more on this issue." Palestine resident Leah Eberbaugh said she admired Lynch for including the assault in the book. "Can you imagine the humility it takes to tell the world you were raped? That's not a secret that a woman likes to tell," Eberbaugh said. But Iraqi doctors who treated Lynch dismissed the rape claims. Dr. Mahdi Khafazji, an orthopedic surgeon at Nasiriyah's main hospital performed surgery on Lynch to repair a fractured femur and said he found no signs that she was raped or sodomized. Khafazji, speaking at his private clinic in Nasiriyah, said he examined her extensively and would have detected signs of sexual assault. He said the examination turned up no trace of semen. Relatives are now turning their worry to Lynch's brother, Army Spc. Greg Lynch Jr., who is being deployed to Iraq, The Parkersburg News reported Friday. Greg Lynch, a helicopter mechanic, introduced his sister at a news conference when she returned home in July to recover from her injuries. Months later, she is receiving two hours of physical therapy five days a week and taking about 18 pills a day. She's up to about 100 pounds from a low of 70. She still has not regained feeling in her left foot and uses crutches. She opts for a wheelchair on shopping trips to nearby Parkersburg. Since her return to West Virginia's smallest county, population about 5,900, Lynch has made a few public appearances. She's stopped in at Mom's Place for some home-cooking and a slice of chocolate pie. She's appeared at the county fair, raised the American flag at Wirt County High School's homecoming game and visited with schoolchildren. Despite her public appearances, most residents have shied away from asking her about her experiences in Iraq. The family also hasn't talked about her experiences. "You can hear that speculation but to see it in print and to know it's fact, it hurts," said Lorene Cumbridge, a 63-year-old cousin who lives near the Lynches. Emzy Ashby said Iraqi lawyer Mohammed al-Rehaief, who is credited with going to the U.S. Marines after seeing Lynch slapped in the Iraqi hospital, is the hero. Al-Rehaief recently visited Palestine, but Lynch did not meet with him. "There's no way she will ever be able to repay that man," Ashby said. In excerpts of the ABC interview, Lynch said she doesn't remember being slapped or mistreated at the hospital, and she recalled one nurse sang to her. She said her heroes were the soldiers who rescued her and those who died in the ambush on her unit. "I'm just a survivor," she said.
I commend her for finally speaking up even though her memory still seems conveniantly selective. She does not remember being raped or sodomized and the doctor who first treated her saw no signs of either. Sounds very fishy.
I think it's great that she spoke out against the hype and propoganda surrounding her. It has to be strange to all of a sudden be somebody's instrument of propoganda and you are helpless to stop it.
I was thinking the same. She claims to not remember anything, so is she taking OUR doctors word for it that she was raped. In any case, it's a GOOD thing that she doesn't remember it, whether it happened or not. I don't know her mind, but maybe she has her own good reason for not speaking, or meeting with the Iraqi man who tipped us off about where she was. I apoligize for my previous statement about her being a typical "B_tch", but it really seems strange that she wouldn't meet him. After what she's been through, I'll give her the benefit of the doubt. But I won't buy her book.
I haven't the whole story, but on the radio they were discussing this topic and how angry she was at the Pentagon for saying she was a hero and using her as a pawn to get people behind the war... You know what, be thankful your alive and stop b****in'...I'm sorry she went thru this, but she enlisted...You'll have more money than you'll know what to do with and I just think it's poor timing and classless... To me, the media always takes the story to the nth degree and I think the govt. has a right to show us what really happens in war...
Did anyone watch 60 Minutes last night? Apparently not only is there this one soldier (SGT Donald Walters) who was the one actually shot and stabbed during this battle, story originally attributed to Lynch, but there is another soldier named PFC Patrick Miller running around during the gunfight to get a new vehicle to help his troops escape who shot half a dozen Iraqis in the process who were trying to set up a mortar on the position where our troops were pinned down. Amazing... while Lynch gets the movies and books the real heroes are nameless. Jessica Lynch's Hero http://cbsnews.cbs.com/stories/2003/11/06/60minutes/main582354.shtml On the fourth day of the war in Iraq, a huge American convoy headed from Kuwait to Baghdad. A dozen heavy trucks and other maintenance vehicles fell behind the rest and got lost. At sunrise, Iraqi troops ambushed the lost soldiers, firing from both sides of the highway. The Americans sped up to escape the attack, but the Humvee that Pfc. Jessica Lynch was riding in smashed into the back of a jack-knifed American tractor-trailer. Less than a mile behind Lynch, Pfc. Patrick Miller was driving the last truck in the convoy. During the attack, he floored the accelerator, trying to steer and duck bullets at the same time. Miller says he had not used his weapon at that point. "I used my truck on one of 'em," he says. "An Iraqi jumped out in the middle of the street, and I ran him over." Iraqi bullets pounded Miller's truck, which also carried Sgt. James Riley and Pfc. Brandon Sloan. "I knew that we were taking a lot of incoming just from the sounds that were coming around us," Miller says. "It was bouncing off the trucks, bouncin' off the hood. I went to stick my hand out the window to adjust the mirror so I could see 'em comin' from behind. And as I got my hand right to to the window, the mirror just shattered." At that moment a bullet hit Sloan in his forehead, killing him instantly. "He just tensed up and slumped over. Didn't make a sound or nothing," Miller recalls. He kept driving. "You had to. You couldn't stop and try to take care of him." He says, "It just felt like a real bad war movie. You were actually seeing people die in front of you." Bullets then ripped into his truck's transmission, and it lost power. Miller and Riley jumped out and ran forward to where Lynch's Humvee had slammed into the tractor-trailer. Lynch was unconscious and appeared to be dead. All four others inside were killed. "And it was just like a mangled mess of equipment and everything," MIller says. "I figured there was no way that anybody could survive something like that." Army specialists Shoshana Johnson and Edgar Hernandez also believed everyone in the Humvee had been killed. They were in the tractor-trailer that Lynch's Humvee had smashed into. All the American vehicles had broken down, but Miller thought they might still escape the ambush in an Iraqi dump truck parked 50 yards up the road. If there were no keys in the ignition, he says, he would have hot-wired it. Is that something he knows how to do? "I'd have learned really fast," he says. Johnson and Hernandez were taking cover in their tractor-trailer. Their weapons had jammed and they were pinned down. But Miller ran on toward the dump truck. "She [Johnson] yells 'Miller! Get down here. You're gonna get hit,'" Miller says. "And I said 'I gotta go.' And I just kept going." Johnson recalls, "I thought it was going to be the end for all of us." Johnson was shot in the ankles; Miller took a bullet in his arm. He says there were "a whole bunch" of Iraqis firing on them. "All I could see was the bullets that were hitting the dirt around my feet." Just when it seemed the situation couldn't get any worse, it did. Miller saw a group of Iraqis setting up a mortar position in front of the dump truck. He says it could have wiped them all out. To prevent them from firing, Miller dove behind a horseshoe-shaped mount of dirt called a berm, across the highway from the Iraqis. But it was seven Iraqis against one American -- seven Iraqis who were in that mortar pit just 25 yards away. Miller hadn't fired a weapon for seven months, and he admits he wasn't the best marksman. He was an Army mechanic, and when he'd taken his first marksmanship test, he'd failed it. So what did he do? "One guy, like, jumped up to where I could see him, and he had a mortar round in his hand, getting ready to drop it in the tube," he says. "And as he jumped up, I just raised my rifle up and shot, and he fell over." It was the first shot he fired in the incident. The lousy marksman hit home. But after that first shot, his rifle jammed. He had to pound on it with the palm of his hand, after every shot, to get the next bullet loaded into the chamber. He kept on re-loading and shooting. "I was kind of getting a rhythm down, count like seconds and then look up," he explains. "And you could see somebody else trying to load it. So, I was starting to count, and when I'd get to the number, I'd look up. And somebody else would be trying to load it, and I'd shoot. I did that probably seven times total. I counted the last time, and when I looked up, there wasn't nobody there." Everybody knows about Jessica Lynch, but nobody knows about Patrick. "And he did an amazing thing," Johnson says. "He saved our lives. If that mortar had hit that vehicle we were underneath, we'd be gone. And so would Jessica, because it would have been a chain reaction. It had all that fuel, we'd be dead." Iraqi gunmen surrounded the group and took them prisoner. They went into captivity still believing that Lynch had been killed back in the Humvee. When U.S. Marines came to their rescue 21 days later, they were astonished to learn that their friend had also survived -- but surprised that she'd become a national hero. Lynch apparently agrees with Johnson and Hernandez that Miller was the hero of the whole operation. Does her $1 million book deal and television movie bother Miller? "Mmm, somewhat," he answers. "But I don't want to get all into that." Would he turn down a $1 million book deal? "Oh no, I'd have to think about it," he laughs. For now, Miller has been working anonymously in the motor-pool at Fort Carson in Colorado. Three months after the crash, The Washington Post referred to him thusly in an article about Jessica Lynch: "One soldier whose name could not be learned, took cover behind a berm. Iraqi soldiers were on the other side in a mortar pit. He killed a half dozen of them, a defense official said. Soon though, he was surrounded by a couple of dozen armed Iraqis and is believed to have been killed on the spot. 'He didn't have a chance,' said the official." Miller says he saw the article. "I went to work the next day and said that I wasn't doing nothing at work because the paper said I was dead," he laughs. Only a month ago, Baltimore Sun reporter Tom Bowman revealed the name of the unsung hero. Bowman had learned that out of the 150,000 U.S. soldiers sent to Iraq, Miller was one of only 90 to receive the Silver Star for valor. Col. Heidi Brown explains why, out of 2,000 soldiers under her command, Miller was the only one she recommended for one of the Army's highest awards. She says, "Private First Class Miller did things during war that no other soldier underneath my command did. And he risked his life to save his comrades and he absolutely did." Brown also has an idea why the Pentagon had first mistakenly described Lynch as a fierce warrior who'd been shot and stabbed fighting off Iraqis. The Americans there had heard an Iraqi radio transmission describing a blond American fighting to her last breath before she was shot and stabbed to death. Now Brown believes they may have confused Lynch with another blond soldier in her unit, Sgt. Donald Walters, whose body was later found shot and stabbed to death. "The Iraqi reports had, whether it was the actual Iraqi, the language, or the translation, used, 'she' instead of 'he' and that is my understanding of why there was confusion in this," she says. Miller may be the only person who doesn't think he's a hero. "It's good to know that you actually did something to save other people's lives," he says. "But for me, as far as people saying that I'm a hero, I don't feel that I'm a hero. Because I feel that I was doing my job as a soldier."
Huh? What are u saying? Poor timing, classless? ... the govt. has a right to show us what really happens in war? Are you among those who praised her for her "heroism" and now disappointed that she wasn't one? Are you saying you rather she keeps her mouth shut and let the lies perpeptuate? What kind of a person r u?
Apparently based on your comments, a logical sane person... I agree she has a right to speak her mind, but do it any other day but Veteran's Day (when the interview will air)... Also, I do wish she wasn't put in this situation, however, I don't want her comments to affect the morale of the men and women who are still over their defending our country an honor...BTW, I never praised her heroism as the real hero's are the ones that saved her and afforded her the opportunity to be free, including the Iraqi... If you still don't get it, let me know and I'll type a little slower
So u think Jessica chooses the day the network shows the interview? In any case, you honor the veterans/ soldiers by telling the truth, by honoring the real heroes of that particular ordeal ... not by telling lies. You think our soldiers in Iraq knows nothing about these lies? Do u think they appreciate you lying to protect their morale? Do you think they like it when they put their lives on the line while some celebrity the Pentagon and media built up reap the rewards? Contrary to your belief, Jessica coming out and telling the truth may be the biggest morale boost they have for a while ... Talking about being slow ....
Off topic, but Larry Flynt is claiming he's got some jessica lynch "pictures' This'll get pretty ugly.
Or not... Who would have thought that when it comes to exploiting Lynch, Larry Flynt turns out to be a paragon of virtue compared to the Bushies. _____________ Larry Flynt Buys Purported Nude Photos of Jessica Lynch Tuesday, November 11, 2003 By David K. Li and Bill Sanderson — Pornmeister Larry Flynt (search) said he's bought purported nude photos of Iraq war heroine Jessica Lynch (search) - to keep them from ever being published. Flynt's claim came as Lynch and her family were feted last night at a Glamour magazine reception at the American Museum of Natural History (search) - and on the day before her authorized biography is to be released. "I was offered photos of Jessica Lynch. I purchased them in order to keep them out of circulation, not to publish them," Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine, said in a statement read by a publicist. "Jessica Lynch is being used as a pawn by the media and by the government to create a hero who can sell this war to the American people." Flynt, no friend of the Bush administration or the Republicans, said the president is using Lynch "to justify the war in Iraq." "The U.S. government wasn't alone in their actions," his statement said. "They were co-conspirators with the media, who wanted to force-feed us a Joan of Arc." Flynt's spokeswoman declined to reveal how much he paid for the photos, or where they came from. Rumors of nude photos of Lynch, 20, have been swirling for several months. In September, two Army ex-comrades allegedly tried to sell topless pictures of Lynch to Globe, a supermarket tabloid, for $200,000. Globe turned down the offer, and some reports questioned whether the pictures were in fact real. A half-million copies of Lynch's authorized biography, "I Am A Soldier Too: The Jessica Lynch Story," go on sale today. The book, by former New York Times reporter Rick Bragg, discloses medical evidence that Lynch may have been sodomized after she was captured by Iraqi soldiers last March. But Iraqi doctors say they didn't see any such evidence - and that they kept Jessica safe while she was in their care. In an ABC News interview to air tonight, Lynch said the military was "wrong" to videotape her rescue April 1 from a hospital in the Iraqi town of Nasariyah, and that she's bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal. "They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," Lynch said.
