A record number of active-duty soldiers killed themselves last year, top Army leaders reported Thursday, acknowledging that they are losing a battle to reverse a years-long rise in suicides, many of them by soldiers deployed to Afghanistan 0or Iraq.

The 128 confirmed suicides last year — with 15 others pending confirmation — mark a new high since the Army began tracking them in 1980. Soldier suicides have risen each year since they totaled 67 in 2004, the first full year of the Iraq war. At least 171 soldiers, including those in the Army Reserve and National Guard, have killed themselves while deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq from the start of the military operations there in 2001 and 2003, the Army reported.

On Thursday, Army Secretary Pete Geren and other top Army officials unveiled training programs and initiatives aimed at reaching soldiers on the brink. They noted that, for the first time, the Army suicide rate exceeded the adjusted national suicide rate of about 19.5 people per 100,000.

“This is not business as usual. We need to move quickly to do everything we can to reverse this very disturbing number of suicides,” said Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the Army vice chief of staff. “We need to help our soldiers and their families understand that it’s OK to ask for help.”

Defense officials have not released overall suicide statistics in the military, but the numbers for Marines also reportedly rose in 2008. Army doctors said that troubles with intimate relationships, poor job performance, alcohol or drug abuse sparked some of the suicides. Stress from long deployments and multiple tours can play a role, often straining relationships at home; some soldiers have killed themselves after returning home and receiving new deployment orders, the Army confirmed.

However, officials also said that most of the suicides for deployed soldiers came during their initial deployments. Overall, the suicides were split about evenly among deaths in Afghanistan or Iraq, soldiers who had returned from deployment and those who never deployed.

“The numbers represent tragedies that have taken place across our Army,” Geren said. “As long as there is a single soldier out there struggling with this personal crisis, we are going to consider that a crisis of our Army family.”

In October, the Army announced it would embark on a $50 million study with the National Institute of Mental Health — the largest suicide study ever by the military. On Thursday it announced plans to step up its suicide training regimen, and ordered a “Stand Down” for suicide outreach beginning Feb. 15 that is designed to reach every soldier. However, the Army already has added hundreds of psychiatrists and psychologists and pushed videos and training through the ranks, with no sign of a turnaround. continued at Mercury News.

Now this is a story all about how
I ascended to the seat of power
If you’ll listen for a minute
Hear what I say
I’ll tell you how I became President of the U. S. of A.

In west Honolulu, born and raised
In Jakarta, where I spent most of my days
Chillin’ out in Chi-Town relaxin’ all cool
Organizing communities like I was a fool
When a couple of guys
With a disdain for peace
Started making trouble in the Middle East
They started two little wars and we all got scared
The people said "We need a president who isn’t mentally impaired!"

I ran a perfect race, turned red states blue
Swept electoral votes, added Rham to my crew
With a mandate for change and Constitution in hand
I’ll dance on the Colonnade singing, "Yes we can!"

I got to the White House about 7 or 8
And I yelled to the Bushes "Yo holmes, smell ya later!"
Looked at my office
There were no corners there
Sitting at the Resolute Desk, signing universal health care.

ReverseBelAir.ORG - President Obama

More like this at: ReverseBelAir.Org

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Two men released from the US "war on terror" prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba have appeared in a video posted on a jihadist website, the SITE monitoring service reported.

One of the two former inmates, a Saudi man identified as Abu Sufyan al-Azdi al-Shahri, or prisoner number 372, has been elevated to the senior ranks of Al-Qaeda in Yemen, a US counter-terrorism official told AFP.

Three other men appear in the video, including Abu al-Hareth Muhammad al-Oufi, identified as an Al-Qaeda field commander. SITE later said he was prisoner No. 333.

A Pentagon spokesman, Commander Jeffrey Gordon, on Saturday declined to confirm the SITE information.

"We remain concerned about ex-Guantanamo detainees who have re-affiliated with terrorist organizations after their departure," said Gordon.

"We will continue to work with the international community to mitigate the threat they pose," he said.

On the video, al-Shihri is seen sitting with three other men before a flag of the Islamic State of Iraq, the front for Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

"By Allah, imprisonment only increased our persistence in our principles for which we went out, did jihad for, and were imprisoned for," al-Shihri was quoted as saying.

Al-Shiri was transferred from Guantanamo to Saudi Arabia in 2007, the US counter-terrorism official said.

The other men in the video are identified as Commander Abu Baseer al-Wahayshi and Abu Hureira Qasm al-Rimi (also known as Abu Hureira al-Sana’ani).

The Defense Department has said as many as 61 former Guantanamo detainees — about 11 percent of 520 detainees transferred from the detention center and released — are believed to have returned to the fight.

The latest case highlights the risk the new US administration faces as it moves to empty Guantanamo of its remaining 245 prisoners and close the controversial detention camp within a year. story from Yahoo News from AFP.

Note: how does NOT relate to terrorists who breed ignorance and belief through militarism?

When the Gospel Community Church in Coxsackie, New York, breaks midservice to excuse children for Sunday school, nearly half of the 225-strong congregation patters toward the back of the worship hall: the five youngest children of Pastor Stan Slager’s eight, assistant pastor Bartly Heneghan’s eleven and the Dufkin family’s thirteen, among many others. "The Missionettes," a team of young girls who perform ribbon dances during the praise music, put down their "glory hoops" to join their classmates; the pews empty out. It’s the un-ignorable difference between the families at Gospel Community and those in the rest of the town that’s led some to wonder if the church isn’t a cult that forces its disciples to keep pushing out children.

But after the kids leave, Pastor Stan doesn’t exhort his congregation to bear children. His approach is more subtle, reminding them to present their bodies as living sacrifices to the Lord, and preaching to them about Acts 5:20: Go tell "all the words of this life." Or, in Pastor Stan’s guiding translation, to lead lives that make outsiders think, "Christianity is real," lives that "demand an explanation."

Lives such as these: Janet Wolfson is a 44-year-old mother of eight in Canton, Georgia. Tracie Moore, a 39-year-old midwife who lives in southern Kentucky, is mother to fourteen. Wendy Dufkin in Coxsackie has her thirteen. And while Jamie Stoltzfus, a 27-year-old Illinois mom, has only four children so far, she plans on bearing enough to populate "two teams." All four mothers are devoted to a way of life New York Times columnist David Brooks has praised as a new spiritual movement taking hold among exurban and Sunbelt families. Brooks called these parents "natalists" and described their progeny as a new wave of "Red-Diaper Babies"–as in "red state."

But Wolfson, Moore and thousands of mothers like them call themselves and their belief system "Quiverfull." They borrow their name from Psalm 127: "Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate." Quiverfull mothers think of their children as no mere movement but as an army they’re building for God.

Quiverfull parents try to have upwards of six children. They home-school their families, attend fundamentalist churches and follow biblical guidelines of male headship–"Father knows best"–and female submissiveness. They refuse any attempt to regulate pregnancy. Quiverfull began with the publication of Rick and Jan Hess’s 1989 book, A Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship of Christ, which argues that God, as the "Great Physician" and sole "Birth Controller," opens and closes the womb on a case-by-case basis. Women’s attempts to control their own bodies–the Lord’s temple–are a seizure of divine power.

Though there are no exact figures for the size of the movement, the number of families that identify as Quiverfull is likely in the thousands to low tens of thousands. Its word-of-mouth growth can be traced back to conservative Protestant critiques of contraception–adherents consider all birth control, even natural family planning (the rhythm method), to be the province of prostitutes–and the growing belief among evangelicals that the decision of mainstream Protestant churches in the 1950s to approve contraception for married couples led directly to the sexual revolution and then Roe v. Wade.

"Our bodies are meant to be a living sacrifice," write the Hesses. Or, as Mary Pride, in another of the movement’s founding texts, The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality, puts it, "My body is not my own." This rebuttal of the feminist health text Our Bodies, Ourselves is deliberate. Quiverfull women are more than mothers. They’re domestic warriors in the battle against what they see as forty years of destruction wrought by women’s liberation: contraception, women’s careers, abortion, divorce, homosexuality and child abuse, in that order.

continued for four more pages at The Nation

Dennis Kucinich - "50 Percent of the Population of Gaza Under 14 Years of Age!"

Hopefully Saturday’s ceasefire agreement will last…

When you’re this humble, how can you not get elected?

When future historians argue over the legacy of George W. Bush, the question they confront may be just which bracket of presidential failure he belongs in. Nixon and Johnson? Or Herbert Hoover? President Bush earned his place in the pantheon of disgrace even before he presided over an epochal financial crisis. Absent the atrocities of 9/11, he might have been a mediocrity: a big spender too prone to trust his shallow instincts but able to clear the competence threshold and lacking the sophistication to be truly dangerous.

Then came that epic morning, which Bush answered by giving the hijackers far more than they could accomplish with four planes. His grand democratization plan reduced Iraq to rubble, drove Iran to arm, and provided terrorists with the ultimate recruiting tool. America, once renowned for her decency, became the aggressor her foes alleged.

At home, our failed attempt at global liberation has left us less free than ever before. Ancient liberties, cultural imperatives, even basic solvency were subsumed by the war effort. And the conservative movement that gave Bush his margin sanitized his radicalism at the cost of its soul.
All he touched turned to dross. Yet he departs unbowed, still a Churchill in his own mind.

Ouch, I had to re-read a couple of times to make sure it wasn’t satire or sarcasm…. The American Conservative Magazine

Brian: Peter Iraq had nothing to do with it, it was a bunch of Saudi Arabians, Lebanese, and Egyptians, financed by a Saudi Arabian guy living in Afghanistan, and sheltered by Pakistanis.

Peter: So are you saying we need to invade Iran?

This is journalism at its best, I feel we should give her a medal and use her as an example to 24 hour news networks.

Is the US already at war with Iran? In "America’s Secret War", Vanguard correspondent Mariana van Zeller travels to the Iraq-Iran border to investigate claims that the United States is supporting militant groups that are attacking Iran. In the rugged Qandil mountains, she meets with up with anti-Iranian guerillas who have been launching deadly raids against the Islamic Republic. A good percentage of the fighters are women, and Mariana accompanies a small group of them through what many believe has become the frontline of the US’s secret war with Iran.

The story continues. Another proxy war led by the American government. This happened so many times before under Reagan’s administration and we had George H.W. Bush and his war in Nicaragua against the Sandanistas. Remember the Contras and Ollie North? Remember the illegal funding of the Contras and the selling of weapons to Iran for money to finance the Contras? But no one remember the thousands that died under this war. Things haven’t changed. Bush Sr. = Bush Jr.? You Betcha, this should have been predictable.

And btw, who can say they knew this much about IRAN, Kurds, PKK, PJAK and Hezbollah before?