Tim Sumner

antiwar, New York Times, Support our troops, War on Terror

New York Times’ smear certainly wasn’t an accident: Ralph Peters

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Retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters’ column in the New York Post this morning The New ‘Lepers’ tells of what motivated the New York Times to smear our troops this past Sunday. While “crazed” killers and criminals within the ranks of veterans and current military are few compared to America’s civilian populace, the Times morphed beyond the political as it willfully failed to acknowledge that fact for all this War on Terror:

I’VE had a huge response to Tuesday’s column about The New York Times’ obscene bid to smear veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan as mad killers. Countless readers seem to be wondering: Why did the paper do it?

Well, in the Middle Ages, lepers had to carry bells on pain of death to warn the uninfected they were coming. One suspects that the Times would like our military veterans to do the same.

The purpose of Sunday’s instantly notorious feature “alerting” the American people that our Iraq and Afghanistan vets are all potential murderers when they move in next door was to mark those defenders of freedom as “unclean” — as the new lepers who can’t be trusted amid uninfected Americans.

In the more than six years since 9/11, the Times has never run a feature story half as long on any of the hundreds of heroes who’ve served our country — those who’ve won medals of honor, distinguished service crosses, Navy crosses, silver stars or bronze stars with a V device (for valor) [Editor — Actually, more than 4,000 of our nation’s top six medals for the heroism of our troops have been awarded since 9/11, as I detailed on this web site on October 20, 2007].

But the Times put a major investigative effort into the “sensational” story that 121 returning vets had committed capital offenses (of course, 20 percent of the cases cited involved manslaughter charges stemming from drunken driving, not first- or second-degree murder … ).
…
The Times is trying to make you fear our veterans (Good Lord, if your daughter marries one, she’s bound to be beaten to death!). And to convince you that our military would be a dreadful place for your sons and daughters, a death-machine that would turn them into incurable psychopaths.

To a darkly humorous degree, all this reflects the Freudian terrors leftists feel when confronted with men who don’t have concave chests. But it goes far beyond that.

Pretending to pity tormented veterans (vets don’t want our pity — they want our respect), the Times’ feature was an artful example of hate-speech disguised as a public service.

The image we all were supposed to take away from that story was of hopelessly damaged, victimized, infected human beings who’ve become outcasts from civilized society. The Times cast our vets as freaks from a slasher flick.

The hard left’s hatred of our military has deteriorated from a political stance into a pathology: The only good soldier is a dead soldier who can be wielded as a statistic (out of context again). Or a deserter who complains bitterly that he didn’t join the Army to fight … READ THE REST.

Without boring you with my full resume, I am also U.S. Army retired and served as a Military Policeman during much of the same period as LTC Peters goes on to describe. Yes, there was crime yet the rates were but a fraction of that of the civilian world. Nearly all served with honor and today’s troops are no different.

Support our troops!

Aviation Security, Debra Burlingame, Mike Huckabee, REAL ID

Congressman tells DHS that consular ID cards should not be used to board airplanes

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The primary function of Mexico’s many consulates in the United States is to provide illegal aliens with consular ID cards as a means to circumvent our passport requirements for foreign visitors. Those cards are not attached to a secure database and if an applicant has no birth certificate, they can present a letter from virtually anyone attesting to the fact the applicant was born in Mexico as “proof” of citizenship there. Yet most consular ID cards (known as Matricula ID cards) are cheaply purchased on street corners around our nation.

It gets worse. Our Department of Homeland Security says a consular ID card is sufficient photo ID to board an airplane.

In 2003, then Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee:

…went to Mexico … to urge the Mexican government to open a consulate in Arkansas. He leased the consulate state office space for $1 per year (obligating Arkansans to subsidize the rest of the costs of nearly $600 a month). And he put together a sweetheart deal for Mexico to enjoy a permanent facility in Little Rock without having to pay rent for three years.

Elton Gallegly of Simi Valley is a member of the House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, a senior member of the Judiciary Committee and chairman of the 1995 Congressional Task Force on Immigration Reform. He wrote this morning in a commentary that:

Consular cards are issued by foreign governments to their nationals in the United States. There is no attempt to determine whether the person obtaining the card is legally in the United States and, in fact, the only people who need these cards are illegal immigrants, criminals and terrorists. No one denies this fact.

In testimony before a congressional committee, FBI Director Robert Mueller said the FBI had identified a route through Brazil that illegal immigrants from al-Qaida nations use to obtain false identities — including assuming Hispanic surnames — before heading for Mexico and the U.S. border. While no one in the intelligence community will say publicly whether or not any terrorists have been captured along our southern border, all warn it is a serious loophole in our Homeland Security net.

It is clear terrorists have the means and the motive to come here, obtain a consular card and use it to kill Americans.

Consular cards are easily obtained with no proof of true identity and are easily forged. Debra Burlingame, sister of the pilot of the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11, made that point when she presented consular cards to members of the House Homeland Security Committee with their names, addresses and photos.

Representative Bennie Thompson's Matricula ID card

Congressman Gallegly continued:

REAL ID regulations will make America much safer by taking from terrorists a key piece of their arsenal — the ability to move freely and anonymously about the United States.

When it’s implemented.

In the meantime, we don’t have to wait until REAL ID is in place to close other security loopholes. With that in mind, I’ve once again asked Secretary Chertoff to eliminate consular cards from the list of acceptable forms of identification used to board airplanes. It’s just common sense, and the time is now.

In the following YouTube video, you’ll hear that Governor Huckabee dodges when asked about his providing Mexico a place to pass out their phony consular ID cards:

I wonder if Mexico issued Governor Mike Huckabee a consular ID as a souvenir.

Michael Huckabee's Matricula ID card