The United States lost six more soldiers in Afghanistan when a Taliban terrorist rammed a foot patrol with an explosive-laden motorbike. One of those killed was already familiar to many lawyers. Air Force Major Adrianna Vorderbruggen was one of the first openly gay service members to come forward after “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was repealed in 2011. She was among a true “band of brothers” who represented the very best of this country in its diversity and patriotism. Vorderbruggen shows how gay and lesbian personnel continue to step forward to put themselves in peril in defense of their fellow citizens — even those who have long fought their effort to achieve equal rights.
Among her comrades killed in the attack was also Air National Guardsman Joseph Lemm, 45, a 15-year veteran of the New York Police Department. During his deployment, an Italian market in the Bronx would send him cookies and candies to remind him of home.
Also killed was Staff Sergeant Louis Bonacasa, 31, of Coram, New York. Bonacasa was a careerist and was on his fourth tour abroad. He left a wife and 5 year old daughter.
Also killed was Chester McBride, assigned to the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, Detachment 405, at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. McBride was a star football player at his high school in Georgia and joined the Air Force after graduating from Savannah State University.
Staff Sergeant Peter Taub, 30, of Philadelphia, was married with a 3-year-old son, and was expecting a second child to be born next summer. He was assigned to the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, Detachment 816, at Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota.
Staff Sgt. Michael A. Cinco, 28, of Mercedes, Texas, assigned to the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, 11th Field Investigations Squadron, at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph in Texas.
Major Vorderbruggen had served as a special agent with the Office of Special Investigations in various bases. Vorderbruggen and her civilian wife, Heather Lamb, were married in June of 2012, and were raising a son who is not yet five.
The unit was a snapshot of the United States and shows the strength that is found in our diversity and equality. Each of these brave people will be missed not only by their grieving families but the nation as a whole.
@John
1, December 25, 2015 at 4:08 pm
“I am not familiar with 6, 7 and Bush’s complicity.”
I suggest that your unfamiliarity with the demolition of World Trade Center Building 7 (not to mention that of the Twin Towers) and the damage to Building 6, is indispensable to the credibility of your assessment of the events of 9/11.
John, the moment you allow “Muslim violence” to preexist independently of its cause, you are buying into the narrative of the imperialist.
Muslim violence is NOT a cause, it is a reaction, which is designed to insure retaliation, which brings more reaction …and the loop keeps looping until nothing is left.
In that regard, 9/11 was the perfect vehicle by which to ensure retaliation is legitimate and forever going.
So if indeed and as you say the plot was known and just allowed to happen, then it is bad enough, However, if the plot was hatched not by the usual suspects but by local conspirators and blamed on Muslims, then it is triply bad, twice for the treason by those supposed to protect us, and once for then diverting our resources, time, efforts, money and lives to fight an enemy that was not guilty of anything, and in the process destroy much of the ME.
It is akin to committing a murder and denying it, versus committing a murder, denying it, accusing someone else, assisting the police in hunting him down, then watching him hang for the crime that you committed.
But,…glad to see however there are voices still adamant in being heard and speaking the truth…
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/
Ken Rogers
“How, then, was the demolition of the Twin Towers, Building 6 and Building 7 effected, if not by the participation of agents of the shadow (or invisible) government?”
I am not familiar with 6, 7 and Bush’s complicity.
If you think about it, 6, 7 and Bush are moot.
The Saudi plot took place and Middle Eastern violence was transferred to America.
Many Americans died.
The plot was known and allowed to proceed.
By discussing 6 and 7, you simply vary the degree.
Saudi Muslims bombed America and killed Americans.
Whether there was an explosive assist really doesn’t matter in the Big Picture.
It doesn’t matter to the scenario if Bush is in the conspiracy or out of the conspiracy.
The reaction by the American President would have been the same, no matter who it was.
It’s the Big Picture effect that mattered. There are thousands of Small Pictures.
Muslim violence was transferred from the Middle East to America.
America would now directly fight Middle Eastern violence and “clean out the swamp,”
theoretically.
@po
1, December 25, 2015 at 12:36 am
“I, for one, Ken, am very proud of these boys and girls who are waking up to the realization that they are the main means by which this global mayhem happens.”
We still have a long way to go in order to realize the implied hope in the 1960s bumper sticker, “What if they called a war, and nobody came?”
The 9/11 Commission Report is a 571-Page Zionist Lie
http://911research.wtc7.net/post911/commission/report.html
The 9/11 Commission Report: An Elaborate Fiction
“The Report fails to mention the total collapse of 47-story steel-framed skyscraper Building 7 at 5:20 on the day of the attack.”
Zionist Liar Philip Zelikow, Traitor & Israeli agent
Zelikow should be arrested for treason
9/11 Commission Executive Director
Primary author of the 9/11 Commission Report
http://buenavistamall.com/zelikow.jpg
@Tom Nash
1, December 24, 2015 at 2:16 am
“Just for anyone who may have forgotten, that’s why we invaded Afghanistan. I’ m not at all interested in our British expert who claimed that Bin Laden ‘was never in Afghanistan’, or the loons on this thread trying to ‘clear’ Bin Laden, and say it was either ‘Silverman’, ‘Zionists’, Hollywood Special effects, or whatever. I lost all patience with these whackos who’ve been flooding the comments section here.”
Tom, your imperviousness to the avalanche of evidence demolishing the official government conspiracy theory regarding 9/11(concocted in every essential by the Bush Administration’s own Philip Zelikow) is a good example of Mark Twain ‘s observation that “It is [much] easier to fool people than it is to convince them that they’ve been fooled.”
This is nowhere more evident than your repressing the significance of the fact that the FBI’s Chief of Investigative Publicity, Rex Tomb, asserted that “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/fbi-says-no-hard-evidence-connecting-bin-laden-to-9-11/2623
You’re free, of course, to continue denying the existence of the mountain of evidence against the official 9/11 cover-up story, but the longer you do, the more foolish and guilty you’re going to feel when you can no longer ignore and/or repress that evidence.
If you’re not at this point totally close-minded and anxiously self-repressed, check out this expose’ of the total control that Zelikow exercised over the 9/11 Commission Report, and the significance thereof:
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/09/20/142478/
Trump: Israel-did-9/11 protestor is a Trump guy
By Kevin Barrett
Front-Row Protester Disrupts Trump’s Michigan Speech with “ISRAEL DID 9/11! FIVE JEWS ARRESTED ON 9/11 IN NEW JERSEY, NOT MUSLIMS.”
“Does Donald Trump know that Israel did 9/11? And is he planning to do something about it?”
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/12/23/trump-israel-did-911-protestor-is-a-trump-guy/
@John
1, December 25, 2015 at 12:35 am
Patriot (@musicman27103),
“Mind if I straighten you out?
“The American shadow government and the Mossad knew fully of the Saudi plot leading up to 9/11 and ignored it in order to start a war by omission, while Bush may have plausible or actual deniability as the conspiracy was very likely above his pay grade. No agents of the shadow government participated in 9/11, they stood down and allowed it to happen.”
—————–
I was with you up to your last sentence, above, John.
How, then, was the demolition of the Twin Towers, Building 6 and Building 7 effected, if not by the participation of agents of the shadow (or invisible) government?
In the video below, historian Dr. Webster Tarpley argues that Bush was in fear of his life on 9/11, after receiving a very credible threat involving code words known only to upper-echelon agents of the government, which is why he flew around so evasively in Air Force One that day:
Patriot (@musicman27103),
Mind if I straighten you out?
Lincoln knew his troops were in a foreign country at Ft. Sumter. When the foreign country fired on Lincoln’s invading troops, he lied, changed the facts and fabricated a false claim of insurrection and rebellion when, in fact, the Confederate States of America had legally seceded, were a sovereign nation and were repelling an invading force. The foreign country, the Confederate States of America, was not in rebellion or committing insurrection, it had committed the act of secession. Lincoln had absolutely NO constitutional basis for any action other than withdrawing his Union troops from a foreign country.
Roosevelt not only knew about Pearl Harbor but he compelled and facilitated that attack to artificially and surreptitiously generate sufficient domestic enthusiasm and fervor to allow him to enter the war in Europe and the Pacific. American sentiment had kept the U.S. out of the war.
Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was fabricated out of whole cloth by the Johnson administration and intell. Never happened.
The American shadow government and the Mossad knew fully of the Saudi plot leading up to 9/11 and ignored it in order to start a war by omission, while Bush may have plausible or actual deniability as the conspiracy was very likely above his pay grade. No agents of the shadow government participated in 9/11, they stood down and allowed it to happen.
Sorry for the double post. I didn’t think the first one made it through the WordPress process, so I posted a second, shorter version, thinking the first’s length might have been a problem.
Please ignore the second one.
I, for one, Ken, am very proud of these boys and girls who are waking up to the realization that they are the main means by which this global mayhem happens.
With this realization, they are also waking the awareness of this power they hold, that refusal to go along and that responsibility to wake the masses as to how they have been misused as agents of imperialism, and how this population is being fooled into a narrative of fear that demands the surrendering of any ability to control own’s environment.
The same thing is happening in Israel too, as officers in the IDF reclaim their soul in refusing to serve the oppression anymore.
I suspect we’ll see it spreading more and more, especially towards richer Asia.
USAF Drone Pilots Are Quitting in Droves
“Seeing Everything, Missing the Obvious
“One thing is clear: the pilots are not just killing ‘bad guys’ and they know it because, as Black points out, they see everything that happens before, during, and after a drone strike.”
“In June 2011, when CIA Director John Brennan was still the White House counter-terrorism adviser, he addressed the issue of civilian deaths in drone strikes and made this bold claim: ‘Nearly for the past year, there hasn’t been a single collateral death, because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop.’
“His claim and similar official ones like it are, politely put, hyperbolic. ‘You Never Die Twice,’ a new report by Jennifer Gibson of Reprieve, a British-based human rights organization, settles the question quickly by showing that some men on the White House ‘kill list’ of terror suspects to be taken out have ‘died’ as many as seven times.
“Gibson adds, ‘We found 41 names of men who seemed to have achieved the impossible. This raises a stark question. With each failed attempt to assassinate a man on the kill list, who filled the body bag in his place?’ In fact, Reprieve discovered that, in going after those 41 ‘targets’ numerous times, an estimated 1,147 people were killed in Pakistan by drones. Typical was the present leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri. In two strikes against ‘him’ over the years, according to Reprieve, 76 children and 29 adults have died, but not al-Zawahiri. (Emphasis added)
“Deserting the Cubicle
“Back in the United States, a combination of lower-class status in the military, overwork, and psychological trauma appears to be taking its mental toll on drone pilots. During the Vietnam War, soldiers would desert, flee to Canada, or even ‘frag’– kill — their officers. But what do you do when you’ve had it with your war, but your battle station is a cubicle in Nevada and your weapon is a keyboard?
“Is it possible that, like their victims in Pakistan and Yemen who say that they are going mad from the constant buzz of drones overhead and the fear of sudden death without warning, drone pilots, too, are fleeing into the night as soon as they can? Since the Civil War in the U.S., war of every modern sort has produced mental disturbances that have been given a variety of labels, including what we today call PTSD. In a way, it would be surprising if a completely new form of warfare didn’t produce a new form of disturbance.
“We don’t yet know just what this might turn out to be, but it bodes ill for the form of battle that the White House and Washington are most proud of — the well-advertised, sleek, new, robotic, no-casualty, precision conflict that now dominates the war on terror. Indeed if the pilots themselves are dropping out of desktop killing, can this new way of war survive?”
http://www.alternet.org/world/new-kind-mental-disturbance-drone-pilots-are-quitting-droves
USAF Drone Pilots are Quitting in Droves
“Seeing Everything, Missing the Obvious
“One thing is clear: the pilots are not just killing ‘bad guys’ and they know it because, as Black points out, they see everything that happens before, during, and after a drone strike.
“Indeed, the only detailed transcript of an actual Air Force drone surveillance mission and targeted killing to be publicly released illustrates this all too well. The logs recorded idle chatter on February 21, 2010, between drone operators at Creech Air Force base in Nevada coordinating with video analysts at Air Force special operations headquarters in Okaloosa, Florida, and with Air Force pilots in a rural part of Daikondi province in central Afghanistan.
On that day, three vehicles were seen traveling in a pre-dawn convoy carrying about a dozen people each. Laboring under the mistaken belief that the group were ‘insurgents’ out to kill some nearby U.S. soldiers on a mission, the drone team decided to attack.
“Controller: ‘We believe we may have a high-level Taliban commander.’
“Camera operator: ‘Yeah, they called a possible weapon on the military-age male mounted in the back of the truck.’
“Intelligence coordinator: ‘Screener said at least one child near SUV.’
“Controller: ‘Bullsh*t! Where? I don’t think they have kids out this hour. I know they’re shady, but come on!’
“Camera operator: ‘A sweet [expletive]! Geez! Lead vehicle on the run and bring the helos in!’
“Moments later, Kiowa helicopter pilots descended and fired Hellfire missiles at the vehicle.
“Controller: ‘Take a look at this one. It was hit pretty good. It’s a little toasty! That truck is so dead!’
“Within 20 minutes, after the survivors of the attack had surrendered, the transcript recorded the sinking feelings of the drone pilots as they spotted women and children in the convoy and could not find any visual evidence of weapons.
“A subsequent on-the-ground investigation established that not one of the people killed was anything other than an ordinary villager. ‘Technology can occasionally give you a false sense of security that you can see everything, that you can hear everything, that you know everything,’ Air Force Major General James Poss, who oversaw an investigation into the incident, later told the Los Angeles Times.
“Of course, Obama administration officials claim that such incidents are rare. In June 2011, when CIA Director John Brennan was still the White House counterterrorism adviser, he addressed the issue of civilian deaths in drone strikes and made this bold claim: ‘Nearly for the past year, there hasn’t been a single collateral death, because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop.’
“His claim and similar official ones like it are, politely put, hyperbolic. ‘You Never Die Twice,’ a new report by Jennifer Gibson of Reprieve, a British-based human rights organization, settles the question quickly by showing that some men on the White House ‘kill list’ of terror suspects to be taken out have ‘died’ as many as seven times.
“Gibson adds, ‘We found 41 names of men who seemed to have achieved the impossible. This raises a stark question. With each failed attempt to assassinate a man on the kill list, who filled the body bag in his place?’ In fact, Reprieve discovered that, in going after those 41 ‘targets’ numerous times, an estimated 1,147 people were killed in Pakistan by drones. Typical was the present leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri. In two strikes against ‘him’ over the years, according to Reprieve, 76 children and 29 adults have died, but not al-Zawahiri. (Emphasis added)
“Deserting the Cubicle
“Back in the United States, a combination of lower-class status in the military, overwork, and psychological trauma appears to be taking its mental toll on drone pilots. During the Vietnam War, soldiers would desert, flee to Canada, or even ‘frag’– kill — their officers. But what do you do when you’ve had it with your war, but your battle station is a cubicle in Nevada and your weapon is a keyboard?
“Is it possible that, like their victims in Pakistan and Yemen who say that they are going mad from the constant buzz of drones overhead and the fear of sudden death without warning, drone pilots, too, are fleeing into the night as soon as they can? Since the Civil War in the U.S., war of every modern sort has produced mental disturbances that have been given a variety of labels, including what we today call PTSD. In a way, it would be surprising if a completely new form of warfare didn’t produce a new form of disturbance.
“We don’t yet know just what this might turn out to be, but it bodes ill for the form of battle that the White House and Washington are most proud of — the well-advertised, sleek, new, robotic, no-casualty, precision conflict that now dominates the war on terror. Indeed if the pilots themselves are dropping out of desktop killing, can this new way of war survive?”
http://www.alternet.org/world/new-kind-mental-disturbance-drone-pilots-are-quitting-droves
@Jim
I am sorry to hear of these servicemen in need of help. We should use all our resources in efforts for them. We have all been exploited by the U.S. Government.
Because of our war in Iraq and our war in Afghanistan, we have a quarter of a million+ servicemen who have permanent brain abnormalities.
The invasion of Afghanistan was a War of Aggression. The occupation of Afghanistan is War Crime.
The U.S. Government has murdered the Afghans and American military for opium, lithium and other minerals.
War Crimes Tribunal Looking to ARREST Obama & Bush
They have been found guilty of War Crimes and Torture
https://youtu.be/wLCc6uwzE80
@Nick Spinelli
1, December 24, 2015 at 10:19 am
“The haters express no empathy for the families of these brave soldiers. They only have vitriol for the US, and those who point out their self loathing.”
The empathy of critics of a foreign policy that callously sends American soldiers into harm’s way in foreign countries in the interests of political power and profit hardly suffers by comparison with that of jingoists and their pseudo-patriotic support of policies that predictably result in the maiming and killing of thousands of those soldiers.
Your comment above embodies all the intellectual integrity and moral clarity of the pathetic Zionist characterization of critics of Israeli government policies as “self-hating Jews.”
Following the 9-11 attacks, we defeated an entrenched hostile military force in Afghanistan, playing defense, with fewer than 1,000 U.S. Special Forces troops. We did so in barely a month. The battle was over, and the war was won Then the military industrial complex, led by President Bush who had gone AWOL himself from May 1972 to October 1973, occupied that 12th-century nation with between 10,000 and 35,000 troops. Under President Obama, our occupying army then multiplied, to 100,000 soldiers.
An Explosion in the WTC North Tower
http://buenavistamall.com/NorthTower.jpg
3 NYC SKYSCRAPERS WERE DESTROYED BY CONTROLLED DEMOLITION ON 9/11
“SCIENTISTS, ARCHITECTS, & ENGINEERS now affirm that the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center buildings was an inside job. The leading scientist of Scholars For 9/11 Truth, Dr Steven Jones, has proven that controlled demolition devices were placed within the WTC Twin Towers – and this is what brought the buildings down not the airplanes. According to Fox News journalist Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, Larry Silverstein tried on the afternoon of 9/11 to get approval to demolish WTC 7. Shortly before the building collapsed, several NYPD officers and Con-Edison workers told me that Larry Silverstein, the property developer of One World Financial Center was on the phone with his insurance carrier to see if they would authorize the controlled demolition of the building ? since its foundation was already unstable and expected to fall.”
Questions Remain:
Who Let The Controlled Demolition Experts Into the Twin Towers?
Did Larry Silverstein Let The Mossad Operatives In?
http://www.realjewnews.com/?p=238