KingOfHearts maybe Schlessinger

2008-12-25T13:11:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: wikipedia 1-12-09

Has the News-Press declared war [again]? Santa Barbara elitists ongoing hate on with the less fortunate...

2008-12-22T17:13:00.000-08:00

Fine food at the Biltmore
How beautiful is "paradise" with all the charity scammers taking advantage of the holiday cheer? I have mixed feelings about the Unity Shoppe production. I want everyone to have food, don't we all? I can see why they want to draw attention to fulfill the need but...
Here's the irrepressible rascal who is never short on words
The Grapes of Wrath.. H E R E
I haven't seen a Unity Telethon in years.

Santa Barbara County: A Profile of Poverty, Hunger & Food Assistance
Despite California’s economic and agricultural prosperity, one in six Californians is hungry or at serious risk of hunger—significantly worse than the nation as a whole. Hunger is a symptom of poverty; far too many families experience devastating health consequences when their low wages or modest public benefits can’t cover the cost of housing, utilities and food.

Children in Poverty, Ages 0 - 17: 2005

Citizen Laura Schlessinger writes as little as possible today in her blog:
Kids Don’t Have To Go To Bed Hungry December 22, 2008 on 6:00 am |
In California, Charity, Children, Dave Ramsey, Economy, Family, Parenting
She's busy with YouTube, a book and movie production. She writes almost half of her blog about Laura! She wrote:
"I remember one point in my own family’s life when we went through every pocket of every jacket and pair of pants, every drawer, and every little “box-like” entity in the house to pool together enough money to go to McDonald’s with our son. I remember crying in the mall one day, because we didn’t have enough cash for a second pair of shoes for him."

Obviously, she doesn't understand poverty. Scraping money together for McDonald’s is hard times? Her kid had one pair of shoes. They had jackets and pants to look through. They had a house to struggle in. I bet Lew paid child support to the family he abandoned.
She's a self-appointed role model. She's been like you, follow her example...
She wants parents to be shifty hucksters? There are people that believe it is stealing when you manipulate people to think you are what you are not and you get them to buy your hokey product.

"Kids Don’t Have To Go To Bed Hungry"
[one in six Californians is hungry or at serious risk of hunger—significantly worse than the nation as a whole]
KIDS DO GO TO BED HUNGRY!

She also writes: "that in southern California, there is absolutely no reason for any child to go to bed hungry, and that parents should do whatever it takes, legally, to make sure that didn’t happen." It's the parents fault?

Laura Schlessinger is a dangerous person when she spews her fantasies under the
ruse of a "Dr" or "licensed psychotherapist".
Seriously, more people need to stand up to these elitists who live off the less fortunate and give back bull. Poverty is not evaporating, it gets worse when so-called role models live in bubbles and repeat the same crap that helped to make things this bad. She's not a moralist or any of that. She does propaganda and sets people up to buy into programs or ideology. Like the crooks that created the financial diaster we are now experiencing.

Laura Schlessinger offers hungry children and guilt ridden parents a guy named Dave Ramsey [who is likely in the bulk book buying scam, he has the same MO as Laura].
From her child hunger blog:

"Dave Ramsey is in print and on just about every television program, giving good advice on what to do about your financial situation. Check him out."

Your kid is hungry, buy into Dave Ramsey...

Dave Ramsey is Bad at Math

I don't see why anyone thinks Laura is child or family favorable...

Where's the license?

Desparate to look professional.

No one can find a license. She'll say she was licensed in 1824 or whenever it was. That's a charlatan. Acts as if she is a doctor but can claim the "entertainer" ruse. The real Laura Catherine Schlessinger isn't good enough for "dr" Laura.
12-8-08 THE OLD "I'M A LICENSED"!
[click image to enlarge]

INVESTIGATE LAURA SCHLESSINGER! "DoD may appear to merge inappropriately the public affairs and information operations functions"

2008-12-12T10:19:00.000-08:00

[ click images to enlarge ]
What we know is that there is something unsavory and illicit about Laura Schlessinger and her military complex.

INVESTIGATE LAURA SCHLESSINGER!*

Thursday, December 18, 2008 Snake Oil 101 ...
Read the entire report by
Robert L. Hanafin Major, U.S. Air Force-Retired
All Americans Support Out Troops.seriously
HERE: AmericaSupportsYou.mil Survives Investigation by the Pentagon

Pentagon mixed propaganda with PR, report finds

John Byrne Friday December 12, 2008 The Pentagon may have mixed propaganda with public relations in an effort to win the "war of ideas" as part of the Iraq war, according to a little-noticed report released Thursday. An inspector general's report said a whopping $1 million had been used to merge propaganda and PR efforts in 2007 and 2008. The Senate recently stripped out $3 million from the Pentagon budget for a Defense Department "strategic communication" program. "Without clearly defined strategic communications responsibilities, DoD may appear to merge inappropriately the public affairs and information operations functions," the inspector general said in a report released yesterday nestled in a Washington Post article. Such programs should be the province of the undersecretary of defense for policy, it added. The Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs "should only perform strategic communications responsibilities related to its public affairs mission," while calling attention to a 2005 Pentagon document, "Public Affairs," which asserted that PR and "information" ops "differ with respect to the audience, scope and intent and must remain separate." "The inspector general also raised questions about the Office of Public Affairs' use of funds and personnel from the Armed Forces Information Service to carry out its functions without specific authority," veteran intelligence reporter Walter Pincus noted Friday. "AFIS, which was recently renamed Defense Media Activity, runs Pentagon internal communications including Stars and Stripes as well as the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service. With a budget of more than $160 million and about 1,200 staff members, it nonetheless comes under the authority, direction and control of the assistant secretary for public affairs, whose authorized staff is only 89, according to the report." Strikingly, the Washington Post is the only media outlet to have reported on the report, according to an examination of Google News Friday morning.

* * *
UPDATE: Pentagon scandal "America Supports You" Defense Department
Exclusive: Pentagon Pro-Troop Group Misspent Millions
The GOP screws the troops again

*Laura Schlessinger's empty promise:
"So I’ve taken it as my personal responsibility to get everybody up to speed." is a serious enough travesty.

Just because posed pictures look good that doesn't make it true. Not all awards are worthy, some are like payola.
The Bush agenda uses taxpayer money to buy promotion for their hyped war. False advertising so it looks cool to take the risks. Schlessinger is not their lone propagandist. Her exploitation of childhood and play on mothers make her among the most loathsome.

There's so much more... who can believe the Pentagon at all when reviewing the Army's Deryk Schlessinger May 2007 investigation sham? The "terrorists" were cleared! [DERYK WAS NEVER CLEARED]. Someone did the KingOf*Hearts* MySpace that others viewed and captured.
According to the Army, Deryk and friends are where they point their finger of blame, they just aren't saying why they destroyed evidence et al. If it wasn't only Deryk, which soldiers did the grusome cartoons and deadly threats? How many known threatening "apathetic killers" are being protected? What happened to Homeland Security? Is there protection for students and civilians? Why is the military covering for a twisted trained killer obsessed with sexual deviance? "Brother" Deryk is not stand up enough to clear his "brothers" from being seen as the pervert who did the KingOf*Hearts*.

If the DoD and Schlessinger know [how could they not?] about Deryk and about the purposeful destruction of evidence that both military and PR claim was from "gay, green, terrorists"... that is another coverup. They were out to destroy those that they knew were innocent to cover for PR mavens "role model" kid. SHAME! Schlessinger's charity link up with the DoD character [they lose trillions of dollars] is based on the same deceptive tactics [remember her hit on her competitor, the USO, via O'Reilly]. They try to destroy good people and organizations in a take no prisoners fashion.

Celebrity and "America Supports You/Operation Family Fund"

HUNGRY CHILDREN

"we're sooo hot, like for real. it's pretty wicked how hot we are."

2008-11-30T15:17:00.000-08:00

[ click image to enlarge ]

blonde ? ? ?

"Nicole and I having too much fun."

Content Warning: Megan Nicole ?

Deryk?

Tattooing Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, Angelina Jolie,Travis Barker, Deryk Schlessinger, Hayden Panettiere

2008-11-25T20:40:00.000-08:00

Angelina Jolie
Hayden Panettiere's New Tattoo
Aussie
Scarlett Johansson With A Sexy Tattoo
Josh Hartnett
Rumer Willis 'Be present'

Tattoos: Christina Aguilera, Christina Ricci,
Jack Osbourne, Deryk Schlessinger

Joaquin Phoenix trying out some tribal tattooing

Antique Tattoos And Vintage Body Modification
scarification, tattooing, extreme erotic body alterations 1908 to 1950

Eminem's Mom Tells All In New Book
Eminem had his say in his own memoir, released last month, The Way I Am. Now, it's mom Debbie Nelson's turn.
In her new book My Son Marshall, My Son Eminem: Setting the Record Straight, Nelson writes about why her son attacked her in his songs, such as Cleanin' Out My Closet.

"If anything, it blows him up," said Nelson. "It shows I'm a very proud mother."

Travis Barker and Shannon Moakler

Joaquin Phoenix has joined the indigenous Yawanawa people of the Brazilian Amazon. For a few pages of the new Italian Vanity Fair.

The worst Deryk Schlessinger ever...gay activists did it and what a mother will allow to cover for baby boi

2008-11-21T15:25:00.000-08:00

"Some gay activists posted some porn on Deryk Schlessinger’s MySpace blog so that they could say the soldier and son of famous conservative talk show host, Dr. Laura Schlessinger is monster/conservative/liar/hate monger…" So writes Mick in his citizen journalist blog that has almost zero to do with fact. He really goes overboard in his fantasy life and he doesn't correct his most egregious misinformation... and Deryk is one of Mick's Top misinformation Posts!

Mick even looks like one of the fake photos that allowed Mommy Dearest for years to cover Derky's arse... here in

"A life of their own... Deryk Schlessinger fake photo saga"
from Tuesday, August 14, 2007

What's funny is we just noticed Fraudline Laura Schlessinger wrote an A2 for the
Santa Barbara News-Press controversy [not user friendly] titled

"Don't enable or rescue errant children"
on November 16, 2008

She who nags and preaches responsibility and accountability for others, doesn't practice responsibility and accountability for her and hers. No accountability for Deryk, instead he got a Screaming Eagle Dyna and who knows what.

She's proud

The worst Deryk Schlessinger ever... milquetoasty Deryk hides away, from their "family values" public, in his scorpion lair... deep, dark deathly toxic secrets. Without his hot body to model we can only hear stories and imagine his tattoos. The only photos we've seen... could be Deryk? It's hard to tell. For sure there were twisted bodies, familiar faces and drunks. Typical Army bratish and boys
[Ft Bragg area?]
The "Deryk" in photos were never quiet clear [scorpio]. So we made our own Deryk above in the worst fake photo ever.

Allegedly, Deryk tatts are not on his hands, won't show when dressed. They may be less color? I'm told. This is sort of close, maybe, sorta, kinda... you get the picture. More Deryk type tatts later.

T A T T O O

Tattooing

[] []
Santa Barbara News-Press, Robert Eringer. Debunking is a good thing.
Now can we deal with the faux "Dr" Laura?
The forgotten Vets...

PhD student "Dr" Laura Schlessinger and Veterans Day 2007

2008-11-12T15:28:00.000-08:00

"Dr" Laura, who skipped Veterans Day 2007, got into it this year. Curious, as she was SO BIG on her "charity" rallies for war in '07, as if it was all about soldiers. O'Really?

Why blow off Veterans Day in November 2007?

What were those spectacles with Bill O'Reilly about?

The Salt Lake Tribune 5/13/2007 article, 'Military wives' whining wears on Dr. Laura', was worthy of an O'Reilly/Schlessinger performance on The Factor.

Only to be exceeded when O'Reilly/Schlessinger took on the competition, United Service Organizations (USO) CEO and President Edward Powell, November 2007.
Laura Schlessingers strange behaviors and performances only solicit more questions.

During Deryk Schlessingers court martial investigation [which he was never cleared] both O'Reilly/Schlessinger acted contrary to their better senses, they did not do for Deryk as mother wrote 5/17/08 in the Santa Barbara News-Press.
Here..."come out with clarification or rebuttal immediately"
No one defended Deryk Schlessinger because no one thought he was innocent.
What a crime this is, they conspire to cover up for Deryk. None other than the Pentagon accused gays and terrorists of hacking Deryk Schlessinger's MySpace page. At the same time none other than the Pentagon purged all the evidence as of Monday May 21 2007. By August 31, 2007 the Army did clear all the accused "enemies"... Deryk Schlessinger? They are all complicit in their silence... Laura Schlessinger continues her propaganda and PR.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Deryk Schlessinger ?

2008-11-05T13:41:00.000-08:00

"Hopefully, he will get the help for the PTSD that he incurred by serving his country in this horrible, never-ending war."

"We will see more and more PTSD from this war no matter who is elected today."
"We will be dealing with the aftermath of the last 8 years of George W. Bush's presidency for generations to come. Sad but true. It is definitely time for change."

Gunman on 101 Freeway overpass in Santa Barbara
is arrested

Van Tassel, a Santa Barbara resident, is a veteran of the Iraq War.
He was attempting to make an anti-war statement.

Overpass Standoff Ends Peacefully

Dr Laura will continue to raise warriors, annihilate Dear Abby, schools, same sex unions, Unions, philathropists, USO and Planned Parenthood et al. She doesn't actually confront mental health matters like PTSD or substance abuse that destroy soldiers who return damaged. [or her own elderly mother's mental health condition]

She does do warmongerer and she failed to keep her word, no "up to speed" for Afghanistan...

she failed to keep her word.

Why does the Department of Defense give her an award while neither of them tell why the Schlessinger evidence was shuttered? They claim evidence against gays or terrorists.

Convention History

2008-11-05T13:40:00.000-08:00

Chris Santory and Deryk Schlessinger

Deryk?

Convention history: Deryk Schlessinger, number ONE 2004 RNC mystery suspect?

2008-08-26T18:10:00.003-07:00

Convention history:
Mother Laura Schlessinger has a top public relations firm at her disposal, she's in tight with publishers and Pentagon spin masters.

Why is it when it comes to her son,
she's a public relation failure?

In 2004 Deryk attended the RNC convention in New York City. A Republican thug was video taped kicking a female protester as she was held to the ground by three Secret Service agents. Deryk Schlessinger is a number one suspect because Laura Schlessinger never released 2004 photos of her son to clear him of suspicion. And he looks like the thug seen kicking the female. Other suspects emerged and denied they kicked the girl or were on video. The matter was never resolved.

After a purge, little information on this convention history remains:

1. Jeralyn @ talkleft did try to ID the culprit.
All Stories for: Republican National Convention 2004
Someones were trying hard to finger Scott Robinson. He did answer the email.

2. The better quality videos no longer work. This one is brief:
http://www.actupny.org/reports/rnc_nyc-kicking.mov

3. Behind the Bright Lights of the Convention

4. Dishonor Thy Mother!

5. Do What I Say Not What I Do

6. She is Her Kid's Mom

7. ????, Young Republican

What we know is that there was no arrest and the thug was definiently a young Republican.

2004 Republican National Convention protest activity

8/29/08... ooops! who could forget Rob Lowe ?
Back in 1988, during the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, Lowe taped himself in compromising positions with a 16-year-old girl and a young woman

The 2008 Convention Crazies have started...

We saw a little of this PUMA in action. Is she an actual Hillary supporter? Tammy Bruce does a similar act.

Tammy Bruce and Bill O'Reilly are tin hat famous for
the Laura Schlessinger test case conspiracy theory.

Four arrested for plotting Obama assassination Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
Motorcycle News ›

Feds Investigate Obama Assassination Plot by Motorcycle Gang

Global Research

Disturbing trend continues... Update Exclusive: Bush US Attorney misled in Obama assassination plot case - Friday October 31, 2008

[] [] []

Sullivan Goss is an American art gallery. October 19, 2006 through November 26, 2006 John Nava's Neo-Icons was exhibited.
You can see the exhibit here...

It was so disturbing to certain people that several thugs made bomb threats. Laura Schlessinger published a column in the Santa Barbara News-Press on November 2, 2006 where she did not condemn the violent threats that were to take place during an opening event packed with clients and families. Her tacit approval is irresponsible support of thuggish behaviors and bomb threats. She offered a letter about how self-censoring is necessary and an "or else" reason to self-censor...

Art exhibit thugs get a pass... female kicking thugs get a pass... who else?

Laura Schlessingers latest warriors...

Afghanistan 82nd Airborne

2008-08-26T18:10:00.001-07:00

2007

"CorpTy an D" approximately July 2007 Afghanistan

Investigative Reporter: Big business and Dangerous U.S gangs

2008-08-21T00:14:00.000-07:00

Big business and Dangerous U.S gangs and forging alliances with other states and countries
Michael Webster, Investigative Reporter August 11, 2008

U.S. gangs have forged illegal business connections with other gangs in the states as well as in Mexico and Afghanistan seeking more lucrative drug markets.

A motorcycle gang with the name of Set Free Soldiers who claim to be Christian bikers have describe themselves as "a group of men who love Jesus and love to ride hard. We are not your normal motorcycle club. Some say we are too good for the bad guys, and too bad for the good guys." Click on or Google: Christian Bikers Busted for Murder

"We don't argue that," the statement says. "All we Soldiers know is that we take care of our own and help plenty of others along the way. We try to live right in this wrong world and let our light shine wherever we may go."

This violent gang sells videos of the group in action, including some showing members in fistfights with other people, their web site offers apparel for sale. An onesie for babies with the words "Soldier Made" written on the front in faux alphabet blocks.

Recently several members of the Set Free Soldiers where arrested for attempted murder after they allegedly got into a bar fight with the Hells Angels. Seven members of the biker gang remained in custody on $1 million bail after their arrest for allegedly stabbing two Hells angels. In what is mostly thought of as an upper middle class naborhood in Newport Beach California late last month. Three members of the Hells Angels were also arrested.

According to the L A Times, more than 150 officers descended on affluent neighborhoods across Orange County California, serving search and arrest warrants on members of the Christian gang and the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, police said. Four search warrants were served at four homes in the 300 block of South Archer Street, near Brookhurst Street and Broadway, belonging to members of the Set Free Soldiers – a biker gang allegedly masquerading as a church, said Anaheim police Sgt. Tim Schmidt.

Authorities obtained search warrants for residences of members of both motorcycle gangs, including two residences in Costa Mesa, one in Rancho Santa Margarita and four in Anaheim, said Newport Beach police Sgt. Evan Sailor. A large number of weapons and ammunition were seized in Anaheim and Costa Mesa, he said.

Overall in the case, 10 have been arrested, with police hunting for an 11th suspect
authorities said. Of these 10, seven are Set Free Soldiers arrested for alleged conspiracy to commit murder; one of them is Pastor Phil Aguilar, 60, of Anaheim, police said. He is described as the founder and director of Set Free Churches Worldwide, according to the group's Web site.

The stabbings, which officials believe involved members of the two motorcycle gangs, occurred the afternoon of Sunday, July 27, at Blackie's By the Sea, near the Newport Beach pier, Newport Beach police Sgt. Evan Sailor said.

Newport Beach officers responded to the large fight, but everyone had fled the scene, Sailor said.

Police said they determined that those in the fight were members of the Hells Angels and Set Free Soldiers. Sailor said it appears that the two stabbing victims were Hells Angels and a man hit by a pool ball was a Set Free Soldier.

A neighbor to one of the Archer houses with Set Free Soldiers said that the group has been a nuisance. Having young girls there all hours of the day and night."

The neighborhood has been trying to get them out of here for years," said Sharon Murphy, 50. "It's supposed to be a sober-living place, but they're always at the liquor store buying beer. They're running their motorcycles all night long. They own three or four houses up and down the street."

Officers arrived at 4:30 a.m. Patrol officers blocked off streets, and SWAT team members were fully outfitted – some police in camouflage and helmets rode hanging off of the sides of Anaheim police tactical vehicles and Jeeps.

By 8:30 a.m., patrol officers started letting residents of the block back in, and tow trucks arrived at around 9 a.m. to start seizing property.

Officers from Anaheim, Newport Beach, Costa Mesa and the Orange County Sheriff's Department assisted in the operation.
>>> the complete article here...

[] []

"We believe the Set Free Soldiers were possibly setting up
members of the Hells Angels,"

said Sgt. Evan Sailor of the Newport Beach police.

Orange County is an area where Laura Schlessinger is popular and well connected.
The county of Santa Barbara is where she purchashed a house and she writes the A2 column at the Santa Barbara News-Press. For months she has been gushing over Christain bikers. She bought bikes for Laura, husband and son. Lew Bishop and Deryk Schlessinger.

Are they all doing the right thing? It sure makes you wonder what she was thinking.

Laura thinks the Christain bikers are the greatest thing since sliced bread. Others, like nearby neighbors, have complaints similar to the Set Free Soldiers neighborhood. Laura Schlessinger is a one way street, the only voice you hear is hers. No dialogue or discussion allowed.

Warrior gun training....

...stay tuned for Laura Schlessinger, ignores bomb threats and oks censor this...
she's a violent guns in school advocate mf ! ! ! !

2008-08-01T18:24:00.000-07:00

Laura Schlessinger was asked about her son, Deryk Schlessinger on CNN LARRY KING LIVE

[Interview With Dr. Laura-January 9, 2008]
She prevaricated again, like Wendy McCaw loyalists
[Travis Armstrong] are known to do.

"SCHLESSINGER [to King]: Oh, gosh, I can't believe you brought up something that was in the "National Enquirer" and in one tiny newspaper that had a grudge against me. My New Year's resolution is not to deal with stupid trash. I'm very proud of my son."

The Salt Lake Tribune is NOT "one tiny newspaper that had a grudge against [Schlessinger] me".

In fact, other papers did mention the "lurid" MySpace [KingOf*Hearts*]. She has connections in media and the Pentagon. It's not a surprize there would be a news black out. Wikipedia is also manipulated, as many who have staff to deal with PR and Wiki do it.

NOTICE: not one word about the TMZ photo

[there are other photos and it's irrelevant that TMZ is a rag].
What is relevant is they pretend the photos don't exist.
"Secrets Can Be Murder"

By Jane Velez-Mitchell

Dr. Laura son linked to lurid Web page

Site contained violent, sex-oriented images one official called 'repulsive'

Here's what Wonkette said:

"The 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan shuttered the pages on Friday.
The Pentagon
managed to immediately cleanse all evidence
of the MySpace pages, including whatever copies and cached versions were kept by Google and the Internet Archive."

The Pentagon managed to immediately cleanse all evidence of the MySpace pages, including whatever copies and cached versions were kept by Google and the Internet Archive

Matthew D. LaPlante's [The Salt Lake Tribune] professionalism was slandered by Bill O'Reilly for Schlessinger in one of the Fox News outrage scenarios. You know, how he goes off with Geraldo? The routine with Schlessinger, she played a damsel in distress while O'Reilly falsely denegrated a credible journalist. It was one of the more unnecessary and vile attacks. The attack before Deryk's MySpace and her pre-Whine book sale tour. O'Reilly and Schlessinger also did the USO attack. O'Reilly and Tammy Bruce get together for the "Laura Schlessinger test case" routine, which is the same type of spin Michael "Savage" Weiner does... Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder by radio talk show host Michael Savage

Schlessinger, O'Reilly, Bruce, Weiner et al, they're all the same, it goes on and on. Now they own Batman as an excuse for bad behavior and genocide. They want your children.

UPDATE: SCROLL to > > The National Enquirer
Date: Fri, Aug 8 2008 4:14 pm

2008-07-06T13:37:00.000-07:00

2007

Laura Schlessinger's cr@p on Carp Hi

2008-04-28T11:17:00.000-07:00

updates:
Carpinteria keeps ban on high school mascot
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Compelling letter to all Warriors
The Warrior’s Last Battlefield
May 14, 2008
"The school board has taught you a difficult but valuable lesson. The battle for your mascot was lost the moment Elias appealed to Authority to get his world sanitized, instead of to Justice or Compassion or to Truth. If this was about those things, the school board would have set the field of contest in your hearts and minds, and not on the physical grounds of the school. This is about Authority. Authority does not listen to people; it only hears its own gears grinding, and the stamping of boots."

A Face in the Crowd

The Independent laid out the Carpinteria situation in the following:
Warrior’s Cry
"Amidst a cacophony of cheers and honking horns Friday afternoon, dozens of Carpinteria High school students and alumni crowded onto the corners of Linden and Carpinteria Avenues to protest the school board’s recent decision to remove all Native American images and icons from school property."
Never one to miss an opportunity to pontificate her POV on the word 'warrior', Laura Schlessinger writes about Carpinteria High's mascot in Wendy McCaw's Santa Barbara News-Press on Sunday 4/27/08. Laura has her own design ideas to offer the community. To greet students at school she wants the head of a "soldier, Marine, police, fireman or Coast Guard". Maybe that's an improvement from her "Calling a Muslim a Terrorist" 9/13/07 column? After calling out and misconstruing Mayor Blum and the City Council, she didn't have the chutzpah to face council and suggest in person that they $pend time impeaching bin Laden.

Whether you agree with one Native American student, who feels offended or the many students with strong feelings toward the mascot, both are asserting their rights. The school board made a decision without a discussion between the two sides. The students and alumni are asking for a recall.

The carpetbagging problem seems to be in the mix. The wounds of Santa Claus Lane's Santa are not reconciled, how do you explain those things to alien forces? Santa Claus or warrior, I look at these old world icons in a more architectural way. I'm disgusted with what the "negative imagery" represents to some. I'm also disgusted with disneyfication. While Santa wasn't as beautiful as say Hillary Duff's Santa Claus Lane, he does keep his clothes on. There is much to be said for honoring the democratic process, students and the traditions they honor. These old architectural pieces are rare and what a shame to forget them and the lessons they teach. Hopefully, we'll grow and be able to look at our past with discussions and respect for all. The mascot warrior has tapped deep feelings on both sides. Let them have it out without an authoritarian take over or lawsuits.

Carpinteria does need a NEW SCHOOL BOARD.

It's outrageous to disrespect the students. How American is that? Next 'design experts' like Laura Schlessinger will favor a 'military' warrior look! If she believes "The Art of Peace" why not start with her son, Deryk Schlessinger. He needs to remedy his MySpace disaster, he might as well be hiding in mommies basement if he's not warrior enough to speak truth to power. Parents set an example, teach truth and accountability. Heal the lies told that took soldiers to an unnecessary war. And don't trivialize or overlook the student warriors who are standing up for their voice.
Laura would sign them up for a war on Iran. In her column she goes on to justify lower standards for Army recruiting [they accept more felons]. She uses that to promote her MANDATORY [DRAFT] 2 year military service. What about the peace corp et al?Her ideology is not geared toward better public schools. It's more like destroy public schools. She will sell books.

Down a Dark Abby

[ 4/27/08: this is no longer in her CALLS TO ACTION ]

Back in the day many adobes [above] in Santa Barbara looked like junk.
They could have all been destroyed.

Old Montecito was a treat for Southern Californians.
Today those reminders are extinct.
Will Carpinteria lose it's character?

Santa Claus

KingOfHearts

2008-04-28T11:16:00.001-07:00

CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Afghanistan

2008-01-21T00:43:00.001-08:00

Mon Feb 4, 2008
Afghan air strike kills civilians, Taliban fighters

Afghanistan 2007 [click to enlarge]
Current events
Explosion kills ISAF soldier, wounds 5 in southern Afghanistan
January 21st, 2008 Posted: 01:43 AM ET

(CNN) — A soldier with NATO’s International Security Assistance Force was killed Sunday and five others were wounded by a blast in southern Afghanistan, ISAF reported.

The soldiers were patrolling in vehicles when they were hit by an explosion, the military said.

The wounded soldiers were expected to survive, the statement said.

The nationalities of the soldiers were not provided.

[] [] []

January 21st, 2008
2 U.S. troops killed in separate operations
Posted: 01:46 AM ET

BAGHDAD (CNN) — Two U.S. troops died in Iraq Saturday — a soldier killed by a roadside bomb blast on the southern outskirts of Baghdad and a Marine killed during a combat operation in al Anbar province, the U.S. military said.

Since the Iraq war began in March 2003, 3,929 U.S. service members have been killed, 25 of them in January.

The soldier’s death happened in Arab Jabour, a rural area described recently by a U.S. military official as an al Qaeda in Iraq safe haven.

U.S. and Iraqi forces have focused on the area over the last several days, an operation dubbed Marne Thunderbolt.

The military said the marine who was killed was assigned to Multi-National Force -West.

[] [] []

The drug of combat
Romeo A. Dallaire, Special to the National Post Published: Wednesday, January 16, 2008

[] [] []

NATO soldier killed in Afghanistan
Sunday, January 20, 2008
38 minutes ago

KABUL (AFP) — A soldier with the NATO-led force fighting the Taliban-led insurgency in southern Afghanistan was killed in an explosion that also wounded five other troopers, the alliance's force said Monday.

The International Security Assistance Force soldiers were in vehicles that were struck by the blast on Saturday, ISAF said in a statement.

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dispatches
from the culture war
Thursday, May 17

What's troubling...
"So, when she says that two years of obligatory military training could prevent incidents like the Virginia Tech shooting, she must be saying that because of her son's similar homicidal tendencies to that of the Virginia Tech shooter. How do I know about these tendencies? Go look at her son's myspace profile: www.myspace.com/183888912"

Deryk Schlessinger and No.1 killers,1

2008-01-18T01:58:00.000-08:00

IEDs the No. 1 killers in war zones occupied by the West

COLIN FREEZE From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
January 16, 2008 at 4:50 AM EST
Deryk Schlessinger and No.1 killers, 2

UPDATE: Sunday, July 06, 2008
$10 Billion Pentagon Program Fails To Defeat IED Threat In Iraq

Deryk Schlessinger and Chris Santory Afghanistan 2007
KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN — With yet another one of his men slain by an unseen enemy, Canada's top soldier in Afghanistan was forced to state the obvious in front of a microphone. "The insurgents are using IEDs and IEDS are the weapons of choice," Brigadier-General Guy Laroche matter-of-factly told reporters last night. There was little else to say.

With the week not yet half over, two of the general's convoys had escaped serious injury from two roadside bombings before a third attack claimed a life. Trooper Richard Renaud, 26, was in a Coyote, a light-armoured vehicle built for speed and reconnaissance, when a lethal bomb detonated yesterday morning.

Improvised explosive devices, IEDs, have become the No. 1 killers in the war zones occupied by the West, slaying dozens of Canadians in Afghanistan and hundreds of Americans in Iraq.

"Every time someone goes out the door, they are facing that threat," said Major Max Messier, the Canadian officer in charge of counter-IED measures in Afghanistan.

The military is trying everything it can think of to contain the threat. This fall, $30-million worth of armoured trucks, 16 in total, arrived for the Canadian troops fitted with technologies to detect and neutralize IEDs before they go off. They also came with built-in shielding mechanisms to keep the vehicles intact in the event of a blast.

In these new vehicles, and in some older armoured troop carriers and Leopard tanks, heavy metal plates, metal detectors, radio-signal jammers, extendable long digging arms and superfluous parts designed to be exploded all work in concert to try to save the lives of soldiers. Ottawa is tendering a $30,000 contract to test handheld vapour scanners that detect trace amounts of explosives on people and in vehicles.

Gen. Laroche has also announced plans to pave up to 10 kilometres of Kandahar roads, hoping that by hardening up the roads, and softening up the hearts of Afghans with some paid construction jobs, it will limit the Taliban's ability to place IEDs.

The Canadian efforts pale beside programs in the United States, where officials have called for a "mini-Manhattan Project" against IEDs. Billions are being spent, including some research money destined for seeming science-fiction projects: New robot dogs that sniff out explosives, aerial blimps that can spot insurgents from above, high-tech laser beams that can zap IEDs from a safe distance.

Those who seek to inspire terror in the hearts of allied soldiers are keenly aware of the uneven economics of asymmetric war. "The Americans know that an explosion to hit a U.S. convoy on a road does not cost us even $100," the Taliban ally, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, told a local newspaper last March.

The faded warrior was among the 1980s-era mujahedeen leaders whose troops shot down Soviet helicopter gunships with shoulder-launched missiles. The Russians did the math, concluded they were going broke, and went home.

Since that withdrawal, jihadists have espoused a patient, bleed-'em-till-they're-broke military strategy. Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has frequently said he will keep "bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy."

Yet the terrorist logic espoused by Mr. Hekmatyar and his ilk " only works if the local people let him place bombs where he wants to place them," said Fred Kagan, a former instructor at West Point.

Mr. Kagan, now a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said that while there's nothing wrong with multimillion-dollar solutions to $100 bombs, science has its limits. "It's the usual technological spiral, you build a better mousetrap, they build a better mouse."

Generals in Afghanistan should look to Iraq, where a so-called troops "surge" has dramatically decreased the number and efficiency of IED attacks for the first time in years. The troops surge has made many civilians start to feel safe again, he said, and ordinary people have come to realize they have everything to lose if insurgents infiltrate their neighbourhoods. "It's not the technological solutions that have made the IED attacks go down," he said.

There may be no easy way to win hearts and minds. Yet what doesn't help is when an army captures, then loses, then fights to recapture the same pieces of ground, something Canadian Forces have been criticized for in Afghanistan. "At a certain point people say, 'To hell with you,' " Mr. Kagan said.

The Canadian Forces don't release statistics about how many bombs they intercept, but officials say it is a regular and growing occurrence.

Major Messier, the counter-IED expert, simply says Canadian-led forces are making strides in the villages and countryside. "The locals are talking, they are reporting the stuff they see," he said.

*****
By the numbers

Improvised explosive devices

are the epitome of asymmetrical warfare, in which a disadvantaged enemy uses limited means to extract great losses from a powerful adversary.

$100

Average cost of a rudimentary Afghan IED, according to warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

$26-million

Cost of 16 IED detection and disposal vehicles recently purchased by Canada, including parts and maintenance

$29,130

Value of a contract to begin preliminary testing of hand-held explosive-detection scanners tendered by the government of Canada $200,000

Cost per unit of a so-called Warlock Duke anti-IED signal jammer that can be mounted on vehicles, purchased by the U.S. last year

$4.7-billion

Amount the Pentagon is requesting for its JIEDDO research program, formed to assist U.S. forces in the defeat of IEDs

$23.2-billion

Forecast value of global counter-IED procurement, services, and upgrade contracts between 2008 and 2012, according to Washington-based Homeland Security Research Corp.

Deryk Schlessinger and No.1 killers, 2

2008-01-18T00:00:00.000-08:00

IEDs the No. 1 killers in war zones occupied by the West

LAURA SCHLESSINGER:

"As we speak, he has a gun in his hand"

...but no protection from IEDs.

Laura is too busy spreading lies to give no nonsense answers to the troops and their families. She's sticking to the phantasmagoric world of O'Reilly's and Bushism and will protect them at all cost. She'll make it sound good but not lift a finger to protect the troops.

UPDATE: December 9, 2008

"When you're the mother of somebody in the military, you're the mother of everybody in the military."
if-only she-meant-it Laura Schlessinger

She may know her son is in the safety of a well fortified zone.
Not the case for Army Specialist David Joseph Drakulich when his vehicle was hit by a mine in Afghanistan.

Also Cpl. Tanner J. O’Leary, 23, of Eagle Butte, S.D., died Dec. 9 in Musa Qal’eh, Afghanistan. He was part of a mission with Deryk's comrades prior to the lurid MySpace, KingOf*Hearts*, investigation and dubious shuttering of evidence. Tanner died of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, N.C.

Also injured during the Musa Qal’eh massacre was Jon Moldovan, the brother of 2006 fiance, Megan Moldovan. He is doing well we hear.

Why no word from war rally mouthpiece Laura Schlessinger to get these troops the equipment needed to save them from these senseless deaths and injuries?
Why not a word on the harmful helicopter shortage while she gangs up with Bill O'Reilly to dis the USO and whine over their faux celebrity shortage?

You behave like you hate the troops, Laura, while you fake caring.

UPDATE 7/6/08:
$10 Billion Pentagon Program Fails To Defeat IED Threat In Iraq

LAURA SCHLESSINGER "As we speak, he has a gun in his hand"

2008-01-12T21:54:00.000-08:00

CNN, Larry King Live, January 9, 2008 Laura Schlessinger on Deryk Schlessinger in Afghanistan.
SCHLESSINGER: He's serving in Afghanistan in combat.
As we speak, he has a gun in his hand...
...but no protection from IEDs
And I'm very proud of what he's been doing.
The entire transcript is here.In May of 2007 someone was alarmed to see Deryk Schlessinger's KingOf*Hearts* MySpace, his highly disturbed cartoons and the image with a gun in his mouth. This was someone who knew his personality and style. They are rightfully concerned Deryk is a trained killer. Deryk Schlessinger was investigated for an Army court martial. He and his friends were never cleared or charged. The story only got worse, in that the Army immediately said it could be "the enemy" who did this lurid MySpace and next [May 2007] the military destroyed the evidence allegedly against "the enemy"... the
KingOf*Hearts* MySpace. That wasn't the end of the lies and cover ups. Now Deryk's deployment ends and he will return around April 2008. No one is explaining anything about the writings, the highly disturbed child molestation cartoons, the inciting gun images and no sign of any accountability. Laura Schlessinger blew off Larry King, not hard to do, and offers no healing and answers no questions. She's never admitted to knowing her son, not knowing him as others do. It's the pretend son she is always "proud" of. Not a reality that makes the world safe.

returns to the scene of the crime

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The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war.

A series of articles and multimedia about veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have committed killings, or been charged with them, after coming home. January 13, 2008

The Cases January 12, 2008

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Just Talking?
Afghanistan 1
Afghanistan 2
Afghanistan 3
Afghanistan 4

New York Times: Killing in this country. Found 121 veterans cases.

2008-01-11T14:33:00.000-08:00

The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war.

A series of articles and multimedia about veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have committed killings, or been charged with them, after coming home. January 13, 2008

The Cases January 12, 2008

War Torn: Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles

Late one night in the summer of 2005, Matthew Sepi, a 20-year-old Iraq combat veteran, headed out to a 7-Eleven in the seedy Las Vegas neighborhood where he had settled after leaving the Army.

This particular 7-Eleven sits in the shadow of the Stratosphere casino-hotel in a section of town called the Naked City. By day, the area, littered with malt liquor cans, looks depressed but not menacing. By night, it becomes, in the words of a local homicide detective, “like Falluja.”

Mr. Sepi did not like to venture outside too late. But, plagued by nightmares about an Iraqi civilian killed by his unit, he often needed alcohol to fall asleep. And so it was that night, when, seized by a gut feeling of lurking danger, he slid a trench coat over his slight frame — and tucked an assault rifle inside it.

“Matthew knew he shouldn’t be taking his AK-47 to the 7-Eleven,” Detective Laura Andersen said, “but he was scared to death in that neighborhood, he was military trained and, in his mind, he needed the weapon to protect himself.”

Head bowed, Mr. Sepi scurried down an alley, ignoring shouts about trespassing on gang turf. A battle-weary grenadier who was still legally under-age, he paid a stranger to buy him two tall cans of beer, his self-prescribed treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.

As Mr. Sepi started home, two gang members, both large and both armed, stepped out of the darkness. Mr. Sepi said in an interview that he spied the butt of a gun, heard a boom, saw a flash and “just snapped.”

In the end, one gang member lay dead, bleeding onto the pavement. The other was wounded. And Mr. Sepi fled, “breaking contact” with the enemy, as he later described it. With his rifle raised, he crept home, loaded 180 rounds of ammunition into his car and drove until police lights flashed behind him.

“Who did I take fire from?” he asked urgently. Wearing his Army camouflage pants, the diminutive young man said he had been ambushed and then instinctively “engaged the targets.” He shook. He also cried.

“I felt very bad for him,” Detective Andersen said.

Nonetheless, Mr. Sepi was booked, and a local newspaper soon reported: “Iraq veteran arrested in killing.”

Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: “Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife.” Pierre, S.D.: “Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress.” Colorado Springs: “Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.”

Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.

The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment — along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems — appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction.

Three-quarters of these veterans were still in the military at the time of the killing. More than half the killings involved guns, and the rest were stabbings, beatings, strangulations and bathtub drownings. Twenty-five offenders faced murder, manslaughter or homicide charges for fatal car crashes resulting from drunken, reckless or suicidal driving.

About a third of the victims were spouses, girlfriends, children or other relatives, among them 2-year-old Krisiauna Calaira Lewis, whose 20-year-old father slammed her against a wall when he was recuperating in Texas from a bombing near Falluja that blew off his foot and shook up his brain.

A quarter of the victims were fellow service members, including Specialist Richard Davis of the Army, who was stabbed repeatedly and then set ablaze, his body hidden in the woods by fellow soldiers a day after they all returned from Iraq.

And the rest were acquaintances or strangers, among them Noah P. Gamez, 21, who was breaking into a car at a Tucson motel when an Iraq combat veteran, also 21, caught him, shot him dead and then killed himself outside San Diego with one of several guns found in his car.

Tracking the Killings

The Pentagon does not keep track of such killings, most of which are prosecuted not by the military justice system but by civilian courts in state after state. Neither does the Justice Department.

To compile and analyze its list, The Times conducted a search of local news reports, examined police, court and military records and interviewed the defendants, their lawyers and families, the victims’ families and military and law enforcement officials.

This reporting most likely uncovered only the minimum number of such cases, given that not all killings, especially in big cities and on military bases, are reported publicly or in detail. Also, it was often not possible to determine the deployment history of other service members arrested on homicide charges.

The Times used the same methods to research homicides involving all active-duty military personnel and new veterans for the six years before and after the present wartime period began with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

This showed an 89 percent increase during the present wartime period, to 349 cases from 184, about three-quarters of which involved Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. The increase occurred even though there have been fewer troops stationed in the United States in the last six years and the American homicide rate has been, on average, lower.

The Pentagon was given The Times’s roster of homicides. It declined to comment because, a spokesman, Lt. Col. Les Melnyk, said, the Department of Defense could not duplicate the newspaper’s research. Further, Colonel Melnyk questioned the validity of comparing prewar and wartime numbers based on news media reports, saying that the current increase might be explained by “an increase in awareness of military service by reporters since 9/11.” He also questioned the value of “lumping together different crimes such as involuntary manslaughter with first-degree homicide.”

Given that many veterans rebound successfully from their war experiences and some flourish as a result of them, veterans groups have long deplored the attention paid to the minority of soldiers who fail to readjust to civilian life.

After World War I, the American Legion passed a resolution asking the press “to subordinate whatever slight news value there may be in playing up the ex-service member angle in stories of crime or offense against the peace.” An article in the Veterans of Foreign Wars magazine in 2006 referred with disdain to the pervasive “wacko-vet myth,” which, veterans say, makes it difficult for them to find jobs.

Clearly, committing homicide is an extreme manifestation of dysfunction for returning veterans, many of whom struggle in quieter ways, with crumbling marriages, mounting debt, deepening alcohol dependence or more-minor tangles with the law.

But these killings provide a kind of echo sounding for the profound depths to which some veterans have fallen, whether at the bottom of a downward spiral or in a sudden burst of violence.

Thirteen of these veterans took their own lives after the killings, and two more were fatally shot by the police. Several more attempted suicide or expressed a death wish, like Joshua Pol, a former soldier convicted of vehicular homicide, who told a judge in Montana in 2006, “To be honest with you, I really wish I had died in Iraq.”

In some of the cases involving veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, the fact that the suspect went to war bears no apparent relationship to the crime committed or to the prosecution and punishment. But in many of the cases, the deployment of the service member invariably becomes a factor of some sort as the legal system, families and communities grapple to make sense of the crimes.

This is especially stark where a previously upstanding young man — there is one woman among the 121 — appears to have committed a random act of violence. And The Times’s analysis showed that the overwhelming majority of these young men, unlike most civilian homicide offenders, had no criminal history.

“When they’ve been in combat, you have to suspect immediately that combat has had some effect, especially with people who haven’t shown these tendencies in the past,” said Robert Jay Lifton, a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance who used to run “rap groups” for Vietnam veterans and fought to earn recognition for what became known as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

“Everything is multicausational, of course,” Dr. Lifton continued. “But combat, especially in a counterinsurgency war, is such a powerful experience that to discount it would be artificial.”

Few of these 121 war veterans received more than a cursory mental health screening at the end of their deployments, according to interviews with the veterans, lawyers, relatives and prosecutors. Many displayed symptoms of combat trauma after their return, those interviews show, but they were not evaluated for or received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder until after they were arrested for homicides.

What is clear is that experiences on the streets of Baghdad and Falluja shadowed these men back to places like Longview, Tex., and Edwardsville, Ill.

“He came back different” is the shared refrain of the defendants’ family members, who mention irritability, detachment, volatility, sleeplessness, excessive drinking or drug use, and keeping a gun at hand.

“You are unleashing certain things in a human being we don’t allow in civic society, and getting it all back in the box can be difficult for some people,” said William C. Gentry, an Army reservist and Iraq veteran who works as a prosecutor in San Diego County.

When Archie O’Neil, a gunnery sergeant in the Marines, returned from a job handling dead bodies in Iraq, he became increasingly paranoid, jumpy and fearful — moving into his garage, eating M.R.E.’s, wearing his camouflage uniform, drinking heavily and carrying a gun at all times, even to answer the doorbell.

“It was like I put one person on a ship and sent him over there, and they sent me a totally different person back,” Monique O’Neil, his wife, testified.

A well-respected and decorated noncommissioned officer who did not want to endanger his chances for advancement, Sergeant O’Neil did not seek help for the PTSD that would later be diagnosed by government psychologists. “The Marine way,” his lawyer said at a preliminary hearing, “was to suck it up.”

On the eve of his second deployment to Iraq in 2004, Sergeant O’Neil fatally shot his mistress, Kimberly O’Neal, after she threatened to kill his family while he was gone.

During a military trial at Camp Pendleton, Calif., a Marine defense lawyer argued that “the ravages of war” provided the “trigger” for the killing. In 2005, a military jury convicted Sergeant O’Neil of murder but declined to impose the minimum sentence, life with the possibility of parole, considering it too harsh. A second jury, however, convened only for sentencing, voted the maximum penalty, life without parole. The case is on appeal.

As with Sergeant O’Neil, a connection between a veteran’s combat service and his crime is sometimes declared overtly. Other times, though, the Iraq connection is a lingering question mark as offenders’ relatives struggle to understand how a strait-laced teenager or family man or wounded veteran ended up behind bars — or dead.

That happened in the case of Stephen Sherwood, who enlisted in the Army at 34 to obtain medical insurance when his wife got pregnant. He may never have been screened for combat trauma.

Yet Mr. Sherwood shot his wife and then himself nine days after returning from Iraq in the summer of 2005. Several months before, the other soldiers in his tank unit had been killed by a rocket attack while he was on a two-week leave to celebrate the first birthday of his now-orphaned son.

“When he got back to Iraq, everyone was dead,” his father, Robert Sherwood, said. “He had survivor’s guilt.” Then his wife informed him that she wanted to end their marriage.

After the murder-suicide, Mr. Sherwood’s parents could not help but wonder what role Iraq played and whether counseling might have helped keep their son away from the brink.

“Ah boy, the amount of heartbreak involved in all of this,” said Dr. Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist for the Department of Veterans Affairs in Boston and the author of two books that examine combat trauma through the lens of classical texts.

An Ancient Connection

The troubles and exploits of the returning war veteran represent a searing slice of reality. They have served as a recurring artistic theme throughout history — from Homer’s “Odyssey” to the World War I novel “All Quiet on the Western Front,” from the post-Vietnam-era movie “The Deer Hunter” to last fall’s film “In the Valley of Elah.”

At the heart of these tales lie warriors plagued by the kind of psychic wounds that have always afflicted some fraction of combat veterans. In an online course for health professionals, Capt. William P. Nash, the combat/operational stress control coordinator for the Marines, reaches back to Sophocles’ account of Ajax, who slipped into a depression after the Trojan War, slaughtered a flock of sheep in a crazed state and then fell on his own sword.

The nature of the counterinsurgency war in Iraq, where there is no traditional front line, has amplified the stresses of combat, and multiple tours of duty — a third of the troops involved in Iraq and Afghanistan have deployed more than once — ratchet up those stresses.

In earlier eras, various labels attached to the psychological injuries of war: soldier’s heart, shell shock, Vietnam disorder. Today the focus is on PTSD, but military health care officials are seeing a spectrum of psychological issues, with an estimated half of the returning National Guard members, 38 percent of soldiers and 31 percent of marines reporting mental health problems, according to a Pentagon task force.

Decades of studies on the problems of Vietnam veterans have established links between combat trauma and higher rates of unemployment, homelessness, gun ownership, child abuse, domestic violence, substance abuse — and criminality. On a less scientific level, such links have long been known.

“The connection between war and crime is unfortunately very ancient,” said Dr. Shay, the V.A. psychiatrist and author. “The first thing that Odysseus did after he left Troy was to launch a pirate raid on Ismarus. Ending up in trouble with the law has always been a final common pathway for some portion of psychologically injured veterans.”

The National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study, considered the most thorough analysis of this population, found that 15 percent of the male veterans still suffered from full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder more than a decade after the war ended. Half of the veterans with active PTSD had been arrested or in jail at least once, and 34.2 percent more than once. Some 11.5 percent of them had been convicted of felonies, and veterans are more likely to have committed violent crimes than nonveterans, according to government studies. In the mid-1980s, with so many Vietnam veterans behind bars that Vietnam Veterans of America created chapters in prisons, veterans made up a fifth of the nation’s inmate population.

As Iraq and Afghanistan veterans get enmeshed in the criminal justice system, former advocates for Vietnam veterans are disheartened by what they see as history repeating itself.

“These guys today, I recognize the hole in their souls,” said Hector Villarreal, a criminal defense lawyer in Mission, Tex., who briefly represented a three-time Iraq combat veteran charged with manslaughter.

Brockton D. Hunter, a criminal defense lawyer in Minneapolis, told colleagues in a recent lecture at the Minnesota State Bar Association that society should try harder to prevent veterans from self-destructing.

“To truly support our troops, we need to apply our lessons from history and newfound knowledge about PTSD to help the most troubled of our returning veterans,” Mr. Hunter said. “To deny the frequent connection between combat trauma and subsequent criminal behavior is to deny one of the direct societal costs of war and to discard another generation of troubled heroes.”

‘The Town Was Torn Up’

At the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution in Nebraska, Seth Strasburg, 29, displays an imposing, biker-style presence. He has a shaved head, bushy chin beard and tattoos scrolled around his thick arms and neck, one of which quotes, in Latin, a Crusades-era dictum: “Kill them all. God will know his own.”

Beneath this fierce exterior, however, Mr. Strasburg, an Iraq combat veteran who pleaded no contest to manslaughter and gun charges in 2006, hides a tortured compulsion to understand his actions. Growing up in rural Nebraska, he read military history. Now he devours books like Lt. Col. Dave Grossman’s “On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society” and Dr. Shay’s “Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming.”

Because Mr. Strasburg is introspective, he provides a window into the reverberations of combat violence within one veteran’s psyche and from there outward. In Arnold, Neb., population 679, the unintentional killing last year by Mr. Strasburg of Thomas Tiffany Varney V, a pre-mortuary science major known as Moose, was a deeply unsettling event.

“To lose one young man permanently and another to prison, with Iraq mixed up in the middle of it — the town was torn up,” said Pamela Eggleston, a waitress at Suzy’s Pizza and Spirits.

In late 2005, Mr. Strasburg returned to Arnold for a holiday leave after two years in Iraq. Once home, he did not easily shed the extreme vigilance that had become second nature. He traveled around rural Nebraska with a gun and body armor in his Jeep, feeling irritable, out of sorts and out of place in tranquil, “American Idol”-obsessed America.

During his leave, he shrank from questions about Iraq because he hated the cavalier ones: “So, did you kill anybody? What was it like?”

He had, in fact, killed somebody in Iraq and was having trouble dealing with it. Like several veterans interviewed, Mr. Strasburg was plagued by one death before he caused another one.

In 2004, Sergeant Strasburg’s section was engaged in a mission to counter a proliferation of improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, on the road west of Mosul. One night, posted in an old junked bus, he watched the road for hours until an Iraqi man, armed and out after curfew, appeared and circled a field, kicking the dirt as if he were searching for something. Finally, the man bent down, straining to pick up a large white flour sack, which he then dragged toward the road.

“In my mind at the time, he had this I.E.D. hidden out there during the day and he was going to set it in place,” Mr. Strasburg said. “We radioed it in. They said, ‘Whatever, use your discretion.’ So I popped him.”

With others on his reconnaissance team, Mr. Strasburg helped zip the man into a body bag, taking a few minutes to study the face that he now cannot forget. When they went to search the flour sack, they found nothing but gravel.

“I reported the kill to the battalion,” Mr. Strasburg said. “They said, you know: ‘Good shot. It’s legal. Whatever. Don’t worry about it.’ After that, it was never mentioned. But, you know, I had some issues with it later.”

Mr. Strasburg’s voice broke and he turned his head, wiping his eyes. A reporter noted that he was upset.

“I’m trying not to be,” he said, then changed his mind. “I mean, how can you not be? If you’re human. What if I had waited?”

“Maybe I was too eager,” he added. “Maybe I wanted to be the first one to get a kill, you know? Maybe, maybe, maybe. And that will never go away.”

Which bothers him, Mr. Strasburg said, telling himself: “Get over it. You shot somebody. Everybody else shot somebody, too.”

Shortly after Mr. Strasburg’s military tour of duty ended, he returned to Iraq as a private contractor because, he said, he did not know what else to do with himself after eight years in the Army. “I have no skill other than carrying a gun,” he said.

By late 2005, home on leave, he was preparing to return once more to Iraq in January.

On New Year’s Eve, Mr. Strasburg, accompanied by his brother, consumed vodka cocktails for hours at Jim’s Bar and Package in Arnold. Toward evening’s end, he engaged in an intense conversation with a Vietnam veteran, after which, he said, he inexplicably holstered his gun and headed to a party. Outside the party, he drunkenly approached a Chevrolet Suburban crowded with young people, got upset and thrust his gun inside the car.

Mr. Strasburg said he did not remember what provoked him. According to one account, a young man — not the victim — set him off by calling him a paid killer. Mr. Strasburg, according to the prosecutor, stuck his gun under the young man’s chin. There was a struggle over the gun. It went off. And Mr. Varney, a strapping 21-year-old with a passion for hunting, car racing and baseball, was struck.

Asked if he pulled the trigger, Mr. Strasburg said, “I don’t know,” adding that he took responsibility: “It was my gun and I was drunk. But what the hell was I thinking?”

The Suburban drove quickly away. Mr. Strasburg jumped into his Jeep, speeding along wintry roads until he crashed into a culvert. Feeling doomed, he said, he donned his bulletproof vest and plunged into the woods, where he fell asleep in the snow as police helicopters and state troopers closed in on him.

Mr. Strasburg had never been screened for post-traumatic stress disorder. Like many soldiers, he did not take seriously the Army’s mental health questionnaires given out at his tour’s end. “They were retarded,” he said. “All of us were like, ‘Let’s do this quickly so we can go home.’ They asked: ‘Did you see any dead bodies? Did you take part in any combat operations?’ Come on, we were in Iraq. They didn’t even ask us the really important question, if you killed someone.”

After his arrest, a psychologist hired by his family diagnosed combat trauma in Mr. Strasburg, writing in an evaluation that post-traumatic stress disorder, exacerbated by alcohol, served as a “major factor” in the shooting.

A Judge’s Harsh Words

At the sentencing hearing in Broken Bow, Neb., in September 2006, however, the judge discounted the centrality of the PTSD. He called Mr. Varney “the epitome of an innocent victim” and Mr. Strasburg “a bully” who “misconstrued comments” and “reacted in a belligerent and hostile manner.” In a courtroom filled with Arnold townspeople and Iraq veterans, he sentenced Mr. Strasburg to 22 to 36 years in prison.

Mr. Strasburg’s mother, Aneita, believing that the shooting was a product of his combat trauma, started an organization to create awareness about post-traumatic stress disorder.

Her activism, however, deeply offended the victim’s parents, who run the Arnold Funeral Home.

“I’m sorry, but it feels like a personal affront, like she’s trying to excuse our son’s death with the war,” Barb Varney said, adding that Mr. Strasburg has “never shown any remorse.”

Thomas Tiffany Varney IV, the victim’s father, expressed skepticism about Mr. Strasburg’s PTSD and the disorder in general, saying, “His grandfather, my dad, a lot of people been there, done that, and it didn’t affect them,” Mr. Varney said. “They’re trying to brush it away, ‘Well, he murdered someone, it’s just post-traumatic stress.’ ”

Mr. Strasburg himself, whose diagnosis was confirmed by the Department of Veterans Affairs, expressed discomfort with his post-traumatic stress disorder and its connection to his crime. “It’s not a be-all-and-end-all excuse, and I don’t mean it to be,” he said.

As Mr. Strasburg prefers to see it, he had adapted his behavior to survive in Iraq and then retained that behavior — vigilant, distrustful, armed — when he returned home. “You need time to decompress,” he said. “If the exact same circumstances had happened a year later” — the circumstances of that New Year’s Eve — “nothing would have happened. It never would have went down.”

Mr. Strasburg also voiced reluctance to being publicly identified as a PTSD sufferer, worried that his former military colleagues would see him as a weakling. “Nobody wants to be that guy who says, ‘I got counseling this afternoon, Sergeant,’ ” he said, mimicking a whining voice.

Mr. Strasburg’s former platoon leader, Capt. Benjamin D. Tiffner, who was killed in an I.E.D. attack in Baghdad in November, wrote a letter to Nebraska state authorities. He protested the length of the sentence and requested Mr. Strasburg’s transfer “to a facility that would allow him to deal with his combat trauma.”

“Seth has been asked and required to do very violent things in defense of his country,” Captain Tiffner wrote. “He spent the majority of 2003 to 2005 in Iraq solving very dangerous problems by using violence and the threat of violence as his main tools. He was congratulated and given awards for these actions. This builds in a person the propensity to deal with life’s problems through violence and the threat of violence.

“I believe this might explain in some way why Seth reacted the way that he did that night in Nebraska,” the letter continued. “I’m not trying to explain away Seth’s actions, but I think he is a special case and he needs to be taken care of by our judicial system and our medical system.”

Many Don’t Seek Treatment

Unlike during the Vietnam War, the current military has made a concerted effort, through screenings and research, to gauge the mental health needs of returning veterans. But gauging and addressing needs are different, and a Pentagon task force last year described the military mental health system as overburdened, “woefully” understaffed, inadequately financed and undermined by the stigma attached to PTSD.

Although early treatment might help veterans retain their relationships and avoid developing related problems like depression, alcoholism and criminal behavior, many do not seek or get such help. And this group of homicide defendants seems to be a prime example.

Like Mr. Strasburg, many of these veterans learned that they had post-traumatic stress disorder only after their arrests. And their mental health issues often went unevaluated even after the killings if they were pleading not guilty, if they did not have aggressive lawyers and relatives — or if they killed themselves first.

Of the 13 combat veterans in The Times database who committed murder-suicides, only two, as best as it can be determined, had psychological problems diagnosed by the military health care system after returning from war.

“The real tragedy in these veterans’ case is that, where PTSD is a factor, it is highly treatable,” said Lawrence W. Sherman, director of the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania. “And when people are exposed to serious trauma and don’t get it treated, it is a serious risk factor for violence.”

At various times, the question of whether the military shares some blame for these killings gets posed. This occurs especially where the military knew beforehand of a combat veteran’s psychological troubles, marital problems or history of substance abuse.

In some cases, the military sent service members with pre-existing problems — known histories of mental illness, drug abuse or domestic abuse — into combat only to find those problems exacerbated by the stresses of war. In other cases, they quickly discharged returning veterans with psychological or substance abuse problems, after which they committed homicides.

Perhaps no case has posed the question of military liability more bluntly than that of Lucas T. Borges, 25, a former private in the Marines whose victims are suing the United States government, maintaining that the military “had a duty to take reasonable steps to prevent Borges from harming others.” The government is trying to get the claim dismissed.

Mr. Borges immigrated from Brazil at 14 and joined the Marines four years later. After spending six months in Iraq at the beginning of the war, he “came back different, like he was out of his mind,” said his mother, Dina Borges, who runs a small cleaning business in Maryland.

Assigned on his return to a maintenance battalion at Camp Lejeune, N.C., Private Borges developed a taste for the ether used to start large internal combustion engines in winter.

Mr. Borges did have a history of marijuana use, which he disclosed to the Marines when he enlisted, said Jeffrey Weber, a lawyer who represented the victims until recently.

But inhaling ether, which produces both a dreamy high and impairment, was new to him, and his sister, Gabriela, a 20-year-old George Washington University student, believes that he developed the habit to relieve the anxiety that he brought home from war.

The Marines, aware of Mr. Borges’s past drug use, also knew that he had developed an ether problem, but they never removed him from the job where he had ready access to his drug of choice, according to the lawsuit. They never offered him drug treatment, either, Mr. Borges’s own lawyer said in court.

Four months after he returned from Iraq, military officials moved to discharge Private Borges when he was caught inhaling ether in his car. They impounded the car, which contained several canisters of the government’s ether, and sent Mr. Borges, who threatened to kill himself, to the mental health ward of the base hospital.

“He was finally under the care of a psychiatrist, but they pulled him from that because he was a problem and they wanted to get rid of him,” Mr. Weber said. “They processed him out, handed him the keys to his car, and his supervisor said, ‘If you’re not careful, you’re going to kill somebody.’ ”

When Mr. Borges retrieved his 1992 Camaro, he discovered that the Marines had left their ether canisters inside — they did not have anywhere to store them, officials said at trial — and immediately got high. He then drove east down the westbound lane of a state highway, slamming headfirst into the victims’ car, killing 19-year-old Jamie Marie Lumsden, the daughter of a marine who served in Iraq, and seriously injuring four others.

Convicted of second-degree murder, Mr. Borges was sentenced to 24 to 32 years in prison.

Lost in Las Vegas

The Army has recently developed a course called “Battlemind Training,” intended to help soldiers make the psychological transition back into civilian society. “In combat, the enemy is the target,” the course material says. “Back home, there are no enemies.”

This can be a difficult lesson to learn. Many soldiers and marines find themselves at war with their spouses, their children, their fellow service members, the world at large and ultimately themselves when they come home.

“Based on my experience, most of these veterans feel just terrible that they’ve caused this senseless harm,” Dr. Shay said. “Most veterans don’t want to hurt other people.”

Matthew Sepi withdrew into himself on his return from Iraq.

A Navajo Indian who saw his hometown of Winslow, Ariz., as a dead end, Mr. Sepi joined the Army at 16, with a permission slip from his mother.

For a teenager without much life experience, the war in Iraq was mind-bending, and Mr. Sepi saw intense action. When his infantry company arrived in April 2003, it was charged with tackling resistant Republican Guard strongholds north of Baghdad.

“The war was supposedly over, except it wasn’t,” Mr. Sepi said. “I was a ground troop, with a grenade launcher attached to my M-16. Me and my buddies were the ones that assaulted the places. We went in the buildings and cleared the buildings. We shot and got shot at.”

After a year of combat, Mr. Sepi returned to Fort Carson, Colo., where life seemed dull and regimented. The soldiers did not discuss their war experiences or their postwar emotions. Instead, they partied, Mr. Sepi said, and the drinking got him and others in trouble. Arrested for under-age driving under the influence, he was ordered to complete drug and alcohol education and counseling. Shortly after that, he decided to leave the Army.

Feeling lost after his discharge “with a few little medals,” he ended up moving to Las Vegas, a city that he did not know, with the friend of a friend. Broke, Mr. Sepi settled in the Naked City, which is named for the showgirls who used to sunbathe topless there. After renting a roach-infested hole in the wall with an actual hole in the wall, he found jobs doing roadwork and making plastic juice bottles in a factory. Alone and lonely, he started feeling the effects of his combat experiences.

In Las Vegas, Mr. Sepi’s alcohol counselor took him under his wing, recognizing war-related PTSD in his extreme jumpiness, adrenaline rushes, nightmares and need to drink himself into unconsciousness.

The counselor directed him to seek specialized help from a Veterans Affairs hospital. Mr. Sepi said he called the V.A. and was told to report in person. But working 12-hour shifts at a bottling plant, he failed to do so.

In July 2005, when Mr. Sepi was arrested, he identified himself as an Iraq veteran. But, Detective Andersen said, “He didn’t act like a combat veteran. He acted like a scared kid.”

Soon afterward, Nancy Lemcke, Mr. Sepi’s public defender, visited him in jail. “I asked him about PTSD,” Ms. Lemcke said. “And he starts telling me about Iraq and all of a sudden, his eyes well up with tears, and he cries out: ‘We had the wrong house! We had the wrong house!’ And he’s practically hysterical.”

As part of an operation to break down the resistance in and around Balad, Mr. Sepi and his unit had been given a nightly list of targets for capture. Camouflaged, the American soldiers crept through towns after midnight, working their way down the lists, setting off C-4 plastic explosives at each address to stun the residents into submission.

“This particular night, it was December 2003, there was, I’d say, more than 100 targets,” Mr. Sepi said. “Each little team had a list. And at this one house, we blow the gate and find out that there’s this guy sitting in his car just inside that gate. We move in, and he, like, stumbles out of his car, and he’s on fire, and he’s, like, stumbling around in circles in his front yard. So we all kind of don’t know what to do, and he collapses, and we go inside the house and search it and find out it’s the wrong house.”

Although Mr. Sepi said that he felt bad at the time, he also knew that he had done nothing but follow orders and that the Army had paid the man’s family a settlement. He did not imagine that the image of the flaming, stumbling Iraqi civilian would linger like a specter in his psyche.

Listening to Mr. Sepi recount the story of a death that he regretted in Iraq while grappling with a death that he regretted in Las Vegas, his lawyer grew determined to get him help. “It was just so shocking, and his emotions were so raw, and he was so messed up,” Ms. Lemcke said.

An Unusual Legal Deal

She found compassion for him among the law enforcement officials handling the case. The investigation backed up Mr. Sepi’s story of self-defense, although it was never determined who fired first. It made an impression on the police that he was considerably outweighed — his 130 pounds against a 210-pound man and a 197-pound woman. And it helped Mr. Sepi that his victims were drifters, with no family members pressing for justice.

The police said that Kevin Ratcliff, 36, who was shot and wounded by Mr. Sepi, belonged to the Crips and was a convicted felon; Sharon Jackson, 47, who was killed, belonged to NC, the Naked City gang, and an autopsy found alcohol, cocaine and methamphetamines in her blood.

Buoyed by an outpouring of support from Mr. Sepi’s fellow soldiers and veterans’ advocates, Ms. Lemcke pressed the Department of Veterans Affairs to find treatment programs for Mr. Sepi. This allowed an unusual deal with the local district attorney’s office: in exchange for the successful completion of treatment for substance abuse and PTSD, the charges against Mr. Sepi would be dropped.

After about three months in jail, Mr. Sepi spent three months at a substance abuse program in Prescott, Ariz., in late 2005, where the graying veterans presented an object lesson: “I don’t want to be like that when I’m older,” he said to himself. In early 2006, he transferred to a PTSD treatment center run by the V.A. in Topeka, Kan., where he learned how to deal with anger, sadness and guilt, to manage the symptoms of his anxiety disorder and, it seems, to vanquish his nightmares.

“For some reason, my bad dreams went away,” he said. “It’s pretty cool.”

Free to start life over, Mr. Sepi stepped tentatively into adulthood. Settling in Phoenix, he enrolled in automotive school and got a job as a welder for a commercial bakery. Once in a while, he said, a loud noise still starts his heart racing and he breaks into a cold sweat, ready for action. But he knows now how to calm himself, he said, he no longer owns guns, and he is sober and sobered by what he has done.

“That night,” he said, of the hot summer night in Las Vegas when he was arrested for murder, “if I could erase it, I would. Killing is part of war, but back home ...”

[] [] []

Laura-lie returns to the scene of the crime

2008-01-10T22:14:00.001-08:00

2007-12-18T17:39:00.000-08:00

Editorial Cartoon

Afghanistan Ignored December 18, 6:51 PM

Getting by with genocide
Use of Air Strikes in Afghan Conflict 'Rising Sharply': Report

From the Family Values Folk...

2007-11-29T01:32:00.001-08:00

Update NYT 12/30/07:

Tapes by C.I.A. Lived and Died to Save Image

Schlessinger/Bishop family
(minus 3 children by first wife) values are
proud parents who believe torture=safe....

WWHO?

2007-10-06T19:39:00.000-07:00

KingOf*Hearts*
14 friends
Update 11/14/07: Military starts using drug dogs to search troops’ bags in Afghanistan

82nd Airborne not to worry (Canadian dogs only)

[ click images to enlarge ] MUST BE OVER 18

[ WARNING GROSS ]

Deryk Schlessinger
KingOf*Hearts* cartoons...What Was He On?
"Yes . . . F---ING Yes!!!" said one blog entry on the Schlessinger site. "I LOVE MY JOB, it takes everything reckless and deviant and heathenistic and just overall bad about me and hyper focuses these traits into my job of running around this horrid place doing nasty things to people that deserve it . . . and some that don't."

"it may be possible that our enemies are actually behind this."

David Accetta, public affairs director for the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan

"A great numb feeling washes over me as I let go of the past and look forward to the future. Pretend to be a vampire. I don't really need to pretend, because it's who I am, an emotional vampire. I've just come to expect it. Vampires are real. That I was born this way. That I feed off of other people's real emotions."

"They hide behind an associates degree or a band that might be signed. they hide when there is war. It must make their mothers proud that others protect their sons. I cannot bear to watch my friends and truest brothers, who I would die for, kill for, be hurt. I will not allow it. It will not go unpunished.15months. And we will be home. And we will give GOD a reason to drown the earth once more. With Love Deryk muah" dated May 15, 2007

"GIVING GOD REASON TO DROWN
THE WORLD ONCE MORE"

"Godless crazy people like me have become a generation of apathetic killers"

“It will not go unpunished”

"No this blog isn't about me, it's to thank you America, bc of your unwillingness to compromise and pull your head cut of your *ss every unit deployed to either Iraq or Afghanistan will serve a mandatory 15 months in country bc we have lost funding." KingOf*Hearts* 5/15/07

photos
movie
Tillman

trouble
Soldiers jailed for selling drugs, body armor
Steven Dale Green

A British patrol was abandoned by its American special forces escort
in the town for several hours. Stranded in central Sangin, British
officers tried to establish radio contact with the Americans, who had
disappeared without warning, and swore impatiently when they could
not.

Jon Moldovan
Chris Santory
Deryk Schlessinger
John Platt

Chris Santory
Deryk Schlessinger

The above cartoons, photos and quotes are from the KingOf*Hearts* My Space May 2007

"Deployment"
Unknown 82nd airborne
summer 2007
is from another site

Mystery Surrounds Death of U.S. Solider.

Ciara Durkin Uncovered Information That She Said Troubled Her Just Before She Was Killed in Afghanistan

Heroin, they say 'is everywhere

OUR VIEW: Truth is a combat casualty By The Patriot Ledger

The initial reports of Ciara Durkin’s death in Afghanistan are a byproduct of the Bush administration’s wrongheaded intent to shape the public perception of this fight and the war in Iraq.

But it is a disgrace that grieving families of those killed in service to their country have to endure painfully slow trickles of information - and misinformation - that pose more questions than answers.

The Massachusetts Army National Guard told Durkin’s family and released a statement that the 30-year-old finance specialist from Quincy was ‘‘killed in action’’ last Friday, traumatic news to anyone but not wholly unexpected when a loved one is serving in a combat theater.

But on Monday, family members learned she was killed by a single gunshot wound and her death was termed non-combat related. Suddenly, the Durkin family’s grief was compounded with the unspeakable pain that their daughter and sister, who felt fate intervened in her choosing to enlist in the military, may have been killed either by accidental friendly fire or, even more horrendous, murdered.

Family members immediately dismissed thoughts of suicide and the area where her body was found is deemed very secure and an unlikely spot for sniper attack.

A spokesman for the National Guard said the KIA term was used initially because Durkin died in Afghanistan and she was not at home. That, however, conflicts with the definition of ‘‘killed in action,’’ laid out in the Department of Defense dictionary.

‘‘A casualty category applicable to a hostile casualty, other than the victim of a terrorist activity, who is killed outright or who dies as a result of wounds or other injuries before reaching a medical treatment facility,’’ is how the military defines KIA.

Given the history of this administration’s selling of the war on terror, it is not beyond the pale to make the leap that the choice of that phrase was an intentional attempt to mislead either the family or the public or both.

Deryk Schlessinger cartoon/‘Afghanistan may be lost forever’

2007-10-04T22:16:00.000-07:00

[ click images to enlarge ]

Chris . John . Deryk

UPDATE 11/27/07: new Harley

Afghanistan needs more celebrities

or more helicopters?
update 12/12/07

Claims of atrocity in Helmand province
US special forces have undertaken secret missions about which Nato has no knowledge.

"It was, however, the panel’s chairman, Congressman David Ackerman, a New York Democrat, who set the tone for Thursday’s hearing. Painting a very bleak picture of the situation in Afghanistan, he noted:

'There is no security in much of the country. The central government’s grip does not extend much beyond the environs of Kabul. In the provinces, there is no functioning local government, and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime projects that 2007 will be another record year for opium production in Afghanistan'."

‘Afghanistan may be lost forever’
October 04, 2007

Violence in Afghanistan has soared by 30%, UN report says Declan Walsh in Islamabad

Thursday October 4, 2007
The Guardian

How Did Specialist Ciara Durkin Die?
Soldier In Finance Unit At Bagram Air Base Said To Have "Discovered Things" Is Found Dead

Taliban rising in power in Helmand&Kandahar

"Helmand, Kandahar and Oruzgan have particularly seen a significant rise in the power of Taliban.
NATO air-strikes targeting Afghan civilians have also
caused great alarm among Europeans. The ISAF has still not developed a positive image of itself among the Afghans outside Kabul.
Faulty Reconstruction and Security Sector Reforms
NATO's broad-based efforts to reconstruct Afghanistan and reform the country's security sector have also produced minimal results."

Simultaneously stressed and bored, U.S. soldiers are turning to the widely available drug for a quick escape
It's easy for soldiers to score heroin in Afghanistan
By Shaun McCanna

cartoons

Deryk Schlessinger/KingOfHearts

2007-09-22T18:42:00.000-07:00

KingOf*Hearts*'s Blurbs [ warning ]
About me:
"I'm not gonna lie I LOVE 8=======D- --:) if there's a hot single guy that wants a skinny athletic man that he can take control of i want you to find me and do me, i love nothing more then a 3some with black dudes!!! A WOMAN WAS WALKING ON A SNOW COVERED PATH AS SHE CAME UPON A DYING SNAKE, SHE CARRIED THE SNAKE BACK TO HER HOME AND NURSED THE SNAKE BACK TO HEALTH.
MANY MONTHS WENT BY AS SHE TENDED TO THE SNAKE UNTIL ONE DAY THE SNAKE STRUCK AT HER SINKING HIS FANGS DEEP WITHIN HER NECK AND PUMPING HER VEINS FULL OF POISON. AS SHE LAID ON THE FLOOR DYING SHE ASKED 'WHY DID YOU BITE ME' AND THE SNAKE REPLIED, 'LOOK BITCH, YOU KNEW I WAS A SNAKE.' " CARTOONS

The Army cleared "the enemy" and declined to clear Deryk Schlessinger* or friends.

*Deryk Schlessinger is the son of Wendy McCaw's* Santa Barbara News-Press (controversy) A2 columnist, Laura Schlessinger. Her recent columns have made a few citizens question why is the Thursday September 13, 2007 "Calling a Muslim a terrorist" column unavailable online?
(here is where the online columns can be purchased)

Locals Deane and Bert Langdon wrote a letter to the editor, Travis Armstrong, about a NewsPress headline "3 Muslims arrested in plot to attack U.S." Laura, not Mr.Armstrong, responded. Her outrage ended with "The Langdons' concern with respect should be sent to bin Laden-not an American newspaper." We'd like to hear the response after that and her shout out to Mayor Marty Blum and the whole city council, she would like them to take their time to impeach Osama bin Laden. When will she ask them in person, something is off putting to use her pulpit where the response is controlled or censored. Most locals present their ideas in person to the City Council, not using their position in such a political manner.
(Another thread had one man upset enough to do his own censoring, he didn't give specifics, just name calling and intimidation)

**Wendy McCaw, famed since the expensive divorce from Craig McCaw, founder of McCaw Cellular (now part of AT&T Mobility) and Clearwire Corporation.

Just asking

'Sicko', Deryk Schlessinger's Good Childhood, Bad Life and SCARY Cartoons

2007-09-16T16:14:00.001-07:00

[click images to enlarge... CARTOON WARNING]

"'Sicko' and sicker",

Good (as in privileged), bad (as in My Space), SCARY (as in WARNING)

Will Deryk write his own book or stick with this 'Sicko' cartoon image and tenebrous pathology?

Santa Barbara News-Press grunt, Laura Schlesinger's son startled and horrified many in his homeland last May when the Army launched an investigation for a possible Court Martial. By the end of August the Army cleared what they called "the enemy" and declined to say why Deryk was not cleared or if he took any responsibility. They may be glad to have another gunner for the secrets of Afghanistan, not everyone at home is safer.

Deryk is not speaking up and not one family
member or friend has shown any support or explanation. Not even Bill O'Reilly calling traitor or conspiracy. A few lone, meaningless recycled rhetorical comments and blame. Laura's old, tired
radio shtick is the kiss of death for their reputation. They are complicit as they can only know he's guilty. The whole "family values" business is showing signs of failing in public relations now. Each day that passes they fall deeper in darkness. As O.J. shows us, the narcisstic personality operates different, yet the day of reckoning will come.

O.J. did write a book (ghostwriter), Deryk and the "family values" business are turning it over to anyone with something to consider or an unauthorized biographer.

Deryk posted his cartoons on his KingOf*Hearts* My Space along with his photographs. His friends shared many of the same.

photos
The lowdown dirt of De La Guerra Plaza
Britain is protecting the biggest heroin crop of all time
Afghanistan

Cartoon controversies as old as cartone

2007-09-06T17:59:00.001-07:00

cartoon is any of several forms of illustrations, with varied meanings that evolved from one to another

[click images to enlarge]

The Moderate Voice: A Cartoon that Crosses the Line

Historical meaning :

In its original meaning, a cartoon (from the Italian cartone and Dutch/Flemish word "karton", meaning strong, heavy paper or pasteboard) is a full-size drawing made on paper as a study for a further drawings, such as a painting or tapestry. Cartoons were typically used in the production of frescoes, to accurately link the component parts of the composition when painted onto plaster over a series of days. Such cartoons often have pinpricks where the outline of the design has been picked out in the plaster.

Cartoons by painters such as Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci are highly prized in their own right. A world-renowned collection of Peter Paul Rubens cartoons for huge tapestries is displayed in the collection of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida.Originally, a full-size drawing used for transferring a design to a painting, tapestry, or other large work.
Cartoons were used from the 15th century

by fresco painters and stained-glass artists. In the 19th century the term acquired its popular meaning of a humorous drawing or parody. Cartoons in that sense are used today to convey political commentary, editorial opinion, and social comedy in newspapers and magazines.
The greatest early figure is William Hogarth, in 18th-century Britain. In 19th-century France, Honoré Daumier introduced accompanying text that conveyed his characters' unspoken thoughts. Britain's Punch became the foremost 19th-century venue for cartoons; in the 20th century The New Yorker set the American standard. A Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning was established in 1922. See also caricature; comic strip.

A drawing depicting a humorous situation, often accompanied by a caption.

A drawing representing current public figures or issues symbolically and often satirically: a political cartoon.
A preliminary sketch similar in size to the work, such as a fresco, that is to be copied from it.

An animated cartoon.

Bullionist Debate of the 1810s

Controversy Cartoons
Canada’s Cartoon Controversy
New Cartoon Controversy Angers Hindus
Cartoonists Take Up Smoking

The War Ends--Parades and Controversies
Mike Lester cartoon stirs the pot in Tallahassee
Idaho Senator Larry Craig

Apparently, Fred Phelps was unavailable

"maybe" Schlessinger CARTOONS?

2007-09-01T06:12:00.000-07:00

WARNING: must be over 18
These cartoons are from the My Space mentioned in The Salt Lake Tribune article. There are a total of nine.
Dr. Laura son linked to lurid Web page
By Matthew D. LaPlante
[CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE]

Military Investigation of Dr. Laura’s Son Complete
Friday, August 31, 2007 By Matt Kettmann

"The official answer to that question is an unequivocal “maybe” — the Army will only confirm that the investigation is complete, but will not discuss whether Schlessinger was at fault or whether he was reprimanded."

"So was it 'our enemies' putting offensive material on Deryk Schlessinger’s MySpace page? Nope, and that was the only other confirmation from Lt. Col. Accetta. He explained, 'There is no evidence to support any enemy involvement in creating the MySpace webpage. An investigation was conducted by trooper Schlessinger's chain of command and found nothing that indicated that any foreign government or enemy organization contributed to the webpage'."

The The Salt Lake Tribune was alerted to the KingOf*Hearts* My Space by a former Hillsdale College classmate of Deryk Schessingers. There was concern that Deryk should not be around guns. That issue has not been cleared. The Army is stretched and standards have been lowered. Not all critical mental health problems are appropriately dealt with. This summer in Santa Barbara a former serviceman was shot dead as a result of "cheating woman" and concealed weapons. Public safety has not been addressed.

The secret world of the KingOf*Hearts*
[ MOVIES: ]

UPDATE 9/5/07
W T F ?

It's my understanding that Schessinger failed Orthodox Judaism. The local story is she was caught sailing on a holy day. She did smooze with the Orthodoxy until her sham was exposed and they basically did a nice departure, not telling each others dark secrets.

But OMG this is horrendous if part true!

It does fit in with how she is. It makes sense for what happened to Deryk, too, too bad if he can't free himself.

KingOfHearts maybe Schlessinger

Has the News-Press declared war [again]? Santa Barbara elitists ongoing hate on with the less fortunate...

INVESTIGATE LAURA SCHLESSINGER! "DoD may appear to merge inappropriately the public affairs and information operations functions"

"we're sooo hot, like for real. it's pretty wicked how hot we are."

Tattooing Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, Angelina Jolie,Travis Barker, Deryk Schlessinger, Hayden Panettiere

The worst Deryk Schlessinger ever...gay activists did it and what a mother will allow to cover for baby boi

PhD student "Dr" Laura Schlessinger and Veterans Day 2007

Deryk Schlessinger ?

Convention history: Deryk Schlessinger, number ONE 2004 RNC mystery suspect?

Afghanistan 82nd Airborne

Investigative Reporter: Big business and Dangerous U.S gangs

Laura Schlessinger's cr@p on Carp Hi

KingOf*Hearts*

Afghanistan

Deryk Schlessinger and No.1 killers,1

Deryk Schlessinger and No.1 killers, 2

LAURA SCHLESSINGER "As we speak, he has a gun in his hand"

New York Times: Killing in this country. Found 121 veterans cases.

From the Family Values Folk...

Update NYT 12/30/07:

Tapes by C.I.A. Lived and Died to Save Image

WWHO?

82nd Airborne not to worry (Canadian dogs only)

Deryk Schlessinger cartoon/‘Afghanistan may be lost forever’

Deryk Schlessinger/KingOf*Hearts*

'Sicko', Deryk Schlessinger's Good Childhood, Bad Life and SCARY Cartoons

Cartoon controversies as old as cartone

"maybe" Schlessinger CARTOONS?

KingOfHearts

Deryk Schlessinger/KingOfHearts