OBAMA VOWS TO CLOSE GITMO BEFORE HE LEAVES OFFICE; DARES CONGRESS

OBAMA VOWS TO CLOSE GITMO BEFORE HE LEAVES OFFICE:

IS THIS ABOUT ERASING GEORGE W. BUSH'S LEGACY?

WHERE WILL THE CAPTURED TERRORISTS BE RELEASED?

PLEASE GET OUT THE VOTE IN 2016.

Sources: ABC News, USA Today, Youtube

**** Obama Takes Last Chance To Close Guantanamo Bay

Keeping the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay open is "contrary to our values," President Obama said Tuesday, as he released a plan that examined 13 potential sites for transferring the suspected terrorists but did not propose any specific location.

His plan sets up a last-year confrontation with Congress about a campaign promise made eight years ago. Terrorists use Guantanamo as propaganda to recruit, and maintaining it harms U.S. national security, he said.

The plan has three elements beyond closing the prison, Obama said. 

More detainees will be safely transferred, reviewing the threat posed by detainees who are not eligible for transfer, and identifying those eligible for military trials.

“This plan has my full support," Obama said.

Obama said closing Guantanamo was something his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, supported, as did his 2008 Republican challenge, Sen. John McCain of Arizona. Since then, however, the politics have got in the way, he said.

Obama said he was "very clear-eyed" about the challenges of closing Guantanamo. "If it were easy it would have happened years ago," he said.

McCain, who now chairs the Armed Services Committee, called the plan flimsy and said his committee would hold hearings on it soon.

“What we received today is a vague menu of options, not a credible plan for closing Guantanamo, let alone a coherent policy to deal with future terrorist detainees,” McCain said in a statement. “After years of rhetoric, the president has still yet to say how and where he will house both current and future detainees, including those his administration has deemed as too dangerous to release.”

McCain said Obama had missed “a major chance to convince the Congress and the American people that he has a responsible plan to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.”

The plan does not indicate the prisons in the United States under consideration to transfer detainees, Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said in a statement.

“The administration seeks an active dialogue with Congress on this issue and looks forward to working with Congress to identify the most appropriate location as soon as possible,” Cook said.

The report looked at existing facilities in South Carolina, Kansas and Colorado, as well as new facilities at unnamed military bases across the country.

It would cost $290 million to $475 million for the Department of Defense to renovate an existing state or federal prison, which would be dedicated to holding only Defense detainees, the official said. But the Pentagon estimates it could save $65 million to $85 million a year, recouping the one-time costs in about five years, though the official said the numbers are "somewhat rough and notional” because Congress has not appropriated the money necessary to do a complete site assessment.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Monday that the Pentagon report "will make a compelling case that closing the prison is clearly in our national security interest, but also will reflect the need for the United States government to be a good steward of taxpayer dollars."

There are 91 detainees remaining in the prison; each one costs about $4 million per year.

"There is far too much money that is spent to operate that prison when there are more cost-effective alternatives available. And we certainly would like to work with the Congress to make those alternatives a reality because we know that those alternatives don't weaken our national security. In fact, they strengthen it. They enhance it," Earnest said. "And it would take away — by closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay — a chief recruiting tool that we know is used by terrorist organizations about the world."

The plan, released Tuesday morning, anticipates that a "limited number" of detainees will not be eligible for transfer to other countries

"For these detainees, the administration intends to work with the Congress to relocate them from the Guantanamo Bay detention facility to an appropriate site in the continental United States while continuing to identify other appropriate and lawful dispositions," the plan says.

Guantanamo Bay, located on the eastern edge of Cuba, has housed prisoners taken captive in war on terror since 2002. Since it exists on a base on Cuban soil but held by the United States under a 113-year-old lease, the prisoners are in what some human rights organizations call a "legal black hole."

But transferring them to U.S. soil would not necessarily change their legal status. A previous legal opinion from the Pentagon found that the 2001 legislation authorizing the global war on terror allows them to be held as combatants as long as hostilities remain.

There were 242 detainees still in the Guantanamo Bay prison when Obama took office in 2009, down from a high of almost 700. That number has dwindled over the years as the Pentagon has transferred lower-risk detainees to other countries — meaning that the prisoners who remain tend to be considered higher security risks.

Of the 91 detainees remaining, 35 are eligible to be transferred to other countries as long as those countries can demonstrate that they can hold the prisoners without risk. Another 10 await trial by a military court, and 46 are still being evaluated.

Current law prohibits the president from transferring the Guantanamo Bay detainees to U.S. soil, where there are only a handful of maximum-security prisons deemed appropriate to house them. Congress also added a provision to the defense policy bill signed by Obama last year requiring the administration to put forward a plan for transferring the remaining detainees to prisons in the United States.

House Speaker Paul Ryan dismissed the plan, saying it did not make a convincing case that moving detainees to the United States was "smart or safe." The plan did not provide details required by law about the cost and location of the U.S. prison.

"Congress has left no room for confusion," Ryan said in a statement. "It is against the law — and it will stay against the law — to transfer terrorist detainees to American soil. We will not jeopardize our national security over a campaign promise.”

Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, the top Democrat in the House, called the administration's proposal a "strong, detailed plan" to close Guantanamo.

“The reality is Guantanamo hurts, rather than advances our efforts to keep America safe and combat terrorism abroad," Pelosi said in a statement. "Closing the detention facility at Guantanamo will strengthen our national security and affirm our values and laws. It is disappointing that Republicans have worked to prevent the long-overdue closure of the Guantanamo facility."

Ray Charles Sings "America The Beautiful" R.I.P. (Videos)

Sources: White House, Youtube

Robert Bales: Small Town Patriot To Deranged, Alleged Killer; (PTSD) War Is Hell!

At Home, Asking How ‘Our Bobby’ Became War Crime Suspect


He was not the star, just a well-regarded young man who seemed to try to do the right thing. That was Robert Bales, “our Bobby,” friends said.

He was a busy, popular kid, but he made time for the autistic man down the block. Other neighborhood boys admired him. As a high school linebacker, he was good enough to be captain, but also gracious enough to help a more talented player take over his starting position. It was good for the team, he said.

That solid-guy reputation followed him into the Army infantry. He joined at the relatively seasoned age of 27, just a few weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and became respected for his maturity and calm, including in battle. “He was a damn good leader and a damn good soldier,” said Zachary Parsons, who served with Staff Sergeant Bales in Iraq in 2007.

So when many of his old neighbors from Norwood, Ohio, and former battalion mates from Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State heard the news that Sergeant Bales had been accused of coldbloodedly shooting to death 16 Afghan civilians on March 11, nine of them children, they were not simply shocked. They grieved.

Michelle Caddell, 48, who knew Sergeant Bales when he was growing up, watched a video clip of the news over and over and over again, mesmerized by disbelief. “I wanted to see, maybe, a different face,” she said, fighting back tears. “Because that’s not our Bobby. Something horrible, horrible had to happen to him.”

Friends, relatives and his lawyer say they have an idea of what that horrible thing was: war.

Three deployments in Iraq, where he saw heavy fighting, and a fourth in Afghanistan, where he went reluctantly, left him struggling financially, in danger of losing his home.

And there were more direct impacts. During his deployments, Sergeant Bales, 38, lost part of a foot and injured his head, saw fellow soldiers badly wounded, picked up the bodies of dead Iraqis, was treated for mild traumatic brain injury and possibly developed post-traumatic stress disorder, his lawyer and military officials said.

But there are also glimpses of a darkness in his personal life. Sergeant Bales’s past includes an arrest on a misdemeanor charge of assault on a woman, which was dropped after he completed anger-management counseling; an accident in which he overturned his car, something he attributed to falling asleep at the wheel; and an accumulation of rejections and disappointments.

A year ago, according to a blog written by his wife, he was denied a promotion to sergeant first class, a rank that would have brought not just added responsibility and respect but also money at a time when his finances seemed stretched.

Neighbors remember him, in between earlier deployments, as a gung-ho solider, eager to get back to the fight. But that seemed to have changed.

He trained to become a recruiter, a job that would have allowed him to skip Afghanistan, but the Army kept him in the infantry. And though he felt that his injuries were significant enough to keep him out of combat, his lawyer said, Army doctors said he was fit to deploy.

Weeks later, he arrived in one of the roughest precincts of Afghanistan.

A long legal process — starting with the formal filing of charges in the coming weeks and ending, most likely, in a court-martial — will sort out whether Sergeant Bales was guilty of atrocities and may shed light on which, if any, of these factors played a role.

From dozens of interviews with lawyers, friends and military officials, competing legal narratives are already starting to emerge.

A military official, speaking anonymously, has said Sergeant Bales had marital problems, felt stressed by the Afghanistan deployment and snapped after drinking alcohol before the shootings.

Sergeant Bales’s lawyers contend that he had a solid marriage and no drinking problems. If he cracked, they said, it was because he probably had P.T.S.D. that the Army failed to diagnose, had been dispatched to a war he did not want to fight and had seen a friend gravely wounded just before the killings.

Dr. Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist and retired brigadier general who was an adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that after a decade of combat, where hundreds of thousands of troops have sustained traumatic brain injury and P.T.S.D., those syndromes by themselves seem inadequate to explain how a seemingly normal and widely admired sergeant might have single-handedly committed one of the worst war crimes of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.

With his multiple deployments and wounds, Dr. Xenakis said, Sergeant Bales seems emblematic of bigger problems: an overstretched military battered by 11 years of combat; failures by the military to properly identify and treat its weary, suffering troops; and the thin line dividing “normal” behavior in war from what later is deemed “snapping.”

“This is equivalent to what My Lai did to reveal all the problems with the conduct of the Vietnam War,” Dr. Xenakis said. “The Army will want to say that soldiers who commit crimes are rogues, that they are individual, isolated cases. But they are not.”

Inspirational Teenager

Sergeant Bales grew up in Norwood, a modest suburb of Cincinnati, the youngest of five boys who lived in a two-story brick home still known as “the Bales house,” though no Baleses live in it anymore. The family was that well known, and that well liked.

“They’re down-home country,” Ms. Caddell said.

Mr. Bales was a gregarious, chatty, engaged teenager who played football and threw himself into an array of clubs and activities, including theater. In his yearbook, he signed the football team photo with a nickname, “Doom,” and is listed on the “senior superlatives” page as one of the best dancers in his class.

“He’s one of those kids you remember,” said David C. Griffel, the principal of Norwood High School when Mr. Bales attended. “A real extrovert.”

Mr. Bales was a leader on the football team, a feisty middle linebacker who was not big but strong, able to bench press 300 pounds. But in his junior year, a freshman star named Marc Edwards arrived, and the coach wanted the newcomer to be the starting middle linebacker. There might have been an unpleasant rivalry, but instead Mr. Bales shared tips on the position.

“He got the idea in that situation that Marc was going to be better for the team,” said Aaron M. Smith, the author of a book about Mr. Edwards.

Mr. Edwards was surprised by Mr. Bales’s generosity. “He credited Bob Bales with teaching him what leadership meant, and how to handle a situation that doesn’t favor you,” Mr. Smith said.

Mr. Edwards went on to be named Ohio’s “Mr. Football” for 1992 and to play for Notre Dame, the San Francisco 49ers, the Cleveland Browns, the New England Patriots, the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Chicago Bears.

Mr. Bales was enrolled in the College of Mount St. Joseph in 1991 and 1992. He attended Ohio State University from 1993 until 1996, declaring an economics major, according to Jim Lynch, a university spokesman. It is not clear why he left, Mr. Lynch said.

Details about Mr. Bales’s life during the next several years are sketchy. Friends and his lawyer said he had worked in financial services in Columbus, Ohio, then started an investment business with his brother Mark. No sign remains of their Spartina Investments at the modest office building where they leased space in Doral, Fla., a few blocks west of Miami International Airport and south of the Doral Golf Resort and Spa.

By November 2001, he had joined the Army.

“It wasn’t really anger when he joined,” said Michael Blevins, 35, a childhood friend. “It was — they had hurt something,” he added, referring to the Sept. 11 terrorists.

Ms. Caddell said that she had worried about his decision, but that he had assured her, “Nothing’s going to happen to me.” The decision made sense to Ms. Caddell’s son Mark, who had idolized Mr. Bales since he was a toddler.

He has to join, Ms. Caddell recalled her son saying. “He takes care of everybody.”

Introduction to Warfare

After basic training, Sergeant Bales was assigned to what was then known as Fort Lewis, near Tacoma, which would become the Army’s Western deployment hub for the wars. For the next 11 years, he would spend his career with the Second Battalion, Third Infantry Regiment in a Stryker brigade.

In 2002, the criminal assault occurred in a Tacoma-area hotel room, but he paid his fine and completed court-mandated anger-management counseling, court records show.

Not long after, he married Karilyn Primeau, a woman he had met online, his lawyer said, and they went on to have two children, a daughter named Quincy and a son named Bobby.

The Third Brigade deployed to northern Iraq from November 2003 to November 2004, a time when the country was quickly devolving into looting, insurgency and chaos. But it was Sergeant Bales’s second tour, from June 2006 into September 2007, that was particularly eventful.

By then, Iraq was in the throes of sectarian civil war, and American troops were dying at a rate of about 80 a month. David Hardt, a Third Brigade soldier who wrote a blog about the deployment, said that the enemy had almost always been invisible and that soldiers had grown bitterly frustrated at their inability to fight back.

“You sort of got used to seeing dead bodies, seeing things blow up in front of you,” said Mr. Hardt, who did not know Sergeant Bales but was in Iraq at the same time. “We wanted to get insurgents, but it’s so rare that we succeeded.”

In one extraordinary battle in January 2007, however, Sergeant Bales’s battalion encountered as many as 600 Shiite militia fighters while trying to recover a downed Apache helicopter in Najaf. In a pitched two-day battle that included airstrikes and mortar exchanges, the American forces claimed to have killed 250 enemy fighters while losing none of their own.

“The cool part about this was, World War II-style, you dug in,” Sergeant Bales, then a team leader, was quoted as saying in a recounting of the battle by the Fort Lewis newspaper. “You’re taking a shovel and digging as fast as you can.”

“I’ve never been more proud to be a part of this unit than that day,” he added.

Somewhere during that deployment, Sergeant Bales injured his foot, though his lawyer said he did not know how. The Army has declined to provide details about the sergeant’s record.

But the injury did not seem significant enough to remove him from Iraq, and he seems to have finished the tour, which was extended to 15 months from 12 in what became known as the surge.

Mr. Hardt said most soldiers he knew were angry about the extension because they were exhausted by the continuous fighting and the threats of roadside bombs. But if Sergeant Bales was upset, he did not seem to complain. When he returned to the Tacoma area, he was limping, neighbors said, but also working hard to rehabilitate his foot because he wanted to return to full duty.

“He was a gung-ho Army guy,” said Tim Burgess, 59, a retired trucker and warehouse worker who lived next door to Sergeant Bales at the time. “He still wanted to see action even though he had been wounded.”

Neighbors remembered his wife as an avid bicyclist but not particularly sociable. Records show that she worked as a project manager at now-defunct Washington Mutual, then became an associate technical project manager at Amaxra, a business communications company in Redmond.

Sergeant Bales was home for nearly two years after his second deployment. Mrs. Bales, also an avid blogger, cheerfully recounted baking cookies, reading books and visiting her parents in Bellingham with their daughter.

By August 2009, he was gone again. It was a quieter tour, with more nation building than combat. In a Facebook exchange with a childhood friend, Steven Berling, Sergeant Bales called the deployment “boring” and “pretty dumb,” then lamented the lack of fighting.

“Giving money to Hagji instead of bullets just don’t seem right,” he wrote, apparently misspelling Hajji, a term used by soldiers, often pejoratively, in referring to Arab people.

Financial and Career Setbacks

About the time Sergeant Bales was preparing to deploy in 2009, the Baleses were having financial problems, records show.

Early in their relationship, they had lived in a house in Auburn, between Seattle and Tacoma, that Mrs. Bales had owned before they were together. According to records, they received a notice of a trustee sale in mid-2009. The couple, who had moved out by then, had missed $17,000 in payments and owed a total of $195,000 to the bank.

A trustee auction was scheduled for October 2009, while Sergeant Bales was in Iraq, but the auction was postponed three times and then called off in early 2010 for reasons that are unclear.

Robert Baggett, president of the neighborhood’s Riverpark Estates Homeowners Association, said the Baleses had stopped paying their annual association dues of about $120 at least two years ago.

The house, which for a while was occupied by renters whose noise drew complaints from neighbors, has been vacant for about 18 months and is now filthy and in disrepair. “We are parking cars there to keep it looking like it is occupied so no homeless move in,” Mr. Baggett said.

The Baleses bought their two-story house in Lake Tapps, east of Tacoma, in 2005, records show. But just three days before the shootings in Afghanistan, Mrs. Bales told a real estate agent, Phillip Rodocker, that she wanted to sell the house because they were financially stretched. The house is listed for sale at $229,000, about $50,000 less than what the family paid for it.

Asked about the mortgage problems, Sergeant Bales’s lawyer, John Henry Browne, said, “There are no financial pressures on the family right now other than the normal ones that are experienced by the 99 percenters.”

Last March, Mrs. Bales wrote on her blog that her husband had not gotten the hoped-for promotion to sergeant first class, which would have raised his pay by about $370 a month and made him eligible to be the senior noncommissioned officer for a platoon.

(He was also paid an extra $400 a month during his deployments.) The promotion probably would have also given him some peace of mind about his Army career, which was nearly halfway to the 20 years needed for retirement with pay.

Though “sad and disappointed” by the news, Mrs. Bales said she was also relieved. “We can finally move on to the next phase of our lives,” she wrote.

The Final Deployment

That next phase, the Baleses hoped, would take them to Germany, Italy or Hawaii. But the Army did not move Sergeant Bales from Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Nor did it allow him to become a recruiter, though he was in training for the job. Instead, he was told he would go with the Third Brigade to Afghanistan in December.

“He was not happy about it,” Mr. Browne said, but took his orders like a professional soldier.

Before deploying, Sergeant Bales would have undergone physical exams, including on his foot, and a computer-based survey for traumatic brain injury intended to measure attention, memory and thinking ability. The survey is not well regarded among many specialists, but it remains the Army’s chief screening tool for traumatic brain injury. Sergeant Bales was declared fit to deploy.

Little is known about his time in Afghanistan, other than that he and others in his battalion were assigned to work alongside Army Special Forces soldiers in the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province, a longtime hotbed of Taliban activity that has grown more secure in recent years. Sergeant Bales would probably have provided security for the Green Berets while they carried out night raids, built relations with village leaders and organized local militias.

A Green Beret who has spent time in Panjwai in the past year said the combat outpost would have been relatively small, protected by dirt-filled containers known as Hesco barriers, with guard towers and perhaps a blimp with a high-powered camera capable of capturing images more than a mile away. It would have been difficult, but not impossible, for Sergeant Bales to slip away at night unnoticed, as the Army says he did.

Supervision in the outpost might also have been more lax than at larger bases, which could explain the presence of alcohol. Sergeant Bales might have even been among the more senior noncommissioned officers on his team. Special Forces teams typically have 12 members, sometimes fewer, and Sergeant Bales’s unit might have been as small as a platoon of two dozen soldiers.

Many younger soldiers consider such assignments exciting and more fulfilling, though they are also potentially more dangerous. But Mr. Browne said Sergeant Bales had considered the posting “grueling,” noting that the soldiers lived in metal cargo containers.

“It was very tough and rustic,” the lawyer said.

About a week ago, Mr. Browne said, Sergeant Bales saw a friend lose a leg to a buried mine. Soon after, according to Mr. Browne, he sent his wife a short message: “Hard day for the good guys.”

About a day later, Army officials said, Sergeant Bales walked out of the outpost and headed toward the nearby village.


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Sources: ABC News, Daily Mail, NY Times, Google Maps

Robert Bales Lauded By Many As "Mild-Mannered, Great Guy Who Loves America"

Why would the U.S. choose to release Army Staff Sgt Robert Bales' Identity?

This just creates more problems for U.S. Troops in Afghanistan.

I repeat: Why is Pres. Obama giving in to Karzai's demands by Identifying an American Soldier? Karzai does NOT give a Darn about the United States or Our Troops!

Staff Sgt Robert Bales Enlisted in the U.S. Army out of Patriotism soon after the 9-11 Attack on the World Trade Center. After 4 Deployments & a Brain Injury he's now being treated like Trash.

Afghan Civilian Shooting Suspect Staff Sgt Robert Bales's Defense?

The U.S. Army is Liable because Bales has a Serious Case of PTSD & a Brain Injury yet he was serving in a Combat Zone on his 4th Deployment.

Please understand that I am NOT advocating Violence, nor am I Condoning what Staff Sgt. Bales did when he Shot those Afghan Civilians.

However under UCMJ Law Sgt. Bales still deserves a Fair Trial.

He also still deserves to be treated with the Dignity All U.S. Military Personnel are Worthy of.

Especially Military Personnel who served in War Zones, such My husband who retired after 23 Years of Service & Robert Bales.

I could be wrong but U.S. Officials choosing to release Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales' Identity (Afghan Killings Suspect) was NOT a Wise move Politically, nor Strategically.

I don't care about this Man's Ethnicity!
WHITE, BLACK, Latino, Asian, etc.,

In the Army EVERYONE's Ethnicity is supposed to be GREEN!

I repeat: In the Army EVERYONE's Ethnicity is supposed to be GREEN!

U.S. Army Staff Sgt Robert Bales Should NOT be tried in the Media! He is Still Under UCMJ Law! He is Still a Soldier Deployed 4 Times!

So why are U.S. Officials doing things to Satisfy Afghanistan President Karzai’s demands when its obvious this Corrupt Middle East Leader does NOT give a Darn about the United States or our Troops?

Afghanistan is a Tribal Region ruled for Decades by the Taliban.
This will NEVER Change! NEVER!

Karzai doesn’t want the U.S. to help him get rid of the Taliban.

Instead he just wants the U.S. to continue giving Afghanistan Billions of Dollars each year while still propping up the Opium Drug Trade & still allowing the Taliban to Control his Country.

And…..

Karzai also wants to continue Abusing Women & Children.

President Karzai can NOT be Trusted & he is Corrupt, so how is it possible for the U.S. to remain in Alliance with him?

Our Alliance with him has cost America at least a Trillion Dollars, Thousands of Lives of U.S. Troops & NATO Troops.

In fact we should just pull our troops out TODAY!

Osama Bin Laden is Dead so why are we staying there until 2014?

In 2011 Pres. Obama said All U.S. Troops would be pulled out by 2013.
However now it appears he's pandering to GOP Lawmakers in Congress by choosing to NOT pull our troops out until 2014.
Why?

Is this decision due to Political Reasons?

Our Troops remaining there until 2014 will NOT make any difference because Afghanistan will Always be a Corrupt Country governed by the Taliban, thus we will NEVER Win this Conflict just as we NEVER Won Conflicts in Cuba (Bay of Pigs) & Vietnam.

Let's Please Go Now!
Dear God Help Us!




U.S. Identifies Army Sergeant in Killing of 16 in Afghanistan


The military on Friday identified the soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan villagers earlier this week as Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, a 38-year-old father of two who had been injured twice in combat over the course of four deployments and had, his lawyer said, an exemplary military record.

The release of Sergeant Bales’s name, first reported by Fox News, ended an extraordinary six-day blackout of public information about him from the Pentagon, which said it withheld his identity for so long because of concerns about his and his family’s security.

An official said on Friday that Sergeant Bales had been transferred from Kuwait to Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where he had a cell to himself in the medium-security prison there. His wife and children were moved from their home in Lake Tapps, Wash., east of Tacoma, onto Joint Base Lewis-McChord, his home base, earlier this week.

Military officials say Sergeant Bales, who has yet to be formally charged, left his small combat outpost in the volatile Panjwai district of Kandahar Province early in the morning last Sunday, walked into two nearby villages and there shot or stabbed 16 people, 9 of them children.

Little more than the outlines of Sergeant Bales’s life are publicly known. His family lived in Lake Tapps, a community about 20 miles northeast of his Army post. NBC News reported that he was from Ohio, and he may have lived there until he joined the Army at 27. Sergeant Bales’s Seattle-based lawyer, John Henry Browne, said several members of the sergeant’s family moved to Washington after he was assigned to Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

Mr. Browne said the sergeant joined the Army right after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and then spent almost all of his career at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, where he was part of the Third Stryker Brigade in the Second Infantry Division, named after the armored Stryker vehicles.

The killings have severely undermined longstanding NATO efforts to win support from villages in Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban, and have shaken relations with the government of President Hamid Karzai, who this week told Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, who was on a visit to Afghanistan, that he wanted American forces out of villages by next year.

Pentagon officials, who have been scouring the sergeant’s military and health records for clues, have said little about what they think motivated the killings. But one senior government official said Thursday that Sergeant Bales had been drinking alcohol before the killings and that he might have had marital problems.

“When it all comes out, it will be a combination of stress, alcohol and domestic issues — he just snapped,” said the official, who had been briefed on the investigation and spoke on the condition of anonymity because the sergeant had not yet been charged.

Mr. Browne has disputed those assertions, telling reporters on Thursday that the sergeant’s marriage was sound and questioning reports about drinking. On the day before the shootings, he said, the sergeant had seen a fellow soldier lose his leg from a buried mine.

Mr. Browne, who said he had had a short conversation with Sergeant Bales because he was worried that their phone call was being monitored, added that the sergeant had thought he could avoid this deployment and was upset when he could not.

“The family was counting on him not being redeployed,” Mr. Browne said. “He and the family were told that his tours in the Middle East were over.”

He added, “I think that it would be fair to say that he and the family were not happy that he was going back.”

The Bales family lived in a two-story, wood-frame house beneath tall fir and cedar evergreens in Lake Tapps, an unincorporated section of Pierce County, Wash. Kassie Holland, a neighbor, said that as far as she could tell, they were a happy family and the sergeant was a devoted father to his young children, a daughter, Quincy, and a son, Bobby. “There were no signs,” Ms. Holland said when asked whether Mr. Bales seemed troubled.

The Baleses’ house had a lock box on the front door on Friday. Phillip Rodocker, a real estate agent, said that he was contacted by Ms. Bales on March 8, three days before the shooting in Afghanistan, and that she told him she wanted to sell the house in Lake Tapps.

“She told me she was behind in our payments,” Mr. Rodocker said. “She said he was on his fourth tour and it was getting kind of old and they needed to stabilize their finances.”

Mr. Rodocker said he and a colleague met with Ms. Bales at the house the next day. “It looked like it had been really, really neglected,” he said. “Four tours of duty and nobody around to take care of the exterior of the property.”

Because it took time for the paperwork to go through, the house was not officially put on the market until Monday, the day after the shooting. On Tuesday, Mr. Rodocker said, “She called and said needed to take the house off the market due to a family emergency.”

He said that the house remained on the market because he had not received a written request for it to be removed.

Zillow, the real estate Web site, shows the house listed for $229,000, about $50,000 less than the family paid for it in 2005. Mr. Rodocker said the house was going to be a short sale, meaning the Baleses owed more to the bank than what it would sell for.

Mr. Rodocker said Ms. Bales also asked his colleague to sell a second property, a house in Auburn, Wash., that he said she had bought before the Baleses were married.

Boxes were piled on the front porch at the house in Lake Tapps along with a snow sled, while toys, a barbecue grill and a weathered hot tub sat in the fenced backyard. Mr. Rodocker said Ms. Bales told him she was collecting boxes to prepare for a move.

Over the course of the decade, Sergeant Bales was deployed three times to Iraq, Army records show: between 2003 and 2004; for 15 months between June 2006 and September 2007, during the height of the civil war and at the beginning of what became known as the surge; and then between August 2009 and August 2010.

During his second tour, his unit, the Second Battalion, Third Infantry Regiment, was involved in a major battle in the city of Najaf while trying to recover a downed Apache helicopter.

On his third deployment, in 2010, a Humvee carrying Sergeant Bales flipped over, possibly because of a roadside bomb, Mr. Browne said. Sergeant Bales injured his head and probably sustained a minor traumatic brain injury, which in chronic cases can lead to cognitive problems, personality changes and a loss of impulse control. Mr. Browne said it was possible that Sergeant Bales also had post-traumatic stress disorder.

Mr. Browne also said the sergeant lost part of a foot in another episode, also apparently from an explosive device. It was not clear whether he might have sustained a second traumatic brain injury then.

Court records show that Sergeant Bales was charged with assault in 2002, but that the charge was dismissed. In 2008, he was charged with a hit-and-run involving a parked car, but that too was dropped, the records indicate.

Though the Army has said nothing about the case, investigators have been poring over Sergeant Bales’s evaluations, health records and computers in search of telltale information. But Mr. Browne said his client’s record was good and that he had been awarded a number of medals.

“He’s never said anything antagonistic about Muslims,” Mr. Browne said. “He’s in general been very mild-mannered.”

Joint Base Lewis-McChord has come under scrutiny because of a string of problems in recent years. In 2010, rogue soldiers from another Stryker brigade murdered three Afghan civilians during combat episodes staged by the soldiers. This year, the Army opened investigations into the base’s Madigan Army Medical Center after soldiers complained that diagnoses of post-traumatic stress disorder were being changed or dismissed.

Some advocates for active-duty troops and veterans say the problems demonstrate that the sprawling base, the Army’s largest on the West Coast, with nearly 40,000 soldiers, was not prepared to handle the strain of repeated deployments. Between 2009 and 2010, when Sergeant Bales was on his third deployment to Iraq, about 18,000 soldiers from the post were sent to war zones, and almost all returned at roughly the same time, overwhelming base services, the critics contend.

But on Friday, the general in charge of managing military bases said that the installation was not under an exceptional amount of strain from multiple deployments and was not seeing an unusual number of crimes or mental health issues, at least when compared with other bases.

“There’s nothing different here than most places,” said Gen. David M. Rodriguez, the commanding general of the United States Army Forces Command. “Again, those things happen. Everybody knows that doesn’t reflect our standards and our values.”


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Pres. Obama Reads Psalm 46 During 9-11 10th Anniversary Ceremony

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9-11 Attacks Tribute (Musical Video)

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Obama Administration Calls For Unity & Prayer On 10th Anniversary Of 9-11 Attacks

Obama proclaims National Days of Prayer and Remembrance

Commemorating the 10th anniversary of 9/11, President Barack Obama proclaimed this weekend, Friday though Sunday, as National Days of Prayer and Remembrance.

“Today, our nation still faces great challenges, but this last decade has proven once more that, as a people, we emerge from our trials stronger than before,” Obama said in a statement Friday.

The president called on Americans to honor the victims of the terrorist attacks through activities such as prayer, memorial services, the ringing of bells, and evening candlelight remembrance vigils.

Obama also urged citizens to remember those among “the 9/11 generation” of service members who have “come of age bearing the burden of war,” with some paying the ultimate sacrifice.

“During these days of prayer and remembrance, a grateful nation gives thanks to all those who have given of themselves to make us safer,” Obama said.

Obama will attend memorial services at all three attack sites – New York, Washington and Pennsylvania – this weekend.

The proclamation comes in the wake of faith-based groups expressing opposition toward New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who stirred controversy when deciding to exclude religious leaders from the World Trade Center memorial service on Sunday.

Prominent politicians have also come out against the decision. On Tuesday, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said religion played a key role in the days following the attacks by offering people some “strength to move on.”

“Just get them up. Say a little prayer,” Giuliani said at the National Press Club in Washington Tuesday. “The microphone will not melt if you say a prayer.”

In his statement Friday, Obama did not address the clergy issue, but focused on the memory of those who lost their lives 10 years ago.

“We continue to stand with their families and loved ones, while striving to ensure the legacy of those we lost is a safer, stronger, and more resilient nation,” Obama said.


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Joe Biden & Former Presidents Clinton, Bush Pay Tribute To Passengers Of Flight 93

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VP, former presidents laud courage of Flight 93

Vice President Joe Biden said the 40 passengers and crew of Flight 93 gave their lives for their country when they overcame four hijackers to crash the plane into a Pennsylvania field.

He says that while nothing can fill the void left in the hearts of their family members and friends, their actions will always be recalled gratefully, for defining their country and sacrificing their lives so that others could live.

Speaking Saturday at the dedication of the first phase of the Flight 93 National Memorial near Shanksville, Biden said those aboard the plane knew that it was more than a hijacking, but an opening shot in a new war.

He says they acted as citizen patriots have done since Capt. John Parker said in April 1775 that if war is what they want, "then let it begin here."

Former President George W. Bush called the actions aboard Flight 93 on Sept. 11 one of the most courageous acts in U.S. history and a shining example of democracy in action. More than 4,000 people, including relatives of those killed when the plane crashed into a rural Pennsylvania field, attended the service.

He said that even as the U.S. was under attack in New York and Washington, those aboard the hijacked plane defied their four captors by holding a vote to try and overpower them. He said the choice cost them their lives but was successful.

'Determination and valor'
Former President Bill Clinton said he and U.S. House Speaker John Boehner will mount a bipartisan effort to raise the remaining $10 million needed to completely fund the Flight 93 National Memorial, and he praised those aboard the plane as heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice.

Clinton likened their efforts to the Battle of the Alamo in Texas and the battle of Thermoplyae in ancient Greece, where defenders of both died to the last man.

He noted that the passengers who overcame the four hijackers were not soldiers, but citizens, who with almost no time acted and gave the U.S. a gift: They saved the capital from attack.

He said they saved lives and denied al-Qaida the symbolic victory of smashing the center of American government.

He said that he hoped that 2,500 years from now, their exploits would not be forgotten.

The terrorists "never made it because of the determination and valor of the passengers and crew of Flight 93; that plane crashed in this field, less than 20 minutes by air" from Washington, where it appeared to be headed, said Jon Jarvis, director of the National Park Service.

The Rev. Daniel Coughlin, who was the U.S. House Chaplain at the time of the attacks, called the sacrifices made by the passengers and crew "willing seed for freedom's harvest."

"They refused to be paralyzed. ... They break the silence and decidedly act together. They do only what is possible in an impossible situation," he said in the invocation. "Because they are your children, they find within themselves, true freedoms."

Coughlin's invocation was followed by a long moment of silence as the U.S. flag was brought in, then a singing of "The Star-Spangled Banner." The names of the victims were also read as bells tolled.

Poet Robert Pinsky took to the lectern and read a pair of poems, one about "needing to remember, even if you don't want to," and a second about heroism. The poems came from Brazilian Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Poland's Czeslaw Milosz.

Grammy Award-winning singer and songwriter Sarah McLachlan performed her song of loss and remembrance, "I Will Remember You."

In remembrance in NYC

In New York City, hundreds of families, friends and strangers ringing lower Manhattan clasped hands as a bell clanged at 8:46 a.m. to signify the time the first hijacked plane crashed into the World Trade Center's North Tower. It was one of several public and private events scheduled around the city, including a free performance by the New York Philharmonic and a memorial by Fire Department of New York for its 343 members who died on 9/11 and those who have died from illness after working at ground zero.

In Pennsylvania on Friday, family members of those who died on Flight 93 visited the crash site, read the guestbook and viewed the many mementos left by people from all over the world who have come to pay their respects.

Relatives shed some tears, but they also celebrated the spirit of the guestbook — a rare feeling that people from vastly different walks of life had come together.

"I don't focus on what happened. You can't change that," said Lorne Lyles, whose wife, CeeCee Ross Lyles, had been working as a United Airlines flight attendant for only nine months on that September morning in 2001.

"Coming here is more of a celebratory thing. She's been memorialized," Lyles said. "Just to see the outpouring from all over the world is touching. You really do have some caring people in the world."

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar spoke at the site Friday. He noted that for all the progress on the memorial, there's still work to be done. When it's finished, it will include a "Tower of Voices" with 40 wind chimes.

Public and private donors have contributed $52 million, but $10 million more is needed to build a true visitors center and to finish landscaping, Salazar said.


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Dick Cheney Slams Condi Rice & Colin Powell In New Memoir! Still Supports Waterboarding

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Cheney says he urged Bush to bomb suspected Syria nuke site

Former Vice President Dick Cheney says in a new memoir that he urged President George W. Bush to bomb a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor site in June 2007. But, he wrote, Mr. Bush opted for a diplomatic approach after other advisers — still stinging over “the bad intelligence we had received about Iraq’s stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction” — expressed misgivings.

“I again made the case for U.S. military action against the reactor,” Mr. Cheney wrote about a meeting on the issue. “But I was a lone voice. After I finished, the president asked, ‘Does anyone here agree with the vice president?’ Not a single hand went up around the room.”

Mr. Bush chose to try diplomatic pressure to force the Syrians to abandon the secret program, but the Israelis bombed the site in September 2007. Mr. Cheney’s account of the discussion appears in his autobiography, “In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir,” which is to be published by Simon & Schuster next week. A copy was obtained by The New York Times.

Pugnacious

Mr. Cheney’s book — which is often pugnacious in tone and in which he expresses little regret about many of the most controversial decisions of the Bush administration — casts him as something of an outlier among top advisers who increasingly took what he saw as a misguided course on national security issues. While he praises Mr. Bush as “an outstanding leader,” Mr. Cheney, who made guarding the secrecy of internal deliberations a hallmark of his time in office, divulges a number of conflicts with others in the inner circle.

He wrote that George J. Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, resigned in 2004 just “when the going got tough,” a decision he calls “unfair to the president.” He wrote that he believes that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell tried to undermine President Bush by privately expressing doubts about the Iraq war, and he confirms that he pushed to have Mr. Powell removed from the cabinet after the 2004 election. “It was as though he thought the proper way to express his views was by criticizing administration policy to people outside the government,” Mr. Cheney writes. His resignation “was for the best.”

He faults former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for naïveté in the efforts to forge a nuclear weapons agreement with North Korea, and Mr. Cheney reports that he fought with White House advisers over softening the president’s speeches on Iraq.

Mr. Cheney acknowledged that the administration underestimated the challenges in Iraq, but he said the real blame for the violence was with the terrorists.

He also defends the Bush administration’s decision to inflict what he called “tough interrogations” — like the suffocation technique known as waterboarding — on captured terrorism suspects, saying it extracted information that savedlives. He rejects portrayals of such techniques as “torture.”

In discussing the much-disputed “16 words” about Iraq’s supposed hunt for uranium in Niger that were included in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address to help justify the eventual invasion, Mr. Cheney said that unlike other aides, he saw no need to apologize for making that claim. He writes that Ms. Rice eventually came around to his view.

“She came into my office, sat down in the chair next to my desk and tearfully admitted I had been right,” he wrote.

Detailed account of Sept. 11 response

The book opens with an account of Mr. Cheney’s experiences during the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when he essentially commanded the government’s response from a bunker beneath the White House while Mr. Bush — who was away from Washington and hampered by communications breakdowns — played a peripheral role. But Mr. Cheney wrote that he did not want to make any formal statement to the nation that day.

“My past government experience,” he wrote, “had prepared me to manage the crisis during those first few hours on 9/11, but I knew that if I went out and spoke to the press, it would undermine the president, and that would be bad for him and for the country.

“We were at war. Our commander in chief needed to be seen as in charge, strong, and resolute — as George W. Bush was.”

Mr. Cheney appears to relish much of the criticism heaped on him by liberals, but reveals that he had offered to resign several times as President Bush prepared for his re-election in 2004 because he was afraid of becoming a burden on the Republican ticket. After a few days, however, Mr. Cheney said that Mr. Bush said he wanted him to stay.

Waning influence

But in the Bush administration’s second term, Mr. Cheney’s influence waned. When Mr. Bush decided to replace Donald H. Rumsfeld as secretary of defense after the 2006 midterm elections, Mr. Cheney said he was not given a chance to object.

Mr. Cheney praised Barack Obama’s support, as a senator from Illinois, for passing a bank bailout bill at the height of the financial crisis, shortly before the 2008 election. But he criticizes Mr. Obama’s decision to withdraw the 33,000 additional troops he sent to Afghanistan in 2009 by September 2012, and writes that he has been “happy to note” that Mr. Obama has failed to close the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as he had pledged.

Mr. Cheney’s long struggle with heart disease is a recurring theme in the book. He discloses that he wrote a letter of resignation, dated March 28, 2001, and told an aide to give it to Mr. Bush if he ever had a heart attack or stroke that left him incapacitated.

And in the epilogue, Mr. Cheney writes that after undergoing heart surgery in 2010, he was unconscious for weeks. During that period, he wrote, he had a prolonged, vivid dream that he was living in an Italian villa, pacing the stone paths to get coffee and newspapers.


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