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: How The U.S. Military Lost Him (PTSD, Brain Injury, 4 Deployments)

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.


LOSING SERGEANT BALES


Staff Sergeant Robert Bales began a series of journeys a decade ago, by plane and car and Humvee and on foot. He started out and has ended up, at least for now, in the Midwest: he is from Ohio, and, on Friday, was flown to Kansas, to the prison at Fort Leavenworth.

Bales had gone to Iraq three times; in 2007, in Najaf, in the middle of a battle, his unit was sent to protect a helicopter that had crashed down: “It was like a match lit up. It looked like a toy with a candle lit underneath it,” he said at the time, according to an Army news release.

In 2010, he was driving in a Humvee when it rolled over, and his head was banged up. He flew to Afghanistan in December—his lawyer, John Henry Browne, told the Times that he didn’t want to go:

The family was counting on him not being redeployed…He and the family were told that his tours in the Middle East were over.

Military officials had kept Bales’s name secret since last Sunday, when he left his base and walked by himself for about a mile until he came to a village house, and went inside. When he walked out of that house he went to another, and then another.

Bales has two children of his own, a girl and boy ages three and four. In the three houses he allegedly shot and killed nine children, four of them under the age of six, and seven grown-ups, too.
Bales is thirty-eight. His namelessness was never going to last long, or be useful.

(It still hasn’t been released officially: Bales’s name was leaked, and first reported by Fox News.) The explanation was that his wife and children needed to be kept safe, but they were moved from their home in Lake Tapps, Washington, and sent to Joint Base Lewis-McChord days ago.

(Reporters who walked up to their house found a front porch “cluttered with empty boxes and a snow sled, while toys, a barbecue grill and a weathered hot tub sat in the fenced backyard,” according to the Times.) Transporting Bales hastily from Afghanistan to Kuwait only made both of those countries angry, in Kuwait’s case because the press figured it out before the government there did.

Without a name, Bales had been a phantom of suppositions. Browne had begun to make some of them solid, as had military officials who spoke to the press.

Browne told reporters that Bales had lost part of a foot in Iraq; that was in addition to the head injury. He also said that Bales saw a friend’s leg blown off last week.

Military officials told the Times that Bales had been drinking the night of the murders, and that he was having trouble with his wife.

Browne said that the drinking story was “very offensive,” according to the Post, and that Bales had a “very strong marriage.” Browne has hardly said a sentence that wouldn’t fit in a a closing statement in a defense built around post-traumatic stress disorder or diminished capacity—the loving husband and father broken by the war. But not all explanations can double as absolutions.

One shouldn’t stigmatize veterans by implying that this is normal behavior; but one doesn’t want to isolate them, or leave them stranded on a difficult path, by cheerfully failing to recognize real pain.

The decision to pack Bales on a plane and out of Afghanistan may lead to other journeys.

Will the villagers who saw him that night, like the woman who saw another woman taken by her hair and slammed against a wall, be brought to the trial to testify? (The answer may turn on Bales’s right to confront his accusers.)

The dead left behind in the villages had names and stories and maybe strong marriages, too.

We saw some of their faces in images in which mourners lifted up quilts to show their bodies. Now we are getting snapshots of Bales; neither set should banish the other.






Staff Sgt. Robert Bales' Neighbors Described Afghan Massacre Suspect As 'Good Guy'

Shock echoed down the street in Lake Tapp, Wash., where Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, named as the suspect who allegedly went on a rampage, murdering 16 Afghan civilians, was remembered as a family man and "good guy."

"I just can't believe Bob's the guy who did this," neighbor Paul Wohlberg told the Associated Press. "A good guy got put in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Neighbors painted a picture of the career soldier as a family man who spoke little about his deployments.

Kassie Holland, a neighbor, told the Associated Press that she would see Bales playing with his daughter Quincy, 4, and son Bobby, 3.

"My reaction is that I'm shocked," she said. "I can't believe it was him. There were no signs... He always had a good attitude about being in the service. He was never really angry about it. When I heard him talk, he said, it seemed like, yeah, that's my job. That's what I do. He never expressed a lot of emotion toward it."

Bales' platoon leader in Iraq described him to the Washington Post as an exemplary soldier who "saved many a life."

"Bales is still, hands down, one of the best soldiers I ever worked with," Army Capt. Chris Alexander , 28, told the newspaper.

Bales, 38, remains locked up today in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he is being housed in a private cell away from other inmates.

Charges are expected soon against the career soldier, who was flown out of Afghanistan and arrived at the Army prison Friday night.

Bales is accused of breaking into several Afghan homes in the middle of the night last Sunday and killing 16 civilians, mostly women and children. He could face the death penalty if found guilty.

Pentagon officials said that Bales' being brought back to the U.S. does not necessarily mean that his military court proceedings will be held in the U.S., holding out the possibility that they could be held in Afghanistan. The Afghan government is demanding that Bales be tried in Afghanistan.

Details of Bales' military record have also emerged and they depict a soldier who has seen intense combat and lost part of a foot.

Bales, who enlisted shortly after the 9/11 terror attacks, was first deployed in November 2003 when his unit spent a year in Mosul, Iraq.

In June 2006 he and his unit were sent back to Iraq and their year-long deployment was given a three month extension until September 2007. During that time, he saw duty in Mosul in the north, Bagdad when the city was pressed by militants, and then to Baquba where his unit took major casualties.

His final Iraq deployment was from September 2009 to September 2010 in Diyala province, which was also a hotbed of insurgent activity.

In December 2011, he was ordered to Afghanistan.

Bales' alleged murderous rage is in stark contrast to what he said after a fierce battle in Zarqa, Iraq, in 2007.

"I've never been more proud to be a part of this unit than that day for the simple fact that we discriminated between the bad guys and the noncombatants and then afterward we ended up helping the people that three or four hours before were trying to kill us," he told Fort Lewis' Northwest Guardian.

"I think that's the real difference between being an American as opposed to being a bad guy, someone who puts his family in harm's way like that," Bales said at the time.

John Henry Browne, Bales' lawyer in Seattle, told The Associated Press Thursday that the soldier had witnessed his friend's leg blown off the day before the massacre.

Bales reportedly spent his entire 11-year career at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state and lived not too far from the base. Originally from the Midwest, he was deployed with the Second Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division in December.

Browne said that he was highly decorated and had once been nominated for a Bronze Star though he did not receive it. He also lost part of a foot because of a combat injury.

"He's never said anything antagonistic about Muslims. He's in general very mild-mannered," Browne told the AP.

Bales reportedly left Camp Belambay, where he was stationed to protect Special Operation Forces creating local militias, in the middle of the night wearing night-vision goggles, according to a source. The shooting occurred at 3 a.m. in three houses in two villages in the Panjway district of southern Kandahar province.

In the first village, more than a mile south of the base, he allegedly killed four people in the first house. In the second house, he allegedly killed 11 family members -- four girls, four boys and three adults.

According to a member of the Afghan investigation team and ABC News' interviews, he then walked back to another village past his base and killed one more person. He reportedly returned to the base on his own and turned himself in calmly.

An official told ABC News that the soldier had suffered a mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) in the past, either from hitting his head on the hatch of a vehicle or in a car accident. He reportedly went through the advanced TBI treatment at Fort Lewis and was deemed to be fine.

He also underwent mental health screening necessary to become a sniper and passed in 2008. He had routine behavioral health screening after that and was cleared, the official said.

When the soldier returned from his last deployment in Iraq he had difficulty reintegrating, including marital problems, the source told ABC News. But officials concluded that he had worked through those issues before deploying to Afghanistan.

On Thursday, Browne said that Bales' marriage was "fabulous."

Afghan political leaders have called for the shooter to be tried publicly in Afghan courts, but U.S. military officials say the case will be handled in U.S. military courts. A U.S. military official says Afghan officials were made aware of the transfer before it occurred.


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Sources: ABC News, AP, Daily Mail, New Yorker Magazine, USA Today, Youtube, Google Maps

Robert Bales' Wife Published Blog About War & A Soldier's Life

* Robert Bales transferred to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas on Friday night

* Wife and two children moved to Ft Lewis-McChord base for protection

* She wrote in her Blog she was 'Sad and Disappointed' her Husband was overlooked for promotion

* Soldier, 38, 'did not want to go to Afghanistan' after three tours of Iraq
Bales could face death penalty if convicted, says Defense Secretary Leon Panetta


Inside the troubled family of Afghan 'massacre' soldier: Wife's blog reveals her 'disappointment' that he missed promotion as friends describe dedicated father


Details are emerging that depict the home life of the U.S. soldier held in connection to the shooting rampage that claimed the lives of 16 Afghan civilians six days ago.

Karilyn Bales, who works as a project manager for a marking firm, wrote on her blog that she was ‘sad and disappointed’ her husband didn’t get a promotion that would have allowed them an assignment in an adventurous location like Italy, Germany, or Hawaii.

'It is very disappointed (sic) after all of the work Bob has done and all the sacrifices he has made for his love of his country, family and friends,' she wrote early last year on the blog.

'I am sad and disappointed too.'

She added: 'But I am also relieved, we can finally move on to the next phase of our lives,’ she wrote.

Real estate agent Phillip Rodocker said that Mrs Bales was earnestly looking to ‘stabilize her home life.’

According to the Seattle Times, Bales was on-duty when his first child was born in December 2006. ‘He simply cannot wait for the surprise to come,’ Mrs Bales wrote on her blog in May of that year.

But with a growing family, the tours of duty appeared to put a strain on the family.

‘The family was counting on him not being redeployed,’ Mr Browne told reporters Friday. ‘He and the family were told that his tours in the Middle East were over.’

He continued: ‘I think that it would be fair to say that he and the family were not happy that he was going back.’

Neighbours said he was a loving father two his two children – his daughter, Quincy, and son, Bobby, adding that there were no signs that the Army sergeant was troubled.

The best case scenario for the next phase in their family's life, Mrs Bales wrote, would be an Army assignment in an adventurous location like Germany, Italy or Hawaii, and barring that, possibly an assignment in Georgia, where her husband could become a sniper instructor.

‘We are hoping that if we are proactive and ask to go to a location that the Army will allow us to have some control over where we go next,' Mrs Bales wrote.

It would seem she was greatly looking forward to the promotion, which would allow him to be home with her and their children.

But when Bales was passed over for the position, Mrs Bales was understandably upset.
Sgt Robert Bales, who served as an Army sniper, joined the military after the September 11th terrorist attacks.

His attorney, John Henry Browne, described the couple’s marriage as ‘fabulous.’

He said on CNN that marital problems were 'totally bogus,' adding that his client had a 'very strong marriage and, frankly, we're all taking offense at that.'


A neighbour, Paul Wohlberg, recalled that when he last saw Bales in November the two men talked briefly about the soldier's imminent departure for Afghanistan.

'I just told him to be safe. He said, 'I will. See you when I get back,' said Mr Wohlberg, who recalled attending barbeques at the Bales' homes.

Mr Wohlberg described Bales as a man who clearly loved his country. 'I'm sure he still does,' he said.

The 38-year-old soldier, who arrived at a detention centre in Kansas yesterday night, had been in Afghanistan since December, despite telling his family he did not want to return on what would be his fourth tour of duty.

Bales, an 11-year veteran, is said to have been plagued by various stresses stemming from his deployment, his marriage, and the fact that he had seen a friend's leg blown off the day before the massacre.

The father of two from Ohio was reported to have been drunk at the time of the alleged rampage, according to some sources.

He was also suffering from a traumatic brain injury, but this was not considered enough to disbar him from active service.

A military newsletter from September 2011 featured Bales participating in a training exercise designed to improve relations between the U.S. military and Afghan civilians.

He is recorded asking a village elder: 'How's the security affecting your family?'

And after a 2007 battle in Iraq, he told a local newspaper: 'I've never been more proud to be a part of this unit than that day for the simple fact that we discriminated between the bad guys and the noncombatants and then afterward we ended up helping the people that three or four hours before were trying to kill us.

'I think that's the real difference between being an American as opposed to being a bad guy, someone who puts his family in harm's way like that.'

Bales was stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, near Tacoma, Washington, where his family - including his children, thought to be aged three and four - remains under protection.

He was flown to an American base in Kuwait earlier this week, but on Friday evening was transferred to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas for detention ahead of a future court martial.

The Army said he was placed in his own cell, not a normal four-person bay. He will get time out of his cell for hygiene and recreational purposes and religious support.

Bales has not yet been charged over his alleged offences, nor has he been officially named by the military.

Mr Browne has said he plans to highlight Bales's suspected post-traumatic stress disorder, exacerbated by his witnessing a friend's grave injuries the day before the alleged attack.

'We have been informed that at this small base that he was at, somebody was gravely injured the day before the alleged incident - gravely injured, and that affected all of the soldiers,' Mr Browne said.

He also said that the soldier had previously been injured twice - once sustaining a concussion and, on another occasion, requiring surgery that removed part of his foot - and he and his family thought he was done fighting and might become a military recruiter instead.

Mr Browne added: 'He wasn't thrilled about going on another deployment. He was told he wasn't going back, and then he was told he was going.'

He told reporters that he has met with the wife and other family members of the 38-year-old staff sergeant.

'They were totally shocked,' he said. 'He's never said anything antagonistic about Muslims. He's in general very mild-mannered.'

He said the family said they were unaware of any drinking problem, and described the couple's marriage as 'fabulous'.

Neighbours of the soldier in Lake Tapps, Washington, were surprised to hear of the allegations against Bales.

Kassie Holland, who lives next door, said she would often see Bales playing with his two kids and the family together at the modern split-level home.

'My reaction is that I'm shocked,' she said. 'I can't believe it was him. There were no signs. It's really sad. I don't want to believe that he did it.

'He always had a good attitude about being in the service. He was never really angry about it. When I heard him talk, he said, it seemed like, yeah, that's my job. That's what I do. He never expressed a lot of emotion toward it.'

Military officials say the soldier received sniper training and is assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, of the 2nd Infantry Division, which is based at Lewis-McChord.

Beau Britt, who lives across the street, said: 'For something like that to be right across the street from us is just amazing.

'I kind of sympathise for him, being gone, being sent over there four times. I can understand he's probably quite wracked mentally, so I just hope that things are justified in court. I hope it goes OK.'

Bales and his wife bought the Lake Tapps home in 2005, according to records.

The home was placed on the market Monday, the day after the attack, and was listed at $229,000. Overflowing boxes were piled on the front porch, and a U.S. flag leaned against the siding.

Bales - who signed up to the military after 9/11 and served three tours of Iraq - had no prior events in his Army dossier indicating misbehaviour, according to the lawyer.
The soldier could face the death penalty if convicted of the crime, according to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.

Bales had completed 20 hours of anger-management counseling following a 2002 arrest at a Tacoma hotel for investigation of assault. Mr Browne said the case involved a woman other than Bales' wife, whom he married in 2005.

Records also associated with Bales show that in 2009 he had a hit-and-run charge dismissed in municipal court in Sumner.

Mr Browne's resumé includes defending notorious serial killer Ted Bundy and Colton Harris-Moore, the 'Barefoot Bandit'. Bales specifically asked that he should represent him.

A high-ranking U.S. official told The New York Times on Thursday: 'When it all comes out, it will be a combination of stress, alcohol and domestic issues - he just snapped'.

Nine of the 16 killed by the lone U.S. Army staff sergeant were children, and three were women.

Villagers have described him stalking from house to house in the middle of the night, opening fire on sleeping families and then burning some of the dead bodies.

Mr Browne said he knew little of the facts of the shooting, but disputed reports that a combination of alcohol, stress and domestic issues caused him to snap.

The soldier is suspected of going on a shooting rampage in villages near his base in southern Afghanistan early Sunday, killing nine children and seven other civilians and then burning some of their bodies.

Some villagers told officials they heard shooting from different directions, but many others said they only saw a single soldier. NATO insists the soldier acted alone.

Fort Lewis-McChord is about 45 miles south of Seattle and home to about 100,000 military and civilian personnel.

A former soldier out of Fort Lewis shot and injured a Salt Lake City police officer in 2010, and on January 1, a 24-year-old Iraq War veteran shot and killed a Mount Rainier National Park ranger.

Four Lewis-McChord soldiers were convicted in the deliberate thrill killings of three Afghan civilians in 2010.

The military newspaper Stars and Stripes called it 'the most troubled base in the military' that year.

The shooting, which followed a controversial Quran-burning incident involving U.S. soldiers, has outraged Afghan officials.


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Sources: AP, CBS News, Daily Mail, NY Times, USA Today, Youtube, 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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Sources: AP, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Daily Mail, NY Times, Russia Today, USA Today, Youtube, Google Maps

Karzai Calls U.S. Troops "Demons" & Wants Them Out NOW! McCain Wants Them To Stay! Why?

Karzai is now calling U.S. Troops "Demons"! So why is Obama choosing to keep Our Troops there after Bin Laden's Death?
Because GOP Senators like John McCain & Mitch McConnell want this War to last FOREVER!

Pres. Obama knows its very likely he Will be Re-elected this Fall.

He also knows that due to being Outspent by Super Wealthy GOP Supporters, its very likely the GOP will soon be in Control of Both Chambers of Congress.

From January 2009 to November 2010, Democrats were in Complete Control of Congress.

But instead of tackling Employment Discrimination against BLACKS & Latinos, they became Complacent and Focused Solely on Gay Rights & Health Care.

Now in 2012, Millions of BLACK & Latino Citizens are Financially Ill-equipped to Donate to Pres. Obama's Campaign as most of them did in 2008.

So how is Pres. Obama positioning himself Politically?

Pres. Barack Obama is positioning himself so he will be able to Govern with a GOP-Controlled Congress.

This might explain why he has changed his mind about pulling out U.S. Troops from Afghanistan in 2014 instead of 2013 as he stated last year.

Just watch.









Gulf Widens Between U.S. and a More Volatile Karzai


The Americans in Afghanistan are “demons.”

They claim they burned Korans by mistake, but really those were “Satanic acts that will never be forgiven by apologies.”

The massacre of 16 Afghan children, women and men by an American soldier “was not the first incident, indeed it was the 100th, the 200th and 500th incident.”

Such harsh talk may sound as if it comes from the Taliban, but those are all remarks either made personally by the United States’ increasingly hostile ally here, President Hamid Karzai, or issued by his office in recent days and weeks.

The strongest such outburst came Friday. “Let’s pray for God to rescue us from these two demons,” Mr. Karzai said, apparently holding back tears at a meeting with relatives of the massacre victims, and clearly referring to the United States and the Taliban in the same breath. “There are two demons in our country now.”

Ever since the Koran-burning episode on Feb. 20 and its violent aftermath, the relationship between the two governments has lurched from one crisis to another. American officials have scrambled to run damage control, with President Obama expressing a personal apology for the Koran burning, as well as regrets about the massacre, while calling Mr. Karzai twice in the past week.

The White House went to lengths last week to depict Mr. Karzai’s call for Americans to hand over control a year earlier, by 2013, as no change in policy — only to have Mr. Karzai pointedly insist the next day that it was. The Americans fret that Mr. Karzai is making a difficult job almost impossible, with demands they often see as unreasonable; Mr. Karzai worries that the Americans seek to undermine him, and may yet abandon his country and him, once again, to their fate.

The Koran burnings brought these differences into sharp relief, and led to a rupture in trust some view as irreparable. After an American unit at Bagram Air Base inadvertently burned Korans, embassy officials were deeply worried about an investigation conducted by the country’s Ulema Council, its highest religious body.

The council’s pronouncements, however, are closely controlled by Mr. Karzai’s office — they are even issued by the presidential palace — and American officials were assured by senior members on the president’s staff that the council’s report would be tough but not incendiary.

“We were ready to get knocked a bit,” said an American official who asked not to be identified to preserve his relationship with Afghan officials. “We messed up pretty badly.”

The original draft, in fact, was relatively moderate, American and Afghan officials said. But at the last minute more hard-line elements of Mr. Karzai’s staff weighed in, and the joint statement finally issued by the Ulema Council and the palace used language like “Satanic act” and “unforgivable, wild and inhuman” about the book burnings, and “justifiable emotion” in regard to the violent reaction, which claimed the lives of at least 29 Afghans and 6 Americans.

Western diplomats have often viewed Mr. Karzai’s outbursts as playing to the galleries, meant for consumption by his own people only, not as serious statements of policy. But the galleries also include the public in the United States and its NATO allies, where majorities in nearly every country oppose remaining in Afghanistan, and every new contretemps risks further eroding an already tenuous support.

“I think this is very serious because Mr. Karzai has always had a very ambivalent attitude toward the West and toward the war — he has never really believed violence is the answer,” said Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British ambassador to Afghanistan from 2007 through 2009. “He is also very conscious and very resentful that his political survival and even perhaps his personal safety depend on the Americans.”

The current American ambassador, the veteran diplomat Ryan C. Crocker, was brought out of semiretirement by President Obama last July at least in part because he had known Mr. Karzai since the beginning: Mr. Crocker was the first envoy to Afghanistan after the invasion that defeated the Taliban, when Mr. Karzai was appointed interim leader here.

Like many of his predecessors, Mr. Crocker began his latest tour on an optimistic note. “President Karzai has the toughest job in the world, and he has been doing it for the last 10 years,” Mr. Crocker said early on, and has repeated often since. “You have to give him credit.”

While the two men still have a working relationship and meet often, according to aides to both, there are many signs that the warmth has gone out of that relationship once again.

Mr. Crocker insisted in an interview with PBS on Friday that this was not the case.

“I think he is a committed Afghan nationalist, that at the end of the day he seeks the same goals we do,” the ambassador said. “And sometimes the rhetoric gets a little heated. Sometimes my rhetoric has been known to get a little bit heated in a few of these meetings, and then I go sit under a tree and think about the larger equities at stake, and we move on.”

From Mr. Karzai’s point of view, the Americans have repeatedly defied his demands to end commando night raids, and one civilian casualty after another has put him in the position of either criticizing the Americans and angering them, or not criticizing them and angering Afghans.

“In any relationship there are things that one party does that the other party doesn’t particularly care for, and that goes both ways,” said James Cunningham, the deputy ambassador to Afghanistan. “The question is not just whether President Karzai is a partner; we’re discussing and putting into place a partnership that is going to look forward a decade or so, and that’s a partnership with Afghanistan and its leaders, whoever they are.”

The relationship is so frayed, however, that Mr. Karzai often is quick to view everything through the prism of presumed American perfidy.

When American diplomats meet with his political opponents, he sees it as a sign that they are out to topple him from power — something that has reportedly obsessed him ever since the presidential election in 2009, which the international community saw as widely fraudulent. American officials pressured him into agreeing to a runoff, which in the end his opponents refused.

“We don’t have to be here running Afghanistan, and that is what people are afraid of,” Mr. Cunningham said. “We are not running Afghanistan, we are easing our way out, and I think that’s what feeds this whole dynamic. The notion that somehow we hold the upper hand, that’s not the right way to look at what we are trying to arrange. We are really, actually trying to arrange a partnership in which Afghans run their affairs,” he said.

The Taliban routinely deride Mr. Karzai as nothing more than an American puppet, but that is certainly not the view of his purported puppet masters. “Never in history has any superpower spent so much money, sent so many troops to a country, and had so little influence over what its president says and does,” one European diplomat marveled.

Americans have, however, wielded influence on many occasions, and President Karzai is still smarting from many of them. When an aide to Mr. Karzai was arrested by an American-backed corruption task force, the president intervened to secure his release, and then eviscerated the anticorruption body, the Major Crimes Task Force. But from Mr. Karzai’s point of view, the Americans never gave him the courtesy of warning that they planned to arrest a top official.

Bette Dam, a Dutch author who interviewed Mr. Karzai extensively for her book, “Expedition Uruzgan: Hamid Karzai’s Journey Into the Palace,” says that what the Americans saw as corruption, Mr. Karzai and his family saw as simply patronage. Because the government was weak, with the Americans providing all the muscle, patronage was the only thing Mr. Karzai had to maintain his power base.

“Then you have President Obama, who says we have to do it differently. But the only thing that changed was Obama criticizing Karzai, making his government transparent, setting up task forces openly attacking his corruption,” she said. “It was not likely something would change; Karzai’s patronage system that was built up was too strong, and he himself too proud.”

The inquiry over the apparent embezzlement of nearly a billion dollars from Kabul Bank, which implicated Mr. Karzai’s brother and the brother of his first vice president, was deeply embarrassing, and he blamed American officials for leaking it to the press — and then using the threat of aid cuts to force him to dismember the bank.

From the point of view of the United States and its Western allies, they have only been trying to push Mr. Karzai to do the right thing. The Kabul Bank swindle was so notorious that it risked chasing away foreign aid donors.

From either perspective, it is a less-than-ideal situation — but the Americans have no alternative to Mr. Karzai, and Mr. Karzai has no alternative to the American-led coalition supporting him.

“The Americans are prepared to walk away,” said a senior Western official in Kabul. “And you’ve got an Afghan political establishment that is heavily dependent on the international presence. It’s a dynamic that is very unfortunate.”

“Karzai wants revenge on the U.S. because of the systematic insults he has suffered, that he feels his family suffered, because of Kabul Bank,” said a former Afghan government official. “The culture in the U.S. is about policy, it is about mutually rational interests. Revenge is at times more important in this part of the world, more important than any political or economic interest.”


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Sources: CNN, Daily Mail, NY Times, PBS, Russia Today, Wikipedia, Youtube, Google Maps

New Orleans Saved By Army Corps In 2011; Ignored In 2005

This Time The Army Corps Of Engineers Actually Prevented The Levees In Louisiana From Flooding New Orleans. The Same Way They Could Have Averted Hurricane Katrina's Flood Waters From Wiping Out The Ninth Ward Back In 2005.

Unfortunately ALL Of The WHITE Gulf Coast Residents Who Were Spared In 2005 At The Expense & Sacrifice Of New Orleans's Ninth Ward BLACK Citizens, Are Now Experiencing What Those Ninth Ward Citizens Experienced. Only Fewer Deaths.

For The Record Just Because Newly Elected NOLA Mayor Mitch Landrieu(U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu's Brother) Is A Democrat Doesn't Mean He Loves Black People.

After All He DID Grow Up In Louisiana, One Of The MOST Racist States In The South!

So Do I Believe That Back In 2005, Louisiana's Lawmakers With The Exception Of Mayor Nagin INTENTIONALLY Allowed The City Of New Orleans To Flood Just To "Clean Out" Its Poor BLACK Citizens & Make Room For A New White, Upscale Population?

YES!

But....

Did Anyone Think That The Lord God Almighty Would Ever Forget The Intentional Deaths Of More Than 1,500 Ninth Ward Citizens, Mainly People Of Color In 2005?

Well Guess What?

He Didn't!

Thus The Reason Why All Of This Year's Destruction Along The Gulf Coast.

Call Me Crazy If You Like However....

MURDER IS MURDER!

God's Word Says: VENGEANCE IS MINE! I WILL REPAY! Romans 12:19

Remember Katrina!

Thank You Kanye West For Speaking Up!


FYI:

If You Want Me To STOP Talking About Racism, Then Please Just Stop Practicing Racism & Discrimination.

Its Not Rocket Science You Know.

"What The World Needs Now Is Love Sweet Love. Its The ONLY Thing That There's Too Little Of".

VOTE OBAMA IN 2012!











Louisiana Spillway Opened to Relieve Flooding

After declaring that “public safety is our No. 1 priority,” officials from the Army Corps of Engineers opened the Morganza spillway, sending water from the engorged Mississippi River rushing into the pastures and cropland here to forestall potentially catastrophic damage farther downstream.

As Col. Ed Fleming, commander of the corps’ New Orleans district, had said beforehand, one bay of the giant structure was opened Saturday at 3 p.m. local time, sending water out at a predicted 10,000 cubic feet per second. If current forecasts hold, officials would eventually open enough bays to allow water out at 125,000 cubic feet per second, a quarter of the spillway’s capacity.

That diversion would relieve the already enormous pressure on the levee system as the river courses past Baton Rouge, New Orleans and a corridor of chemical plants and oil refineries. But it would also flood hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland and thousands of homes, as it pours out into the Atchafalaya River basin. Evacuations have been taking place for days in the towns and communities throughout the basin, along with large scale operations to protect these towns with sand bags and other barriers.

The Morganza, one of four floodways in the Mississippi River and tributaries flood control system, has only been opened once, in 1973. “We’re using every flood control tool that we have in the system,” said Gen. Michael J. Walsh, commander of the Mississippi Valley Division of the Corps of Engineers.

General Walsh added that the system was still under “tremendous pressure” and would remain so for weeks as the crest slowly moves down the river to the Gulf. The Morganza, which is triggered to open when the river is flowing at 1.5 million cubic feet per second past the Red River Landing north of Baton Rouge, was likely to remain open for weeks, ensuring that the river remains below that flow rate downstream. Any more pressure would put the levees past their design capacity.

With the opening closed to the general public, the occasion did not have the festive, tailgate atmosphere as when another spillway outside of New Orleans, the Bonnet Carre, was opened earlier this week. But there were some who wanted to mark — and capitalize on — this historic moment: a stand by the road into town was selling T-shirts for $20 that read: “Morganza Spillway 2011 Gates Finally Opened.” A live video stream has been set up by the Corps to show the flooding.

Just about everyone in southern Louisiana had come to expect the decision to open the spillway and had resigned themselves to the bitter but necessary trade-off behind it.

The water will take days to pour out into the Atchafalaya River basin, filling up marshes, engorging bayous, submerging hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland and seeping into thousands of homes. It will also test the network of federally and locally built levees that wall off towns and small Cajun communities throughout the basin. The water levels in the area will remain high for weeks.

According to maps released by the corps, these areas would be flooded to some degree whether the spillway was opened or not, given the extraordinary amount of water in the system.

There are about 2,500 people in the direct path of the spillway, and around 22,500 others who would be threatened by swollen backwaters. Gov. Bobby Jindal urged people remaining in these areas to begin evacuating.


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Sources: ABC News, CNN, Newsbusters.org, NOLA.com, NY Times, Washington Post, Youtube, Google Maps