Saturday, November 29, 2014

The How and Why Behind Obama’s Mysterious Rise to the Presidency -- for Serious Students of Our History

via Verne Strickland usadotcom 11/29/14

The How and Why Behind Obama’s Mysterious Rise to the Presidency

Who is he? 
The Common Sense Show – by Dave Hodges
How does a man get elected President after serving less than one full term as a U.S. Senator? Does being a community activist/antagonist qualify one for the highest office in the land? Were the Soviet defectors correct in that Obama is the manifestation of a multi-generational plot to bring America to her knees? It is easy to comprehend how and why Putin would want to destroy America. But is Obama is his accomplice in this mission which could imperil all of us?
Former FBI Weatherman Task Force supervisor, Max Noel, noted that the FBI utilized a CARL test when it conducted background checks on various suspects. The acronym CARL stands for Character, Associates, Reputation, and Loyalty is used to assess candidates fitness to hold the highest office in the country. On each of these four points of power, Obama fails and fails miserably. Like many FBI law enforcement agents and officials, Noel was alarmed by the fact that someone like Barack Obama could capture the presidency. For some unexplained reason, Obama was never vetted before he became a candidate for the presidency by the FBI. This is an unacceptable result of our national security system and is wholly suggestive of internal plot to allow the installation of a blatantly communist advocate into the highest political position in America.

Soviet Defectors Warn of Deception and the Emergence of a Manchurian Candidate

Did you really think Alger Hiss would be the last communist traitor to serve in a high level US governmental position?
Through the testimony of high-ranking Soviet defectors, it can clearly be established that the Russians have been engaged in a multi-generational plot to destroy the United States from within and from without. Domestically, the Russian communists are in the midst of completing a coup d’état, with the help their communist stooge, Barack Obama. In the following paragraphs, the verbatim statements of high ranking Soviet defectors are offered as proof of these claims. The first three defectors tell how the Soviets are setting the table for America’s demise. Stunningly, the fourth defector warns our country of a Manchurian candidate type of leadership whose job it will be to hand over a weakened America to the Russians (see Part Two).
Today, many people have been in a position to now vet the President after Obama’s first six years in office and observed his “fundamental transformation of America“. This particular series will continue to connect the dots of the secretive and nefarious communist background of Barack Hussein Obama.

Obama Moves To Obscure His Background

With the general warning by Russian defectors that a traitor was waiting in the wings, it is time to reveal the true nature of the Manchurian candidate who sits in the Oval office through a brief examination of his family members with CIA affiliations along with their exposure to the MKULTRA mind control experiments being conducted at the University of Hawaii.
With the stroke of his executive order pen, President Obama quickly moved to seal off his records from public view after his election. However, he was too late to completely hide his background as researchers, such as Wayne Madsen, have found significant  information to demonstrate that what Obama has omitted, is that his rare rise to power can only be explained by his family’s CIA roots.
The election of Barack Hussein Obama is the culmination of what the Soviet defectors have been warning America about for decades in that Obama’s ascendency to the Presidency was part of a documented long-term strategic plan to recruit selected candidates into intelligence, while guiding these individuals and their families into high-ranking intelligence community positions before executing the meteoric rise to power by one of their own. For example, George H. W. Bush was a former CIA director, and CIA member going back to the 1950’s and thanks to Wayne Madsen, we now know that Obama’s family was CIA and not just CIA, but a CIA mind controlled family.
Obama is the Soviet messiah as he will eventually become known as the Second Coming of Stalin. He has been prophesied by Soviet defectors Lunev, Golitsyn, Suvorov and Bezmenov, and now he is here to fulfill his mission.

Phase I of Obama’s Grooming for Treason: The Obama Family’s CIA Background

Question: What does  Barack Obama and the “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski have in common?
Answer: Both Kaczynski and Obama had significant exposure to the MK-ULTRA experiments; Kaczynski at Harvard and Obama at the University of Hawaii and the Ford Foundation much earlier. Outrageous?
The following paragraph represents quoted excerpts from Wayne Madsen’s exceptional investigation into the Obama family CIA background:
“President Obama’s own work in 1983 for Business International Corporation, a CIA front that conducted seminars with the world’s most powerful leaders and used journalists as agents abroad, dovetails with CIA espionage activities conducted by his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham in 1960’s post-coup Indonesia on behalf of a number of CIA front operations, including the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Ford Foundation. Dunham met and married Lolo Soetoro, Obama’s stepfather, at the East-West Center in 1965. Soetoro was recalled to Indonesia in 1965 to serve as a senior army officer and assist General Suharto and the CIA in the bloody overthrow of President Sukarno….   Soetoro worked for the elitist Ford Foundation, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Bank Rakyat (the majority government-owned People’s Bank of Indonesia), and the CIA-linked USAID while she lived in Indonesia and later, Pakistan….. Barack Obama, on the other hand, cleverly masked his own CIA connections as well as those of his mother, father, step-father, and grandmother (there is very little known about Obama’s grandfather, Stanley Armour Dunham.“
Madsen painstakingly and conclusively demonstrated that virtually all of Obama’s relatives were CIA operatives. Madsen has found even more CIA connections to Obama’s first employer. Madsen further went on to describe how Obama’s family was clearly exposed and was intimately connected to MK-ULTRA’s mind control program at the University of Hawaii. Info Wars also carried Madsen’s expose and it is available here.

It’s a Small World, After All

President Obama’s family and former Ex-Goldman Sachs executive, Ex-Treasury Secretary and World Bank leader,Tim Geithner and his family  have been joined together at the hip for decades. Tim Geithner’s father worked for the CIA in the Rockefeller funded Ford Foundation in Asia. Geitner’s father was in charge of micro-finance for the Ford Foundation for all of Asia. From Wayne Madsen’s work, we know that President Obama’s mother was in charge of micro-finance in Indonesia. The Hollywood producers could not make this plot up. Geithner’s father was Obama’s mother’s boss. It is likely that Geithner’s father tagged Obama as a potential presidential CIA Ford Foundation, well-groomed Manchurian candidate.
Additional information comes from the discovery that the two universities that Obama attended, Harvard and Columbia, were prime CIA recruiting grounds. The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations continued to fund Columbia’s Soviet studies programs through the early 1980s, where Obama was a student. And would anyone care to guess what Obama was studying?
Trilateral Commission co-founder, former National Security Adviser to Carter and Obama’s former professor and now political handler.
Obama was enrolled in a Soviet studies program taught by Zbigniew Brzezinski. And to those who are new to NWO conspiracies, one might wonder who is Brzezinski?  Brzezinski was the former National Security Adviser under President Carter. But more importantly, he was also the co-founder of one of the most influential globalist organizations in all of history, the Trilateral Commission. If you know your New World Order history, you have chills going up and down your spine as you read these words. We should be mindful that Brzezinski, in his book,Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (1970), that he laid out the NWO conspiracy to control all nation states and usher in a totalitarian world government.
There are two chilling quotes by Brzezinski in his aforementioned book that come directly to bear on Obama and his meteoric rise to power:
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era
“In the technetronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason.”

In the second quote, Brzezinski is clearly calling for the installation of CIA/MKULTRA mind control leaders. Today, Brzezinski would his former understudy, Obama, a President with an undeniable “magnetic and attractive personality exploiting the latest communications techniques designed to manipulate emotions and control reason.”
Comrade Obama’s ascension to the presidency has been a long time in the making. Interestingly, Barack Obama’s past associates especially the communist terrorists which funded his Harvard legal education and ultimately launched his political career as an Illinois state senator, namely, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, have been in lockstep with Obama his entire adult life. However, Dohrn and Ayers were not the first to indoctrinate Obama with the Marxist communist philosophy. For that information, we have to begin with Frank Marshall Davis.
Obama’s real father, Frank Marshall Davis, was a member of the Communist Party and a former Soviet Agent who was under FBI investigation for a total of 19 years. In 1948, Davis moved from Chicago to Hawaii leaving behind a colleague named Vernon Jarrett, father-in-law of Senior White House adviser, Valerie Jarrett. Yes, the Jarrett’s are communists as well. Both Jarrett and Davis wrote for a left wing newspaper called the Chicago Defender in which they espoused a communist  takeover of the United States Government. In 1971, Davis, according to Joel Gilbert, reunited with his then nine-year-old son, Barack Obama, and schooled him in the ways of being a good communist for the next nine years.

The Final Stages of Training the Manchurian Candidate

Adding more fuel to this communist fire, it is interesting to note that both Senior White House Advisers, David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett were both also “Red Diaper Babies, in which they were the sons and daughters of well-to-do parents who desired communism and lived out their dreams through their children’s revolutionary activities. Other notable red-diaper babies also include such notables as Rahm Emanuel and Eric Holder. Jarrett’s situation is particularly interesting in that her family and the Ayers family have been multi-generational friends which also included a marriage between the two families. Much of the Obama administration is a nest of well-established communists and this should serve to gravely concern every American citizen.
Following the nine years of mentoring and parenting by Frank Davis, Obama made some very important communist connections which ultimately led to him obtaining an impressive college education financed by some very familiar communist activists, namely, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. You remember Bill and Bernardine, don’t you?
The Prairie Fire book was co-authored by Dohrn and Ayers, and, quite unbelievably, it was dedicated to Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy’s assassin. A former FBI informant, while appearing on The Common Sense Show, Larry Grathwohl, revealed that he testified in a court of law that Ayers and Dohrn had direct involvement in a terrorist plot which killed San Francisco police sergeant, Brian V. McDonnell, by a bomb made and planted by these Weathermen Underground terrorists. How are Bernadine Dohrn and husband Bill Ayers not in prison? The only logical explanation is that Ayers and Dohrn are and were CIA assets whose mission it was consisted of guiding the young communist, Barack Obama, and his legal education and later, launching his political career. If Dohrn was not a CIA asset, then how can anyone explain how she teaches at a prominent university with her felony background, conviction and the time she briefly served in prison?
Grathwohl also revealed on The Common Sense Show that he asked Ayers, in a meeting of about 25 well-to do Weatherman, most with advanced degrees from Ivy League Universities, what the Weathermen planned to do when they achieved their goal of a communist take over the government. Grathwohl stated that Ayers paused for a moment and then said that it was likely that about 50 million Americans will have to be re-educated in concentration camps located in the American Southwest and that about 25 million would have to be eliminated, meaning that they would have to be murdered. Bill and Bernardine’s Weather Underground had the support of Cuba, East German intelligence and the North Vietnamese. I believe that Obama could end up being the fulfillment of the Ayers “re-education prediction, and with the power granted to Obama by the NDAA, that he will fulfill Ayers’ promise to Grathwohl to murder 25 million Americans who cannot be “re-educated”.
During the Vietnam war era, Ayers championed black civil rights and he and Dohrn further chastised white society for their treatment of blacks. Grathwohl also revealed that Ayers wanted to support the beginning of a race war by killing whites, from supposed black villains, and then blaming whites in order to begin a race war. How eerily similar does this sound to the Charles Manson Family and their Helter Skelter plans to execute that very same objective? While Grathwohl was infiltrating the Weathermen, Ayers ordered FBI infiltrator, Grathwohl, to blow up a Detroit police substation to which Grathwohl said that a nearby restaurant, where many blacks ate would suffer many casualties. Ayers replied that some have to die for a revolution to proceed.
Ayers and Dohrn raised a foster son, Chesa Boudin, who worked for the late Hugo Chavez, communist dictator in charge of Venezuela. Chesa Boudin was the child of Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, members of a Weather Underground spin-off group who went to prison for an armored car robbery that resulted in the murders of two police officers and a security guard. Dohrn served seven months for her role in the robbery and this is the reason that she is ineligible to become bar certified as an attorney. Is anyone else uncomfortable with the fact that obama and ayersAyers and Dohrn were the ones primarily responsible for educating Obama with the communist funds and then subsequently launched his political career from their living room? Well, it is true, please read on.
Allen Hulton, a 39 year veteran of the postal service, provided a sworn affidavit to Maricopa County, AZ. Sheriff investigators, led by Sheriff Joe Arpaio, in an effort toward determining whether or not former FOREIGN college student, Barack Obama, was eligible to be placed on Arizona’s 2012 election ballot. After reviewing Hulton’s affidavit, it is apparent that Ayers and Dohrn were in fact the de facto adoptive parents to this foreign student destined to become the first illegitimate President of the United States. As a result, Obama was treated to the finest Ivy League education that communist backed money could buy as Hulton maintains that the Ayers’ repeatedly told him that they were financing the education of a promising young black FOREIGN student at Harvard. Hulton also testified that he met Obama while at the Ayer’s home and he asked Obama what he was going to do with all his education, to which Obama politely answered:
“I am going to become the President”. Readers should take note that this is an affidavit, and as such, is formally considered to be evidence, not conjecture or hearsay. There can be no other conclusion that the communist terrorist, Bill Ayers, and his father, the former head of Con Edison, Tom Ayers, began grooming Obama to become America’s first communist President. Bill Ayers and President Obama’s relationship continues into the present time as it is on record that Ayers visited the White House in August of 2009.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
I think it is likely that the Weatherman Underground was a CIA created false flag operation simply designed to assist the communist inspired group with the ability to undermine the country and that Obama represents the Weatherman’s finest achievement. The Weathermen were nothing more than mere Soviet collaborators that Soviet defectors had previously us warned about.
We also know that Obama’s communist affiliations continued well into his adulthood because of the good work of Joel Gilbert who discovered that Obama was active with a Weathermen Underground support group known as The May 19th Communist Organization, in New York. Perhaps, this is why Ayers was visiting the White House in 2009.

The Communists Openly Declare Victory Upon Obama’s Election

Frank Chapman, a communist activist and a member of the communist front group known as the World Peace Council. Chapman clearly used the term “mole” to describe Obama. He said Obama’s political climb and subsequent success in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries was “a dialectical leap ushering in a qualitatively new era of struggle.” Chapman further stated that, “Marx once compared revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface. This is the old revolutionary ‘mole,’ not only showing his traces on the surface but also breaking through. The Communist Party USA backs Obama to the hilt.” It is clear that Obama is their man!

Conclusion

Because of the psychological principal, cognitive dissonance, no amount of direct or circumstantial proof would convince some people that the highest political position in the country has been compromised by a communist plot spanning several decades. The term cognitive dissonance refers to a person who received information so shocking, so upsetting, that they cannot adequately process that information and then instead deny the validity of the proof that anyone else could see. If you are one of the cognitive dissonance types, please allow me to ask you a few questions.
Obama and former NBA player, Clark Kellogg, play pig in an obvious staged victory for the President. When was the last time you played basketball while wearing business clothes?
Who was Obama’s basketball coach in high school? The President has some degree of basketball skills as he defeated former NBA player and sports broadcaster, Clark Kellogg, in a game of pig (how appropriate) in front of a national TV audience. Who was Obama’s history teacher in high school? Why don’t we see interviews with his former professors, teachers, coaches, childhood friends and his first girl friend? Who in the hell is he?
There are no visible answers to these questions are there? But still the cognitive dissonance crowd still persists with their abject denials. To them, I say let’s judge a man by his actions, not his words. Has Obama’s actions served to help or hurt America? Do his Presidential actions match up with his communist background? It is an easy, perhaps, groundless accusation that Obama is truly the manifestation of what Soviet defectors warned us about when these stated that America’s leadership would become compromised and lead America down the path of destruction.
Ask yourself America, how could we collective allow a person with Obama’s very limited political background into the White House? More importantly, how could Obama’s questionable background escape public scrutiny? And the most important question lies in understanding the the answer to this question, “Can anyone clearly demonstrate his intention to bring America down by his own actions?”  The answer to this question is unquestionably YES, and this will be covered in Part Four of this series! When we put Obama’s misdeeds side-by-side, it will become easy to see how Obama is deliberately trying to dismantle America prior to entering martial law followed by World War III.

Harry S. Truman fought as artilleryman during World War I -- the little-known story

via Verne Strickland usadotcom, 11/29/14

D. M. Giangreco, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Transcript of "The Soldier from Independence: Harry S. Truman and the Great War," 7 April 2002

------------------------------------------------------------------------ D. M. Giangreco, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Transcript of "The Soldier from Independence: Harry S. Truman and the Great War," 7 April 2002 at the 69th Annual Meeting of the Society for Military History at the Frank Lloyd Wright Monona Terrace Convention Center, Madison, Wisconsin, and sponsored by the Wisconsin Veterans Museum and Department of Veterans Affairs. ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Common wisdom among historians holds that everything that could reasonably be said about Harry S. Truman during World War I has been said since little useful information exists on Truman's actions during combat outside of one regimental history, some post-war notes, Truman's letters to his wife, and the oft repeated stories of several Battery D members who remained life-long friends.

However, as a battery commander, Truman was on the receiving end of all battalion and regimental orders. In addition, his unique position meant that he was the man responsible for carrying out those orders. A detailed examination of the Truman Library's holdings of battery and battalion paperwork, including operations orders and reports, reveals that the material contained in his letters to his wife were highly sanitized. This will certainly not come as a surprise to the people in this room, and the extremely large number of his fellow 35th Division veterans who cast votes for him in a series of county and, ultimately, federal elections understood well their shared experiences.

When combined with a detailed examination of approximately 200 pages of Truman's hand-written notes, the extensive oral histories of his soldiers, and the records of other commanders in his battalion--- all set against the 35th division's operations--- an extremely rich picture emerges of the future president's time in combat.

Truman's battery was frequently employed well forward. He was detailed to provide fire support for George S. Patton's tank brigade during the Meuse-Argonne offensive, engaged German field guns and was credited with either wiping out or forcing the permanent abandonment of two complete batteries. When firing on these and other targets, he disobeyed orders and fired "out of sector" against threats to his division's open flank. Truman's 35th Division, a National Guard formation made up of units from Missouri and Kansas, suffered grievously in that battle, and the battery of the man who would later order the dropping of the atomic bombs was sited approximately 150 yards forward of where Patton was wounded in an area referred to by one artilleryman as "a cemetery of unburied dead."

In all, the 27,000-man division lost nearly 7,300 men during six--- really four days--- of fighting. A total of 1,126 killed or died of wounds; 4,877 severely wounded; with the balance lightly wounded or suffering from combat fatigue and returned to duty. The casualties suffered on these few days represent the highest loss rate for any U.S. division during the war--- virtually all occurring within two to three miles of Truman's artillery battery as it moved forward through the battlefield and went about its deadly work. Just how this loss rate came about was a subject of intense interest and debate within both local newspapers and Army-wide journals after the war. Said one of Truman's colleagues: "Somewhere there is a man who is responsible for all that. The buck can be passed just so far but there is always a last man."

Well, sometimes yes; sometimes no. This particular buck began its search for a home on the late afternoon of D+1 with Pershing's move-or-else order to 35th Division commander Peter Traub.

But I'm getting a little ahead of myself. On D-day, 26 September 1918, the three regiments of the division's artillery brigade, the 60th Field Artillery under Lucian Berry, fired over 40,000 75 and 155mm shells during the opening bombardment. Truman's mission during this was to saturate the defenses in and immediately adjacent to Boureilles, at point 1, and then shift his four 75s to the east where he would fire a rolling barrage ahead of the infantry from point 2 north to the Cheppy area.

After the rolling barrage reached the Cheppy-Varennes line, the 60th Brigade's two 75mm regiments, the 128th and 129th, lit out close on the heals of the follow-up infantry regiments and ahead of the expected traffic jams with Truman's battery leading the column at the tip of the 129th

Movement was steady but came to an abrupt halt at the first line of defense where retreating Germans had blasted huge craters at point A in the Route National and a side used by Truman's battery. While the rest of the 129th turned around to make a short backtrack before taking off across no mans land, Truman's battery stayed put as he and the 2d Battalion commander, Major Marvin Gates waded the Aire River and continued along the highway in a futile effort to find Patton--- or really any--- armor officer they could liaise with, and eventually reached to point B overlooking Varennes before turning back.

Truman and his battery then followed the rest of his regiment across no man's land and was often forced to pull his guns one at a time by double teaming--- that's 12 horses--- in order to get them through the muddy, shell-torn German minefields. It was 10:00 and raining that night before the bone tired men and horses reached the regiment's bivouac at point C roughly half way between the German's front and main lines of defense.

An impossible to carry out fire mission was received and abandoned early the next morning for fear of hitting our own troops near Carpentry, point 3, and the 2d Battalion subsequently moved north through the carnage of the main defensive line to establish itself at point D northeast of Varennes. Truman was again sent forward to observe and direct fire in support of the assault on Carpentry. And, again, was unable to link up with the anyone from the infantry regiment's HQ but did have a ringside--- if rather hot--- seat at point 4 above an unsupported tank assault into the German reverse-slope positions being shelled and the town.

Unnoticed, however, some quote "shifting and straightening" of the U.S. infantry's lines had begun. The result? Truman's shell-crater OP ended up at point E, some 200 yards in advance of the regiment it was to support. So intent had he and his small group been at observing fire and setting up wire communications, that they hadn't recognized the full-blown pull-back in the smoke and confusion, and disaster was prevented by one of the last infantrymen out who warned them of the move.

Apparently, either direct observation or a check of a terrain map revealed to Truman that setting up the artillery OP high on the ridge would produce blind spots along the most likely axis of advance used by German reinforcements--- the Route National. Truman instead selected a position somewhat down the slope and just west of the road, point F, where he could obtain both excellent observation of the entire length of the road, and (of importance to this narrative) the Argonne Forrest which ran all the way up to the bluffs on the other side of the Aire River and which facied the wide-open 35th Division flank. As it turned out, the Germans principally used other routes for their final approach to the battlefield, but there was plenty to keep Truman busy to the west in the 28th Division sector.

American planners at First Army had long understood that with the exception of a small number of batteries with specific missions, like Truman's intended support of Patton, their divisional artillery would be out of action after about 7:45 am on D-Day as it displaced forward, but they also believed that most units would be ready on D+1. What they did not anticipate was just how clogged most of the roads would become; even further delaying units that didn't get of to the fast start of the 60th Brigade's 75mm regiments. And there was absolutely no way that they could have imagined the bizarre series events centering around some of the 28th Division's senior artillery officers which, together with the traffic jams, immobilized the bulk of its artillery for nearly three full days.

It was the morning of D+2 before one of that division's twelve 75mm batteries managed to get back into action. The rest of its regiment had become stuck in traffic below Boureilles on D-Day, long after Truman's soldiers had departed the area around 3 pm to cut across no mans land, and the regiment was unable to move even to Varennes until D+3. The other 75mm regiment reached Varennes the night before after being delayed not only by traffic, but severe command problems. First, one of its battalion commanders quote "went to the hospital sick" a half hour after receiving orders to push off; his replacement was relieved the following day for not getting the unit moving and the regimental commander took over in an effort to provide enough authority to move it through and around the road congestion.

Command was eventually turned over to one of the battery captains until yet another more senior officer could be brought up.

Both divisions' road-bound medium artillery battalions eventually worked their ways up the Route National and deployed at Varennes. Characteristically, while all elements of the 35th Division's 155mm battalion were in place and firing by 5pm on D+2, the 28th's mediums could not supply a concentrated effort until D+4. It must also be noted that corps artillery at this point in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive operated under the restriction that it could fire on targets no closer than four miles from the infantry's front line positions.

Bottom line: there was almost zero American artillery fire falling into the wide expanse of forest on the 35th Division's ever-lengthening, open left flank until D+3. The German reaction? They easily poured some 16 artillery battalions into this huge hole in the U.S. artillery coverage on D+1 and 2. Some of these units were directed against the 28th but the dastardly Hun's, displaying no respect for American divisional boundaries, directed a murderous fire into the 35th whose infantry regiments frequently complained of being shelled by their own units because a significant amount of this German fire was literally coming from behind them.

Back to Truman at his OP: breaks in his telephone wire from German artillery fire and the tramping of infantrymen's feet caused a good deal of trouble, but his line detail managed to keep communications with his battery relatively open. By now it was late in the day and Truman was basically concerned with the Route National approach in his own division sector but noticed that an American reconnaissance aircraft had dropped a flare just to the west of his position. Turning his field glasses to the spot, he saw a German battery setting up little more than rifle distance away at point 5. On his own initiative, Truman directed his battery, at D, to fire on the German guns as soon as there horses had been pulled away. Scratch one Hun battery.

Truman and his men returned to Battery D when it became too dark to see and, with the rest of the 2d Battalion repositioned his unit to another hedge-lined road about 300 yards to the southwest at point G. It was a good call. The 2d's commander, Gates, believed that their earlier position had been fixed by German aircraft and, sure enough, their former position was thoroughly shelled immediately after the move, and was very heavily bombarded on several occasions over the next few days--- particularly during the German counterattack on D+3. Less welcome than not being killed by German artillery, however, were the threats of courts martial Truman received from his regimental commander, Colonel Karl Klemm, that night for firing out of sector.

Although there are several angry accounts of other Klemm actions against Truman in letters to his wife and a field notebook, there is no record--- even in Truman's voluminous postwar writings--- of the future president's response; only a dry note of irony in his two brief references. But what we do know is that Truman left for his OP position before first light the next morning, D+2, and that when at 9:00 am he spotted a German OP being set up in an abandoned mill at point 6--- smack in the middle of the 28th's sector--- he promptly called down battery fire and destroyed it. Two hours later he observed a battery moving out of position nearby at point 7 and forced its permanent abandonment after a short, intense bombardment. So much for threats of courts martial. Shortly after Truman's forays to the west, a battery from his regiment's other 75mm battalion also engaged German guns in the 28th's sector and was cheered on by a corps liaison officer who was present even as they even as they did it.

Although Truman and his men had removed two batteries from the German's order of battle, the 35th was still suffering grievously. Greatly concerned about the division's situation, Pershing went forward on D+2 to observe for himself what was going on; a move which, incidentally, prompted MPs in the 28's sector to shut down nearly all road traffic for nearly three hours and prolonged the division's lack of artillery support.

General Traub detailed the terrible flanking fire from Apremont and the Argonne Forest and explained that he was unable to respond because of the First Army's standing order which forbid divisions firing on points outside of their own area. An aghast Pershing responded "But surely you do not obey that order?" From that point on, the 35th's artillery was allowed to engage in observed fire in the 28's sector but the damage had already been done by allowing the German guns to deploy unhindered and in force.

The 35th's D+3 assault on Exermont was thrown back with great losses and German counterattacks nearly succeeded in breaking the American lines. The U.S. 1st Division which replaced the 35th, would suffer a further 6,000-plus casualties in this same area during the coming weeks.

Both during the crisis of D+3 and in the years thereafter both Traub and the artillery brigade commander, Berry, would refer directly and indirectly to the actions of battery commander Truman and the 1st Battalion battery which also fired across the river, and use them as a sort-of shield to help ward off criticism--- and Traub would embellish Truman's work. For example, after severe criticism that the division's infantry had received no fire support on D-Day after the opening bombardment, he countered in the Kansas City Post that on D-Day, "The battery under Captain Harry Truman was in action before noon, and continued in action throughout the day, wiping out machine gun nests and anti-tank guns on the slopes." Truman's battery, however, while certainly arrayed for action, never fired a shot during this period.

Truman never criticized his former division commander in public or his writings, but did make it a point to have semiofficial and unofficial accounts somewhat toned down from the defend-the-honor-of-the-division rhetoric, and ensured that they were in line with eyewitness observations including those from the from the 28th Division.

As for Truman's time in the Muese-Argonne, experiencing air and artillery attacks on his positions, directing fire, setting up his anti-aircraft machine guns for use against infantry during the German counterattack--- all this will certainly tempt some to engage in a questionable psychoanalysis of how it must have affected his later thinking on the atom bomb.

Risky business, this psychobabble stuff, and I'm sure not going to do it. But I think I'm on safe ground with two simple observations: First, Truman's activities during the war, were far more interesting and complex than previously realized, and second, the man who later ordered the invasion of Japan in the face of massive casualty estimates knew exactly what he was asking of our soldiers, sailors and Marines, and he understood it at a level that most Americans today would find unfathomable. Truman understood as only one who had lived and fought for six days in a "cemetery of unburied dead" could.

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Schlafly: America 'Freest and most prosperous country in the history of the world'


via Verne Strickland usadotcom 11/26/14


Founding-Fathers-Americans-for-Prosperity
By Paul Bremmer
The millions of Americans who gather Thursday around a dining-room table with family members to celebrate Thanksgiving will heed George Washington’s call in October 1789 to commemorate “a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God.”
Ever since the days of the Pilgrims, Thanksgiving has traditionally been a time to thank God for the blessings in one’s life, particularly the blessing of the harvest.
However, President Obama has failed to thank God in any of his five previous Thanksgiving addresses.
Conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly said she will be watching to see whether Obama mentions God this year, but she isn’t optimistic.
“He seems to be on a mission to wipe God out of public life in every possible way,” Schlafly said.
Schlafly, on the other hand, said Americans, as a people, should be thankful for the nation’s Founding Fathers.
“We have to be thankful that [God] gave us an extraordinary group of men who devised the system of our country, which made us not only the freest, but the most prosperous country in the world,” she said. “That’s why everybody wants to come here.”
America is unique, she said, “and it was due to the incredible group of men who devised our Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and we hope we can live up to it and continue to profit by their wisdom.”
What do YOU think? What are you most thankful for this Thanksgiving? Sound off in today’s WND poll!
And for what should Americans thank President Obama?
“I don’t think we have anything to thank him for,” Schlafly said. “I think he’s doing the best he can to undercut our Constitution. I think he really doesn’t believe America is an exceptional country that God has blessed more richly than any other nation in the world.”
Not all Americans give thanks to God on Thanksgiving. In fact, not everybody respects the holiday. Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote in 2012 that Thanksgiving is a “white-supremacist holiday” that should be replaced with a “National Day of Atonement” for the “genocide” of Native Americans.
In 2013, MSNBC host Ronan Farrow tweeted: “Thanksgiving: because genocide is a lot more festive 392 years after the fact.”
Schlafly is not bothered by people who believe Thanksgiving should be a source of white guilt.
“I’m sorry if they think religion and belief in God is a white supremacist idea,” she said. “We invite all people to revere God and recognize that God has always played a big role in American political and social life.”
Schlafly said although God has richly blessed the nation, Americans still need to fight to hold onto those blessings.
“We have a great deal to be thankful for, because we have the freest and the most prosperous country in the history of the world,” Schlafly said.
“And we need to work harder to protect it and retain it and make sure that we hang on to the blessings that we were given when our Constitution was written.”

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/11/schlafly-thank-god-for-founding-fathers/#cZjzdV2o1K3sIqkr.99

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Record Drought Reveals Stunning Changes Along Colorado River

A boat traces the curves of Reflection Canyon, part of Glen Canyon.
A boat wends its way around the curves of Reflection Canyon, part of Lake Powell in Glen Canyon. The "bathtub rings" on the walls show past water levels.
Photograph by Michael Melford, National Geographic Creative
Jonathan Waterman
Published November 23, 2014
LAKE POWELL, Utah—In early September, at the abandoned Piute Farms marina on a remote edge of southern Utah's Navajo reservation, we watched a ten-foot (three-meter) waterfall plunging off what used to be the end of the San Juan River.
Until 1990, this point marked the smooth confluence of the river with Lake Powell, one of the largest reservoirs in the U.S. But the lake has shrunk so much due to the recent drought that this waterfall has emerged, with sandy water as thick as a milkshake.
My partner DeEdda McLean and I had come to this area west of Mexican Hat, Utah, to kayak across Lake Powell, a reservoir formed by the confluence of the San Juan and the Colorado Rivers and the holding power of Glen Canyon Dam, which lies just over the border in Arizona. Yet in place of a majestic reservoir, we saw only the thin ribbon of a reemergent river channel, which had been inundated for most of the past three decades by the lake. We called this new channel the San Powell, combining the name of the river and the lake.
Map of the Lake Mead and Lake Powell regions.
Virginia W. Mason, NG Staff Source: Bureau of Reclamation, National Park Service
We had also come to see firsthand how drought is changing the landscapes of the desert Southwest. Here, judging by the lack of conservation reform, water has seemed to be largely taken for granted. But our recent float suggests that profound changes may be in store for the region. (See "The American Nile.")
Sweating in the desert heat, we loaded our 15-foot (5-meter) kayaks with two weeks' worth of food and ten gallons of water—enough to last us two days. Drinking from the silty river or fecal-contaminated areas of Lake Powell frequented by houseboats was not an option (Glen Canyon Recreation Area, which includes the reservoir, is visited by more than two million people a year). The contours of our journey—where we camped, our hiking destinations, and how far we paddled each day—would be defined by the need to find potable springs.
Like bicyclists shunning the interstate, many kayakers have avoided Lake Powell ever since the builders of Glen Canyon Dam finished flooding 186 miles (300 kilometers) of the Colorado River Valley in 1980. The reservoir was named after John Wesley Powell, the National Geographic Society co-founder who first paddled most of the Colorado River and who later, in public office, tried to limit population growth in the arid Southwest. The dams and the enormous reservoirs that were later built in the desert would have horrified him.
Motorboaters call Powell's lake the "Jewel of the Colorado" because of its unnatural emerald hue—Glen Canyon Dam now captures the silt that used to make the Colorado, after its confluence with the San Juan, the most colorful river in the West. Paddlers call it "Lake Foul" for the noise and stench of outboard engines.
Photo of Lake Powell in 2011.
In 2011, Lake Powell contained plenty of water.
Photograph by Jon Waterman
"Extreme" Drought
According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, 11 of the past 14 years have been drought years in the Southwest, with the drought ranging from "severe" to "extreme" to "exceptional," depending on the year and the area.
At "full pool," Lake Powell spans 254 square miles (660 square kilometers)—a quarter the size of Rhode Island. The lightning bolt-shaped canyon shore stretches 1,960 miles (3,150 kilometers), 667 miles (1,073 kilometers) longer than the West Coast of the continental United States.
The reservoir serves multiple purposes. It stores water from the Upper Basin states of Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado so that the Lower Basin states of California, Nevada, and Arizona can receive their allotted half of the Colorado River; it creates electricity through hydro-generators at Glen Canyon Dam; and it helps prevent flooding below Hoover Dam (240 miles or 390 kilometers downstream), the site of North America's largest reservoir, Lake Mead.
11 of the past 14 years have been drought years in the Southwest.
The irony, as most students of this river's history now know, is that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation created these enormous reservoirs during the wettest period of the past millennium. According to modern tree-ring data (unavailable during the dam-building epoch), the previous millennium experienced droughts much more severe than those in the first 14 years of the 21st century. Many climate scientists think the Southwest is again due for a megadrought. The Bureau of Reclamation's analysis of over a hundred climate projections suggests the Colorado River Basin will be much drier by the end of this century than it was in the past one, with the median projection showing 45 percent less runoff into the river.
Last winter was snowy in the Rockies, and runoff was at 96 percent of the historical average. Because of the previous years of drought, however, Lake Powell had risen to only half full by fall.
But Lake Mead was in even worse shape. This year it plunged to 39 percent of capacity, a low that has not been matched since Hoover Dam began backing up the Colorado River in 1935. In August, the Bureau of Reclamation announced that Lake Powell would release an additional 10 percent of its waters, or 2.5 trillion gallons, to Lake Mead. That release will lower the water in Lake Powell by about three feet (one meter).
Photo of Lake Powell in 2014.
By 2014, Lake Powell was full of plant life and silt.
Photograph by Jon Waterman
Rise of Ancient Ruins?
Fifty miles (80 kilometers) up from the Colorado River confluence, on what is commonly known as the San Juan River Arm of Lake Powell, we kept poking our paddles-cum-measuring sticks toward the shallow river bottom, shouting: "Good-bye, reservoir! Hello, San Powell River!" In a four-mile-per-hour, opaque current, always hunting for the deepest river braids, we breezed past fields of still-viscous, former lake-bottom silt deposits. Stepping out of the boat here would have been an invitation to disappear in quicksand.
We paddled downstream, looking for the edge of the reservoir. We passed caterwauling great blue herons, a yipping coyote, and squawking conspiracies of ravens. By late afternoon, dehydrated by the desert sun, we stopped at one of the few quicksand-free tent sites above the newly emerged river: a sandy yet dry creek bed draining the sacred Navajo Mountain.
We slept in the perfume of blooming nightshades; wild burros brayed throughout the night. Here, more than a dozen miles below our put-in at a marina that once served the reservoir, the swirling "San Powell" River continued to sigh 15 feet (5 meters) below our tent.
In October 2011, when the reservoir was at 70 percent of its capacity, I had stood on a rocky shore above where our tent now stood and photographed Lake Powell's Zahn Bay here in the San Juan River Valley. It's dry now, and the lake bottom is a cracked series of chocolate-colored hummocks, surrounded by the invasive Russian thistle and tamarisk, native willows and sunflowers, and pockmarked by burro hooves.
For five days, we wouldn't see a human footprint or hear the ubiquitous whine of Lake Powell boat traffic.
Half full, the amazing vessel that is Lake Powell has lost 4.4 trillion gallons of water in the recent drought.
By day three, desperate to refill our water bottles, we found a newly created marsh where the river thinned before dropping into the deeper reservoir. Unlike anything I'd experienced elsewhere on the sterile Lake Powell, abundant small fish and aquatic life supported American pelicans, mallards, coots, mergansers, green herons, hawks, and kingfishers. The silty river is also sheltering endangered razorback suckers and pikeminnows that are preyed upon by non-native fish in the clearer waters of the lake.
Within a decade or two at the most, if the drought persists, we can expect to see hundreds of inundated ancient Anasazi ruins rising above the drying reservoir. Archaeologists will be delighted, just as kayakers like us delight at the reemergence of a river. But more than 36 million people in and around the Colorado River Basin depend on this vanishing water.
As we finally reached a body of water wide enough to be properly called the reservoir, many miles below where we had expected to find it, we continued paddling in a chocolate pudding of ground-up river debris. Some 94 feet (29 meters) above our craned heads, on the red sandstone walls of the reservoir, we saw the "bathtub rings"—the stains left by river minerals in wetter times.
That night we did a quick calculation: Half full, the amazing vessel that is Lake Powell has lost 4.4 trillion gallons of water in the recent drought; the deeper vessel of Lake Mead at 39 percent capacity has lost 5.6 trillion gallons of water.
Aerial view looking down on Lake Powell and the Glen Canyon dam.
This aerial view of Lake Powell and Glen Canyon Dam was taken in 2009.
Photograph by Peter McBride, National Geographic Creative
Big Impact
As central California (beyond the reach of Colorado River water) has already been hamstrung by an even more exceptional drought, many farms and dairy operations have shut down, rationing has begun, homeowners are being fined for watering their lawns, and the state has begun relying on finite groundwater supplies. And as extensive farm networks are served by the Colorado River, it is likely that nationwide produce prices will soon begin to rise.
What's next? As Lakes Powell and Mead continue to plummet, officials are now predicting rationing by 2017 for the junior Colorado River water-rights holders of Nevada and Arizona.
In the decades that follow, invasive flora and fauna will colonize dried-out reservoir bottoms. River running and reservoir boating may end. Those will seem like minor issues compared with the survival of cities like Los Angeles, Denver, Phoenix, and Las Vegas, all of which depend on the Colorado River. There is talk of diverting more water to the Colorado Basin users from places such as the Missouri River. A massive desalination plant is being built on the California coast. But such solutions won't come cheap.
Officials are now predicting rationing by 2017 for the junior Colorado River water-rights holders of Nevada and Arizona.
We can hope for agricultural reform, such as irrigation changes, more aggressive crop rotation and fallowing, reverting to less water-intensive produce, or dismantling of the water-intensive southwestern dairy industry. And the exponential population growth of the region—as Powell warned at the end of the 19th century—will have to be addressed. (See "Arizona Irrigators Share Water With Desert River.")
By mid-September, we reached the speedboat-accessible region of Lake Powell. Motorboaters often stopped to ask if we needed help. Many of these boaters offered us iced beer or bottled water imported from distant regions of the country.
Each day, for 14 days, except during two violent but brief rainstorms, the temperature climbed into the 90s. Often dizzy, and even exhausted from the heat, we parceled out our water, cup by cup, consuming over four gallons daily. And every other day, we walked or paddled miles out of our way so that we could enact a time-honored practice of desert cultures like the Anasazi's, which vanished in the 13th-century megadrought.
Every other day, we uncapped our empty bottles while honoring this ritual of aridity: Bowing under shaded cliffs at moss-covered seeps, we pressed our lips onto cold sandstone walls and drank those precious drops until our bellies were full.
This short film by Pete McBride explores the history and meaning of the Colorado River.
Jonathan Waterman is a writer and photographer based in Colorado. In 2010 National Geographic published his book Running Dry: A Journey From Source to Sea Down the Colorado River. He is also the co-author, with Pete McBride, of The Colorado River: Flowing Through Conflict. See his previous work "The American Nile."
Get involved with the effort to restore the Colorado River through Change the Course, a partnership of National Geographic and other organizations.

Sunday, November 23, 2014

Racial gap in U.S. arrest rates: 'Staggering disparity' . . . but why, people, why?




 Verne Strickland usadotcom 11/24/14 

This is a huge, sprawling story -- a "study" would be more accurate -- about black arrests in the U.S. being disproportionately higher than whites. To me this whole cock-eyed issue is more a crusade by blacks and liberals to use arrest rates somehow as a signal that blacks are unfairly singled out -- not that they are actually running afoul of the law. The article, in that regard, is scary. It will be used to whip up even more racial tension, which has reached the breaking point in Ferguson, and is simmering elsewhere. This is a big story about a big problem. I hope you'll read it. You won't find it comforting. You may, though, like me, come away wondering why the black communities, where most of the troubles center, don't handle these matters like a real crisis -- one in which they are as much the cause as the victim.  

 

Racial gap in U.S. arrest rates: 'Staggering disparity' . . . but why, people, why?

 



When it comes to racially lopsided arrests, the most remarkable thing about Ferguson, Mo., might be just how ordinary it is.
Police in Ferguson — which erupted into days of racially charged unrest after a white officer killed an unarmed black teen — arrest black people at a rate nearly three times higher than people of other races.
At least 1,581 other police departments across the USA arrest black people at rates even more skewed than in Ferguson, a USA TODAY analysis of arrest records shows. That includes departments in cities as large and diverse as Chicago and San Francisco and in the suburbs that encircle St. Louis, New York and Detroit.
Those disparities are easier to measure than they are to explain. They could be a reflection of biased policing; they could just as easily be a byproduct of the vast economic and educational gaps that persist across much of the USA — factors closely tied to crime rates. In other words, experts said, the fact that such disparities exist does little to explain their causes.
"That does not mean police are discriminating. But it does mean it's worth looking at. It means you might have a problem, and you need to pay attention," said University of Pittsburgh law professor David Harris, a leading expert on racial profiling.
Whatever the reasons, the results are the same: Blacks are far more likely to be arrested than any other racial group in the USA. In some places, dramatically so.
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MORE: Full-screen interactive of arrests in the USA
At least 70 departments scattered from Connecticut to California arrested black people at a rate 10 times higher than people who are not black, USA TODAY found.
"Something needs to be done about that," said Ezekiel Edwards, the head of the ACLU's Criminal Law Reform Project, which has raised concerns about such disparate arrest rates. "In 2014, we shouldn't continue to see this kind of staggering disparity wherever we look."
The unrest in Ferguson was stoked by mistrust among black residents who complained that the city's police department had singled them out for years. For example, every year, traffic stop data compiled by Missouri's attorney general showed Ferguson police stopped and searched black drivers at rates markedly higher than whites.
A grand jury is considering whether Officer Darren Wilson should face criminal charges for shooting a teen, Michael Brown. Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency Monday as authorities braced for more unrest after the grand jury's decision is announced.
Such tensions are not new. Nationwide, blacks are stopped, searched, arrested and imprisoned at rates higher than people of other races. USA TODAY's analysis, using arrests reported to the federal government in 2011 and 2012, found that those inequities are far wider in many cities across the country, from St. Louis to Atlanta to suburban Dearborn, Mich.
SUSPICION IN DEARBORN
A dozen people stood or slumped on benches before sunrise in Dearborn on a recent morning, waiting for officers to unlock the doors of the 19th District Court, where they had been summoned to answer traffic citations and petty criminal charges. Almost everyone who lives in Dearborn is white (including a large population of Arabs). Almost everyone waiting in the morning dim was black.
"You can see who's going in there. I guarantee they don't live here," Lawrence Wynn, who is black, said, looking at the line outside the courthouse door. Most days, Wynn said, he detours around Dearborn on his way home from his job at a suburban auto plant. It makes the journey half again as long, "but I'd rather do that than have to come through Dearborn at night."
He leaned in close. "I think they're targeting people."
Dearborn police officers and officials say that's not true. The city's police chief, Ronald Haddad, said the arrest rates are skewed because many of the people his officers arrest don't live in the city. They're picked up at the shopping mall, on their way to work or simply when they're driving through. Some are detained by private security officers before police ever arrive, meaning police would have no chance to single them out.
Haddad said it is unfair to measure his officers' work against the city's demographics. "We treat everyone the same," he said.
More than half of the people Dearborn police arrested in 2011 and 2012 were black, according to reports they submitted to the FBI. By comparison, about 4% of the city's residents are black, as are about a quarter of the people who live in Metropolitan Detroit. Over those two years, the department reported arresting 4,500 black people – 500 more than lived in the city. As a result, the arrest rate for blacks, compared with the city's population, was 26 times higher than for people of other races.



"There is a disparity. We feel like it's racial in a lot of cases," said Bryan Allen, who said he's planning to move his family out of neighboring Dearborn Heights as soon as his youngest daughter graduates from a Dearborn high school.
Allen and his wife, Shelly, said they have their own reasons to be mistrusting: Seven years ago, after Dearborn police shut down a party at a local banquet hall that got out of hand, officers brought their daughter and three other black teens to the police station. A white friend came with them because she had planned to ride home with the girls.
What happened next became the subject of a federal lawsuit: The girls charged that officers took the white teen to the lobby to call her parents but brought three of the black teens to the back of the station, where they were locked up and searched. When one of the girls asked why they were being brought in the back doors, one of the officers replied, "trash in and trash out," according to court records. None of the girls was charged with a crime. The suit was settled out of court.
LARGE GAPS, NO EASY ANSWERS
To measure the breadth of arrest disparities, USA TODAY examined data that police departments report to the FBI each year. For each agency, USA TODAY compared the number of black people arrested during 2011 and 2012 with the number who lived in the area the department protects. (The FBI tracks arrests by race; it does not track arrests of Hispanics.)
The review did not include thousands of smaller departments or agencies that serve areas with only a small black population. It also did not include police agencies in most parts of Alabama, Florida and Illinois because those states had not reported complete arrest data to the FBI.
The review showed:
• Blacks are more likely than others to be arrested in almost every city for almost every type of crime. Nationwide, black people are arrested at higher rates for crimes as serious as murder and assault, and as minor as loitering and marijuana possession.
• Arrest rates are particularly lopsided in some pockets of the country, including St. Louis' Missouri suburbs near Ferguson. In St. Louis County alone, more than two dozen police departments had arrest rates more lopsided than Ferguson's. In nearby Clayton, Mo., for example, only about 8% of residents are black, compared with about 57% of people the police arrested, according to the city's FBI reports. Clayton's police chief, Kevin Murphy, said in a prepared statement that "Ferguson has laid bare the fact that everyone in law enforcement needs to take a hard look at how we can better serve our communities and address any disparities that have existed in our departments for too long."
• Deep disparities show up even in progressive university towns. USA TODAY found police in Berkeley, Calif., and Madison, Wis., arrested black people at a rate more than nine times higher than members of other racial groups. Madison Police Chief Michael Koval said most of the arrests happen in the poorest sections of the city, which are disproportionately black, and where some residents have pleaded for even more police presence. Still, he said, "I think it would be remiss to suggest the police get out of this whole thing with a free pass. We have to constantly be doing the introspective look at who we are hiring and how we are training."
• Arrest rates are lopsided almost everywhere. Only 173 of the 3,538 police departments USA TODAY examined arrested black people at a rate equal to or lower than other racial groups.
Phillip Goff, president of the University of California Los Angeles' Center for Policing Equity, said such comparisons are "seductively misleading" because they say more about how racial inequities play out than about what causes them. Those disparities are closely tied to other social and economic inequities, he said, and like most things that involve race, they defy simple explanations.
"There is no doubt a significant degree of law enforcement bias that is the engine for this. But there's also no controversy that educational quality and employment discrimination lead to this," he said. "It's not an indicator of how big a problem there is with a police department. It's an aggregator of what's going on in the community."
Still, he said, "there's some level of disparity that is a warning sign."
Whatever the causes, Harris said such pronounced disparities have consequences. "Believe me, the people who are subject to this are noticing it and they're noticing it not just individually but as a group. It gets talked about, handed down, and it sows distrust of the whole system," he said.
'THEY WERE BEATING HIM UP'
In Dearborn, distrust was sown years ago.
Dearborn is the birthplace of the modern auto industry, a mostly white and Arab suburb snugged into the southwest corner of Detroit, the poorest and blackest of America's major cities. Its border was long a stark racial divide. Until 1978, the city was presided over by a mayor, Orville Hubbard, who said he favored segregation and boasted to newspapers that he would use the instruments of government to keep blacks from moving in. He had "Keep Dearborn Clean" emblazoned on the city's police cars.
"Our history is not always something we can be proud of. But we've learned from our mistakes," Haddad, Dearborn's police chief, said. "It's unfair that we have to keep fighting that ghost."



Dearborn today is different, he said. The police force has worked to build ties with the city's large community of Arab immigrants. Its officers have cameras in their cars and microphones on their uniforms. Soon, some will start wearing body cameras, too. Their use of force has plummeted in recent years, and so have civilian complaints.
Haddad said most of his department's arrests come after traffic stops on the city's busy arteries, or at the mall, one of the large shopping centers closest to Detroit. Many of the people his officers arrest live in Detroit – a city beset by poverty, violent crime and a faltering school system – and are passing through to work or shop.
Still, allegations of discrimination have persisted there for decades. The local NAACP branch accused Dearborn police of singling out blacks for traffic stops in 1997. Civil rights lawsuits – alleging excessive force and officers using racial epithets – have piled up, too, though the number of such complaints has fallen sharply in recent years.
"There's a lot of storied history, but I think a lot of that is either false or times have changed," said Gregg Algier, who retired from Dearborn's police department this summer after 22 years. "There's no one really getting targeted for their race."
But in suburban Detroit, there is also little doubt that blacks are far more likely to face arrest than people of other races. For example, police in Livonia, another Detroit suburb, arrested blacks at a rate 16 times higher than others. In neighboring Allen Park, it's 20 times higher.
"Our numbers are what our numbers are. Our officers aren't being told to look for any particular demographic. We come across what we come across," Allen Park Police Chief James Wilkewitz said. Allen Park has two interstate highways and a large retail complex not far from the edge of Detroit, and many of the people the city's police arrest live somewhere else.
In some ways, Dearborn has become an odd place to hear such complaints. Its police department won a civil rights award this year. Haddad is the state's first Arab-American police chief. And among the most significant lawsuits over policing there is a complaint that county sheriff's deputies didn't do enough to protect a group of white Christians who were protesting at an Arab festival in Dearborn.
Still, Haddad acknowledges the accumulated mistrust. "There are people who feel that way, and they have cause to feel that way," he said. "We shouldn't be defined by one bad episode."
Dearborn has a history of those, too.
On Father's Day in 2008, for example, two Dearborn officers arrested a diabetic man who had been pulled over by the side of a freeway. The man, Ernest Griglen, 59, was on disability from Detroit's school system after he hurt his ankle helping a special education student off the bus.
An Allen Park police officer stopped Griglen, who was black, after seeing him climb out of his car in the middle of the road. She wrote in a report that she thought he was upset; doctors later concluded he was having a diabetic episode, a sudden drop in blood sugar that relatives said could make him seem dazed or drunk.
Two Dearborn officers arrived moments later. One, Richard Michalski, wrote that officers were afraid Griglen might have a gun in his waistband, so they "guided him to the ground," and wrestled him into handcuffs. The gun turned out to be an insulin pump.
Witnesses remembered it differently. One, Yolanda Lipsey, testified in a deposition that the Dearborn officers threw Griglen to the ground and "just started hitting him, hitting him and kicking him. … They were beating him up."
When she saw her husband, Pam Griglen thought he had been in a car accident. "His clothes were all torn and dirty and looked scuffed. He had a large knot on his forehead, it was like the size of a golf ball, and he had what looked like boot prints on his face," she said. "I just couldn't believe it. And he said 'They beat me, Pam.'"
Griglen complained that his head hurt. Then he said he could not see. "That was the last time my husband spoke to me," Pam Griglen said. He spent the next 11 months in a coma and finally died in 2009. The medical examiner listed his cause of death as bleeding in his brain, caused by "blunt force head trauma."
Dearborn settled a lawsuit brought by Griglen's family. The department reprimanded both officers for turning in their use of force reports late. (Michalski later resigned after he was charged with assault and brandishing a firearm during an off-duty traffic incident. He declined to comment.)
"The Dearborn policemen seem like they're kind of a little rougher with the black community," Pam Griglen said. "My husband was a good man, a hard worker. He took care of his family. He had a diabetic episode and they thought the worst. Thought he was drunk. Thought he had a gun. Black man in a Cadillac. They thought the worst."
Follow investigative reporter Brad Heath on Twitter @bradheath.
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