How Slavery Really Ended In America.

How Slavery Really Ended in America
By ADAM GOODHEART

On May 23, 1861, little more than a month into the Civil Whttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifar, three young black men rowed across the James River in Virginia and claimed asylum in a Union-held citadel. Fort Monroe, Va., a fishhook-shaped spit of land near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, had been a military post since the time of the first Jamestown settlers. This spot where the slaves took refuge was also, by remarkable coincidence, the spot where slavery first took root, one summer day in 1619, when a Dutch ship landed with some 20 African captives for the fledgling Virginia Colony.

Two and half centuries later, in the first spring of the Civil War, Fort Monroe was a lonely Union redoubt in the heart of newly Confederate territory. Its defenders stood on constant guard. Frigates and armed steamers crowded the nearby waters known as Hampton Roads, one of the world’s great natural harbors. Perspiring squads of soldiers hauled giant columbiad cannons from the fort’s wharf up to its stone parapets. Yet history would come to Fort Monroe not amid the thunder of guns and the clash of fleets, but stealthily, under cover of darkness, in a stolen boat.

Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory and James Townsend were field hands who — like hundreds of other local slaves — had been pressed into service by the Confederates, compelled to build an artillery emplacement amid the dunes across the harbor. They labored beneath the banner of the 115th Virginia Militia, a blue flag bearing a motto in golden letters: “Give me liberty or give me death.”

After a week or so of this, they learned some deeply unsettling news. Their master, a rebel colonel named Charles Mallory, was planning to send them even farther from home, to help build fortifications in North Carolina. That was when the three slaves decided to leave the Confederacy and try their luck, just across the water, with the Union.

It cannot have been an easy decision for the men. What kind of treatment would they meet with at the fort? If the federal officers sent them back, would they be punished as runaways — perhaps even as traitors? But they took their chances. Rowing toward the wharf that night in May, they hailed a guard and were admitted to the fort.

The next morning they were summoned to see the commanding general. The fugitives could not have taken this as an encouraging sign. Having lived their whole lives near the fort, they probably knew many of its peacetime officers by sight, but the man who awaited them behind a cluttered desk was someone whose face they had never seen. Worse still, as far as faces went, his was not — to put it mildly — a pleasant one. It was the face of a man whom many people, in the years ahead, would call a brute, a beast, a cold-blooded murderer. It was a face that could easily make you believe such things: a low, balding forehead, slack jowls and a tight, mean little mouth beneath a drooping mustache. It would have seemed a face of almost animal-like stupidity had it not been for the eyes. These glittered shrewdly, almost hidden amid crinkled folds of flesh. One of them had an odd sideways cast, as if its owner were always considering something else besides the thing in front of him. These were the eyes that now surveyed Baker, Mallory and Townsend.

The general began asking them questions: Who was their master? Was he a rebel or a Union man? Were they field hands or house servants? Did they have families? Why had they run away? Could they tell him anything about the Confederate fortifications they had been working on? Their response to this last question — that the battery was still far from completion — seemed to please him. At last he dismissed the three brusquely, offering no indication of their fate.

Maj. Gen. Benjamin Franklin Butler arrived at the fort only a day ahead of the fugitive slaves, greeted at the esplanade by a 13-gun salute. That morning, Butler sat down to compose an important initial report. When an adjutant interrupted to inform him of the fugitives, Butler set down his pen. The War Department could wait. The three ragged black men waiting outside were a more pressing matter.

Butler was no abolitionist, but the three slaves presented a problem. True, the laws of the United States were clear: all fugitives must be returned to their masters. The founding fathers enshrined this in the Constitution; Congress reinforced it in 1850 with the Fugitive Slave Act; and it was still the law of the land — including, as far as the federal government was concerned, within the so-called Confederate states. The war had done nothing to change it. Most important, noninterference with slavery was the very cornerstone of the Union’s war policy. President Abraham Lincoln had begun his inaugural address by making this clear, pointedly and repeatedly. “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists,” the president said. “I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”
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Yet to Fort Monroe’s new commander, the fugitives who turned up at his own front gate seemed like a novel case. The enemy had been deploying them to construct a battery aimed directly at his fort — and no doubt would put them straight back to work if recaptured, with time off only for a sound beating. They had just offered him some highly useful military intelligence. And Virginia, as of 12 or so hours ago, was officially in rebellion against the federal government, having just ratified the secession ordinance passed a month before. Butler had not invited the fugitives in or engineered their escape, but here they were, literally at his doorstep: a conundrum with political and military implications, at the very least. He could not have known — not yet — that his response that day might change the course of the national drama that was then just beginning. Yet it was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that an unanticipated bureaucratic dilemma would force the hand of history.

Despite his rank, General Butler had been a professional soldier barely four weeks. In private life, back in Massachusetts, he was a lawyer, and a very successful one — although he grew up poor, the swamp Yankee son of a widow who kept a boardinghouse in Lowell, the textile-mill town. Unable to attract clients through social connections or charm, he became an expert quibbler: a man who knew every loose thread in the great tangled skein of common law and who could unravel an opponent’s entire case with the gentlest of tugs. By his early 40s, he had also built a successful career as a state legislator and harbored larger political ambitions.

A fellow officer once called Butler “less like a major general than like a politician who is coaxing for votes.” Race-baiting was red meat to many of his working-class constituents in Lowell, and he had always been glad to toss morsels in their direction. But after barely 24 hours at Fort Monroe, the new commander had already sized up his new constituency. The garrison was made up predominantly of eager volunteers from New England, many with antislavery sympathies. How was Butler to win the confidence — or even obedience — of such men if his first act as their commander was to send three poor blacks back into bondage?

Butler’s features may have been brutish and his manners coarse, but inwardly, he nursed the outsize vanity of certain physically ugly men — vanity often manifest in a craving for approval and adulation. He also possessed a sympathetic, even occasionally sentimental, heart.

Still . . . sentiment was a fine thing; so was the admiration of one’s subordinates. Ultimately, though, his duty was to his commander in chief. With a few strokes of his pen, Lincoln had made Butler a major general; the president could just as easily unmake him, sending him back to Lowell in disgrace — and with another stroke, for that matter, send the blacks back to their master as slaves.

Whatever Butler’s decision on the three fugitives’ fate, he would have to reach it quickly. He had barely picked up his pen to finally begin that report before an adjutant interrupted with another message: a rebel officer, under flag of truce, had approached the causeway of Fort Monroe. The Virginians wanted their slaves back.

Waiting before the front gate was a man on horseback: Maj. John Baytop Cary of the 115th. With his silver gray whiskers and haughtily tilted chin, he appeared every inch the Southern cavalier.

Butler, also on horseback, went out to meet him. The men rode, side by side, off federal property and into rebel Virginia. They must have seemed an odd pair: the dumpy Yankee, unaccustomed to the saddle, slouching along like a sack of potatoes; the trim, upright Virginian, in perfect control of himself and his mount.

Cary got down to business. “I am informed,” he said, “that three Negroes belonging to Colonel Mallory have escaped within your lines. I am Colonel Mallory’s agent and have charge of his property. What do you mean to do with those Negroes?”
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“I intend to hold them,” Butler said.

“Do you mean, then, to set aside your constitutional obligation to return them?”

Even the dour Butler must have found it hard to suppress a smile. This was, of course, a question he had expected. And he had prepared what he thought was a fairly clever answer.

“I mean to take Virginia at her word,” he said. “I am under no constitutional obligations to a foreign country, which Virginia now claims to be.”

“But you say we cannot secede,” Cary retorted, “and so you cannot consistently detain the Negroes.”

“But you say you have seceded,” Butler said, “so you cannot consistently claim them. I shall hold these Negroes as contraband of war, since they are engaged in the construction of your battery and are claimed as your property.”

Ever the diligent litigator, Butler had been reading up on his military law. In time of war, he knew, a commander had a right to seize any enemy property that was being used for hostile purposes. The three fugitive slaves, before their escape, were helping build a Confederate gun emplacement. Very well, then — if the Southerners insisted on treating blacks as property, this Yankee lawyer would treat them as property, too. Legally speaking, he had as much justification to confiscate Baker, Mallory and Townsend as to intercept a shipment of muskets or swords.

Cary, frustrated, rode back to the Confederate lines. Butler, for his part, returned to Fort Monroe feeling rather pleased with himself. Still, he knew that vanquishing the rebel officer was only a minor victory, and perhaps a momentary one if his superiors in Washington frowned on what he had done.

The following day, a Saturday, Butler picked up his pen and resumed his twice-interrupted dispatch to Washington. Certain questions had arisen, he began, “of very considerable importance both in a military and political aspect, and which I beg leave to herewith submit.”

But before this missive reached its destination, matters would become even more complicated. On Sunday morning, eight more fugitives turned up at Union lines outside the fort. On Monday, there were 47 — and not just young men now, but women, old people, entire families. There was a mother with a 3-month-old infant in her arms. There was an aged slave who had been born in the year of America’s independence.

By Wednesday, a Massachusetts soldier would write home: “Slaves are brought in here hourly.”

“What’s to Be Done With the Blacks?” asked a headline in The Chicago Tribune. That was the question now facing the Lincoln administration. Within days after the three fugitive slaves crossed the river, their exploits — and their fate — were being discussed throughout the nation. At first the newspapers played it more or less as a comic sketch in a minstrel show: a Yankee shyster outwits a drawling Southern aristocrat. But Lincoln saw things in a more serious light. The president realized he might now be forced to make a signal verdict about matters he previously tried to avoid: slavery, race and emancipation.

Lincoln and his cabinet gathered to address Butler’s decision — and ended up punting. While reminding Butler that “the business you are sent upon . . . is war, not emancipation,” they left the general to decide what to do with fugitive slaves — including whether or not to continue declaring them contraband of war. Unfortunately, no detailed account of the deliberations survives. But a letter from one cabinet secretary, Montgomery Blair, suggests they were driven by a motive as common in Washington then as it is now: “a desire to escape responsibility for acting at all at this time.” By that point, the administration had already received a second dispatch from Butler, describing the influx of women and children. With this in mind, Blair — a member of a slaveholding Maryland family — suggested one pragmatic “modification” to Butler’s policy. “You can . . . take your pick of the lot and let the rest go so as not to be required to feed unproductive laborers or indeed any that you do not require,” he urged. As to the slaves’ eventual fate, Blair wrote, of course no one was suggesting that they be set free. Perhaps at the end of the war, those who belonged to men convicted of treason could be legally confiscated and sent off to Haiti or Central America. (The New York Herald, meanwhile, proposed that the federal government should wait until the war ended and sell all the slaves back to their owners, at half-price, to finance its cost.)

Yet Butler realized what Blair did not: events were unfolding far too quickly for any of that. Despite the counsels from Washington, Butler was not turning away “unproductive” fugitives. He replied: “If I take the able-bodied only, the young must die. If I take the mother, must I not take the child?” By early June, some 500 fugitives were within the Union lines at Fort Monroe.
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“Stampede Among the Negroes in Virginia,” proclaimed Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, with a double-page spread of dramatic woodcuts showing black men, women and children crossing a creek under a full moon, then being welcomed heartily into the fort by General Butler himself (or rather, by the artist’s trimmer, handsomer version of him). One correspondent estimated that “this species of property under Gen. Butler’s protection [is] worth $500,000, at a fair average of $1,000 apiece in the Southern human flesh market.”

Journalists throughout the Union quipped relentlessly about the “shipments of contraband goods” or, in the words of The Times, “contraband property having legs to run away with, and intelligence to guide its flight” — until, within a week or two after Butler’s initial decision, the fugitives had a new name: contrabands. It was a perfectly composed bit of slang, a minor triumph of Yankee ingenuity.

Were these blacks people or property? Free or slave? Such questions were, as yet, unanswerable — for answering them would have raised a host of other questions that few white Americans were ready to address. Contrabands let the speaker or writer off the hook by letting the escapees be all those things at once. “Never was a word so speedily adopted by so many people in so short a time,” one Union officer wrote. Within a few weeks, the average Northern newspaper reader could scan, without blinking, a sentence like this one: “Several contrabands came into the camp of the First Connecticut Regiment today.”

As routine as the usage soon became, however, a hint of Butler’s joke remained, a slight edge of nervous laughter. A touch of racist derision, too: William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, carped, justly enough, that it was offensive to speak of human beings that way. Yet in its very absurdity, reflecting the Alice-in-Wonderland legal reasoning behind Butler’s decision, the term also mocked the absurdity of slavery — and the willful stupidity of federal laws that, for nearly a century, had acknowledged no meaningful difference between a bushel of corn and a human being with dark skin. Eventually, even black leaders adopted it.

Back at Monroe — dubbed “the freedom fort” — fugitives continued arriving daily. Each morning, dozens lined up to pitch in with manual labor. Soon they seemed almost like members of the garrison. A Times correspondent wrote: “Their shovels and their other implements of labor, they handle and carry as soldiers do their guns. . . . I have no doubt they would make fair or even excellent soldiers.” Moreover, as the garrison’s medical chief remarked, “they are the pleasantest faces to be seen at the post.”

Many of the Union soldiers had never really spoken with a black person before; the Vermont farmboys had perhaps never even seen one before leaving home. Now they were conversing with actual men and women who had been (and perhaps still were) slaves: people who had previously figured only as a political abstraction. Some fugitives shared horrific accounts; one man described “bucking,” a practice in which a slave, before being beaten, had his wrists and ankles tied and slipped over a wooden stake. Almost all spoke of loved ones sold away; the most chilling thing was that they said it matter-of-factly, as if their wives or children had simply died.

Perhaps most surprising of all — for Northerners accustomed to Southern tales of contentedly dependent slaves — was this, in the words of one soldier: “There is a universal desire among the slaves to be free. . . . Even old men and women, with crooked backs, who could hardly walk or see, shared the same feeling.”

General Butler grew ever more adamant in the defense of “his” contrabands, to a degree that must have shocked his old associates. By July, he began pressing the Lincoln administration to admit that the contrabands were not really contraband: that they had become free. Indeed, that they were — in a legal sense — no longer things but people: “Have they not by their master’s acts, and the state of war, assumed the condition, which we hold to be the normal one, of those made in God’s image? . . . I confess that my own mind is compelled by this reasoning to look upon them as men and women.”

It would take another 14 months — and tens of thousands more Union casualties — before the Lincoln administration was ready to endorse such a view.

“Shall we now end the war and not eradicate the cause?” the general wrote to a friend in August. “Will not God demand this of us now [that] he has taken away all excuse for not pursuing the right?” (During the rest of the war, Butler’s support for black civil rights — and harsh treatment of rebel sympathizers — made him hated throughout most of the South, where he won the nickname Beast Butler.)
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More and more people had begun to share Butler’s conviction that the fugitives at Monroe stood in the vanguard of a larger revolution. “I have watched them with deep interest, as they filed off to their work, or labored steadily through the long, hot day,” a Northern visitor to the fort wrote. “Somehow there was to my eye a weird, solemn aspect to them, as they walked slowly along, as if they, the victims, had become the judges in this awful contest, or as if they were . . . spinning, unknown to all, the destinies of the great Republic.”

Earthshaking events are sometimes set in motion by small decisions. Perhaps the most famous example was when Rosa Parks boarded a segregated bus in Montgomery, Ala. More recently, a Tunisian fruit vendor’s refusal to pay a bribe set off a revolution that continues to sweep across the Arab world. But in some ways, the moment most like the flight of fugitive slaves to Fort Monroe came two decades ago, when a minor East German bureaucratic foul-up loosed a tide of liberation across half of Europe. On the evening of Nov. 9, 1989, a tumultuous throng of people pressed against the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie, in response to an erroneous announcement that the ban on travel to the West would be lifted immediately. The captain in charge of the befuddled East German border guards dialed and redialed headquarters to find some higher-up who could give him definitive orders. None could. He put the phone down and stood still for a moment, pondering. “Perhaps he came to his own decision,” Michael Meyer of Newsweek would write. “Whatever the case, at 11:17 p.m. precisely, he shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, ‘Why not?’ . . . ‘Alles auf!’ he ordered. ‘Open ’em up,’ and the gates swung wide.”

The Iron Curtain did not unravel at that moment, but that night the possibility of cautious, incremental change ceased to exist, if it had ever really existed at all. The wall fell because of those thousands of pressing bodies, and because of that border guard’s shrug.

In the very first months of the Civil War — after Baker, Mallory and Townsend breached their own wall, and Butler shrugged — slavery’s iron curtain began falling all across the South. Lincoln’s secretaries John Hay and John Nicolay, in their biography of the president, would say of the three slaves’ escape, “Out of this incident seems to have grown one of the most sudden and important revolutions in popular thought which took place during the whole war.”

Within weeks after the first contrabands’ arrival at Fort Monroe, slaves were reported flocking to the Union lines just about anywhere there were Union lines: in Northern Virginia, on the Mississippi, in Florida. It is unclear how many of these escapees knew of Butler’s decision, but probably quite a few did. Edward Pierce, a Union soldier who worked closely with the contrabands, marveled at “the mysterious spiritual telegraph which runs through the slave population,” though he most likely exaggerated just a bit when he continued, “Proclaim an edict of emancipation in the hearing of a single slave on the Potomac, and in a few days it will be known by his brethren on the gulf.”

In August, Lincoln’s War Department tried to bring some clarity to the chaos by asking Union commanders to collect detailed information on each fugitive: not just name and physical description but “the name and the character, as loyal or disloyal, of the master” — since whether the master supported the Union or the Confederacy was, of course, essential to determining whether the particular man or woman counted as legitimate contraband. Such a system would let the federal government assure slaveholders that their “rights” were protected, and possibly return the slaves to their proper owners once the rebel states had rejoined the Union.

But how were officers supposed to tell whether a master they had never laid eyes on was loyal or disloyal — even assuming that the slave was telling the truth in identifying him? Besides, didn’t the military have more pressing business at the moment, like fighting the war? The new contraband doctrine was utterly unenforceable almost from the moment it was devised, but it became hugely influential precisely because it was so unenforceable: it did not open the floodgates in theory, but it did so in practice.

And it did so with very little political risk to the Lincoln administration. Indeed, preposterous as the contraband doctrine was as a piece of law, it was also — albeit inadvertently — a masterstroke of politics; indeed, it satisfied nearly every potential theoretical and political objection while being completely unworkable in the long run. “There is often great virtue in such technical phrases in shaping public opinion,” Pierce observed. “The venerable gentleman, who wears gold spectacles and reads a conservative daily, prefers confiscation to emancipation. He is reluctant to have slaves declared freemen but has no objection to their being declared contrabands.”

The system was eminently practical in other terms. Regiments needed labor: extra hands to cook meals, wash clothes and dig latrines. When black men and women were willing to do these things, whites were happy not to ask inconvenient questions — not the first or the last time that the allure of cheap labor would trump political principles in America.
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Blacks were contributing to the Union cause in larger ways. Not just at Fort Monroe but also throughout the South they provided Northerners with valuable intelligence and expert guidance. When Lincoln’s master spy, Allan Pinkerton, traveled undercover through the Confederacy, he wrote, “My best source of information was the colored men. . . . I mingled freely with them, and found them ever ready to answer questions and to furnish me with every fact which I desired to possess.” They were often the only friends the Yankees encountered as they groped their way anxiously through hostile territory.

Just as influential was what did not happen: the terrible moment — long feared among whites — when slaves would rise up and slaughter their masters. It soon became apparent from the behavior of the contrabands that the vast majority of slaves did not want vengeance: they simply wanted to be free and to enjoy the same rights and opportunities as other Americans. Many were even ready to share in the hardships and dangers of the war. Millions of white Americans realized they did not actually have to fear a bloodbath if the slaves were suddenly set free. This awareness in itself was a revolution.

Most important, though, was the revolution in the minds of the slaves themselves. Within little more than a year, the stream of a few hundred contrabands at Fort Monroe became a river of tens — probably even hundreds — of thousands. They “flocked in vast numbers — an army in themselves — to the camps of the Yankees,” a Union chaplain wrote. “The arrival among us of these hordes was like the oncoming of cities.”

When Lincoln finally unveiled the Emancipation Proclamation in the fall of 1862, he framed it in Butleresque terms, not as a humanitarian gesture but as a stratagem of war.On the September day of Lincoln’s edict, a Union colonel ran into William Seward, the president’s canny secretary of state, on the street in Washington and took the opportunity to congratulate him on the administration’s epochal act.

Seward snorted. “Yes,” he said, “we have let off a puff of wind over an accomplished fact.”

“What do you mean, Mr. Seward?” the officer asked.

“I mean,” the secretary replied, “that the Emancipation Proclamation was uttered in the first gun fired at Sumter, and we have been the last to hear it.”

This article is adapted from “1861: The Civil War Awakening,” by Adam Goodheart (agoodheart2@washcoll.edu), published by Knopf this month. Mr. Goodheart is the author of “1861: The Civil War Awakening,” from which his article in this issue is adapted. He is director of Washington College’s C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, and contributes frequently to The Times’s online Civil War series, “Disunion.” Editor: Sheila Glaser (s.glaser-MagGroup@nytimes.com).

In Case You Missed Barack Obama's Address To United Nations Assembly, Like I Did, Watch It Here Below.

Did You Miss #BarackObama's Speech Last Night On #Isis (Or #Isil As He Called It)? I Did Too, So Let's Watch It Here.

POTUS Barack Obama: "In The Aftermath Of 9/11, W Tortured Some Folks .... We Did Some Things That Were Wrong"! Watch Video.

"Don't Come Back To Afghanistan"!: Army Sgt. Bowe #Bergdahl's Prisoner Exchange. Watch Video.

Kentucky Federal Court Of Appeals Upholds Life Sentence For Bowling Green Iraqi Born Terrorist, Mohanad Shareef Hammadi.

Appeals court upholds life sentence in terror case

An Iraqi man who pleaded guilty to terrorism charges wasn't entrapped into assisting in a plot to ship cash and weapons to al-Qaida in Iraq in 2010 and 2011 and the government did not take part in any misconduct, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

The U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the life sentence of 26-year-old Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, who pleaded guilty in 2012 to taking part in the plot, which was actually being run by a confidential informant for the FBI in Bowling Green.
 
"The government provided Hammadi with an opportunity to commit a crime, and he took it," Judge Karen Nelson Moore wrote for the three-judge panel in the case.

Hammadi and 32-year-old Waad Ramadan Alwan pleaded guilty in 2011 and 2012 to working with a man they thought was an insurgent in the United States to ship thousands of dollars in cash, machine guns, rifles, grenades and shoulder-fired missiles to al-Qaida in Iraq from 2010 through 2011.

Prosecutors said the two were actually working with a confidential informant who recorded the pair's activities and no money or weapons ever left the United States.
The two were arrested in May 2011 in Bowling Green, Kentucky, after a federal sting operation.

Hammadi is in a maximum-security prison in Colorado. Alwan is being held at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind.
Hammadi alleged that the federal government resorted to entrapment in pursuing the case against him and sought to enhance any possible prison sentence by including certain types of weapons in the scheme.

Moore, joined by judges Julia Smith Gibbons and Jeffrey S. Sutton, noted that Hammadi willingly took part in the plot.
"The government's conduct in this case is not irregular, and Hammadi offers no evidence that the government acted purposefully to trigger a twenty-five-year mandatory minimum (sentence)," Moore wrote.

Hammadi and Alwan admitted to working and planting explosives near Bayji, Iraq, where multiple U.S. units were working.

Prosecutors described Alwan as a seasoned terrorist in Iraq. They said he worked with the Mujahidin Shura Council, a violent group that claimed responsibility for the kidnapping, torture and deaths of two soldiers with the Fort Campbell-based 101st Airborne Division and the death of a third soldier from the same unit while they were patrolling about 60 miles south of Baghdad in June 2006.

Prosecutors linked Hammadi to Jaish al Mujahidin, also known as the Mujahidin Army, a group that claimed responsibility for shooting down American helicopters in Iraq in 2006 and 2007.
Alwan and Hammadi arrived in the United States in 2009. Both admitted to taking part in insurgent activities in Iraq in 2005 and 2006. Prosecutors said federal authorities became aware of Alwan when they found out he had been held in an Iraqi prison in June 2006 for insurgent activities.

It is unclear how or why Alwan was released from prison. Later, federal authorities found his fingerprint on an unexploded bomb in Iraq and launched an investigation.
Alwan recruited Hammadi into the plot in January 2011 and the pair spent five months working with the informant, prosecutors said.

What Happened In Benghazi, Libya? Watch Video.

Do you want more? Go here.

I Watched Syrian President Bashar al-Assad On 60 Minutes Today. He Does Not Appear To Be The Madman He Is Made Out To Be. Instead, He Appears Very Intelligent. Watch Video.

do you want to catch a brief history, consisting og Assad's dad,Hafez al-Assad: do you wanna know what a veteran, well placed CIA operative thinks about all of this Syrian stuff? well, watch video below:

Barack Obama As Senator Vs. Barack Obama As President. Will The Real Obama Please Sit Down!

 

Brad Cummings | On Syria, Obama '13 haunted by Obama '02

There once was a politician who appeared to be the kind of change our country wanted. He drew stark contrasts to the current administration of his day using the Iraq War as his main foil. One of his many winning talking points even included being among the first to oppose what was a very popular war back in 2002.
“... I’m opposed to a dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.” — Illinois State Sen. Barack Obama

Yet, there’s nothing more political or emotional a president could do than enter his country into war because of an artificially rendered “red line,” a line members of his team are now claiming wasn’t even meant to be drawn. It’s amazing, with these words above as a historical backdrop to President Obama’s ascension, that we are even considering a strike on another Middle Eastern country based largely on reasons of passion and politics.

In the same speech, then-state Sen. Barack Obama went on to paint Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein as a brutal man, acknowledging his possession of chemical weapons and brutalization of his own people. He defined Hussein as a dictator who defied U.N. resolutions and coveted nuclear capacity. And yet, this dictator was not worth going to war over.
“I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaida.”

How is this war in Syria any different than the one Obama opposed in Iraq? Are we really so riddled with short-term memory loss that we don’t recall the escalation of two wars that were supposed to be quick, localized efforts? No one can say the Syrian conflict would be limited to airstrikes with any certainty, especially since Syrian dictator Bashar Assad has pledged to retaliate. If Syria were to strike a U.S. embassy or our allies in Israel, does anyone believe we would (or should) stand down and take it?

Most important, this proposed war would do far more to “strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaida” than our war in Iraq. Much of the Syrian opposition is constructed of groups directly tied to the very terrorist organization that attacked our country 12 years ago today. It’s hard to imagine a greater benefit to those responsible for 9/11 than to clear the path for their takeover of an entire country, one that we already know possesses chemical weapons.

The Iraq War was the first full-fledged war of my adulthood. At 35 years old, many of my contemporaries, even those instinctively more hawkish like myself, have learned some great lessons over the last decade. More than anything, I’ve learned you can’t force a country to accept your worldview anymore than you can convert someone’s religion or force them to lose weight. Change comes from within, not without.

So do we make a similar mistake with Syria? What is an attack on this country for if not regime change and how do we guide regime change without at least implicitly imposing our way of life on a country lest we be stuck with the above scenario of al-Qaida rule? Possessing and using chemical weapons on the Iraqi people was not “clear rationale” for an attack but it is now in Syria. That makes about as much sense as a three-dollar bill.

With President Bush and a more principled President Obama, an attack was backed with the fear of knowing there’s “more where that’s coming from.” But now that our current president has made it clear he is willing to put every decision up for a vote and sway with the winds of the populace, we may now live in a world where enemies of the U.S. will not fear retaliation and instead count on capitulation. I don’t agree with going to war with Syria, but if President Obama stuck with his guns, the world would at least respect him in the morning.

As of this writing, Russia has now suggested a path forward to avoid a conflict by asking Syria to turn over their chemical weapons to the U.N. President Obama’s actions have made Vladimir Putin the voice of international reason. Honestly, this may be the most concerning revelation of all.

This is likely what happens when a president starts listening to those around him and not his core convictions. He’s no longer the man who lit a nation on fire with soaring rhetoric and inspired the world to the tune of a Nobel Peace Prize. Instead, he’s become a shell of his former inspirational self.
In his spare time, President Obama should take up reading some speeches delivered by a fresh-faced politician from early 2000s. He might still have a thing or two in common with that state senator from the Land of Lincoln.

Brad Cummings is COO of PM Advertising, and he previously served as Jefferson County Republican Party chairman. His column appears every third Wednesday. He can be reached at bradford.cummings@gmail.com

Just In Case You Missed Barack Obama's Speech Justifying "Hit And Run" On Syria Like I Did! Watch And Puke -- Or Enjoy.

FLOTUS Michelle Obama Opposes Syrian "Hit And Run". Maybe, She Should Be President Instead! Watch Video.

Watch Video Intelligence Community Showed To Members Of Senate Foreign Relations Committee To Prove Assad Used Sarin Gas Against His People. Do You Think We Need To Start Bombing? Remember They Told Us Saddam Hussein Had WMDs!

We Congratulate The U. S. House Of Representives For Limiting Military Involvement In Egypt And Syria, Consiatent With War Powers Act.

With little argument, House limits U.S. military involvement in Syria, Egypt

WASHINGTON — With little argument, the House of Representatives approved measures Wednesday that would prevent the Obama administration from spending money on U.S. military operations in Syria without consulting Congress and would forbid funding U.S. military or paramilitary operations in Egypt.

The measures, part of the House’s $598 billion defense bill, were supposed to be contentious issues exposing bipartisan rifts between interventionists who want to give Obama a free hand in dealing with the civil war in Syria and unrest in Egypt and war-weary lawmakers concerned that U.S. troops will be dragged into more military actions.

But both amendments were approved on voice votes with only scant dissent.

On Syria, lawmakers passed an amendment by Rep. Trey Radel, R-Fla., that would forbid any military action in Syria if it violates the War Powers Resolution – which requires the president to consult Congress before committing U.S. forces to battle or placing them in situations where hostilities are imminent.

The Radel amendment does not address the contentious issue of providing weapons to the Syrian rebels, whose campaign to topple President Bashar Assad is made up of as many as 1,200 largely independent groups, including some that are openly affiliated with al Qaida. Congressional intelligence committees recently signed off on an Obama administration proposal to have the CIA funnel unspecified arms and training to rebels aligned with the moderate Supreme Military Council, led by a defected Syrian general, Salim Idriss.

But the wording of the amendment would apply to setting up a no-fly zone or using U.S. ships to launch attacks on sites in Syria, and the debate showed that deeper military involvement in Syria is opposed by an unusual House coalition of conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats.
“I believe without a shadow of a doubt this is one of the most insane policies that borders on madness – the United States to give funding, training and arms most likely to al Qaida in Syria doesn’t make any sense,” said Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn. “This is absolute madness.”
Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., agreed, calling the situation in Syria “chaotic.”
“Distinguishing between the good rebels and the bad rebels is impossible,” Welch said on the House floor. “The notion that we can have a micromanaged approach and pick the good guys, and arm them, and not have any reasonable . . . expectation that the arms will get into bad hands I think is naive.”
Welch added that Congress has the responsibility to weigh in before U.S. troops are sent into harm’s way.

“We have a job to do under the Constitution,” he said.

The Obama administration last month notified Congress under the War Powers Resolution that a detachment of 700 U.S. troops who’d been participating in war games in Jordan would remain in that country “until the security situation becomes such that it is no longer needed.” The detachment includes Patriot anti-missile systems and fighter aircraft, the White House notification said.

The Egypt amendment by Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., would prohibit the Department of Defense from using money authorized in the defense bill to fund military operations in Egypt or to fund individuals, groups or organizations engaged in paramilitary activity.
“Since our national security interests in Syria and Egypt are unclear, we risk giving money and military assistance to our enemies,” Massie said when he introduced his measure last week. “The Constitution prohibits the president from unilaterally spending American taxpayer dollars on military operations without congressional approval.”

The Egypt vote occurred as the Obama administration suspended delivery of four F-16 fighter jets to Egypt this week. A Pentagon spokesman said that the United States values its relationship with Egypt but that the delay was necessary as Egypt remains divided over the military’s removal from office of Mohammed Morsi, the country’s first democratically elected president.
Pentagon spokesman George Little told reporters Wednesday that the United States no longer believes it is “appropriate to move forward with the delivery.”

At the State Department, spokeswoman Jen Psaki used nearly the exact same wording to explain the decision. “Given the current situation in Egypt, we do not believe it is appropriate to move forward with the delivery of the F-16s at this time,” she said.

Egyptian Military Makes Good On Threat And Deposes President Mohamed Mursi, A "Terrorists And Fool" Who "Failed To Meet The Demands Of The Egyptian People", "Ends The State Of Tension And Division".

Egypt army commander Ousts Morsi, suspends constitution

Egypt army commander suspends constitution (00:36)

(Reuters) - Egypt's armed forces overthrew elected Islamist President Mohamed Mursi on Wednesday and announced a political transition with the support of a wide range of political, religious and youth leaders.
After a day of drama in which tanks and troops deployed near the presidential palace as a military deadline for Mursi to yield to mass protests passed, the top army commander announced on television that the president had "failed to meet the demands of the Egyptian people".
 
Flanked by political and religious leaders and top generals, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi announced the suspension of the Islamist-tinged constitution and a roadmap for a return to democratic rule under a revised rulebook.
 
The president of the supreme constitutional court will act as interim head of state, assisted by an interim council and a technocratic government until new presidential and parliamentary elections are held.
"Those in the meeting have agreed on a roadmap for the future that includes initial steps to achieve the building of a strong Egyptian society that is cohesive and does not exclude anyone and ends the state of tension and division," Sisi said in a solemn address broadcast live on state television.
After he spoke, hundreds of thousands of anti-Mursi protesters in central Cairo's Tahrir Square erupted into wild cheering, setting off fireworks and waving flags. Cars drove around the capital honking their horns in celebration.
But a statement published in Mursi's name on his official Facebook page after Sisi's speech said the measures announced amounted to "a full military coup" and were "totally rejected".
 
The Arab world's most populous nation has been in turmoil since the fall of autocrat Hosni Mubarak as Arab Spring uprisings took hold in early 2011, arousing concern among allies in the West and in Israel, with which Egypt has a 1979 peace treaty.
The Muslim Brotherhood president, in office for just a year, was at a Republican Guard barracks surrounded by barbed wire, barriers and troops, but it was not clear whether he was under arrest. The state newspaper Al-Ahram said the military had told Mursi at 7 p.m. (1700 GMT) that he was no longer head of state.
 
"TERRORISTS AND FOOLS"
 
Military chiefs, vowing to restore order in a country racked by protests over Mursi's Islamist policies, earlier issued a call to battle in a statement headlined "The Final Hours". They said they were willing to shed blood against "terrorists and fools".
Armored vehicles took up position outside the state broadcasting headquarters on the Nile River bank, where soldiers patrolled the corridors and non-essential staff were sent home.
In another show of force, several hundred soldiers with armored vehicles staged a parade near the presidential palace, and security sources said Mursi and the entire senior leadership of his Muslim Brotherhood were banned from leaving the country.
Security sources told Reuters the authorities had sent a list of at least 40 leading members of the Brotherhood to airport police.
 
In a last-ditch statement a few minutes before the deadline, Mursi's office said a coalition government could be part of a solution to overcome the political crisis. But opposition parties refused to negotiate with him and met instead with the commander of the armed forces.
The Brotherhood's Egypt25 television station had broadcast live coverage of a rally of tens of thousands of Mursi supporters, even as the army moved tanks into position to prevent them from marching on the presidential palace or the Republican Guard barracks.
U.S. oil prices rose to a 14-month high above $100 a barrel partly on fears that unrest in Egypt could destabilize the Middle East and lead to supply disruption.
 
The massive anti-Mursi protests showed that the Brotherhood had not only alienated liberals and secularists by seeking to entrench Islamic rule, notably in a new constitution, but had also angered millions of Egyptians with economic mismanagement.
Tourism and investment have dried up, inflation is rampant and fuel supplies are running short, with power cuts lengthening in the summer heat and motorists spending hours fuelling cars.Earlier, Mursi's spokesman said it was better that he die in defense of democracy than be blamed by history.
"It is better for a president, who would otherwise be returning Egypt to the days of dictatorship, from which God and the will of the people has saved us, to die standing like a tree," spokesman Ayman Ali said, "Rather than be condemned by history and future generations for throwing away the hopes of Egyptians for establishing a democratic life."
Liberal opponents said a rambling late-night television address by Mursi showed he had "lost his mind".
 
The official spokesman of the Muslim Brotherhood said supporters were willing to become martyrs to defend Mursi.
"There is only one thing we can do: we will stand in between the tanks and the president," Gehad El-Haddad told Reuters at the movement's protest encampment in a Cairo suburb that houses many military installations and is near the presidential palace.
 

The country's two main religious leaders, the head of the Al-Azhar Islamic institute and the Coptic Pope, both expressed their support for the army's roadmap in speeches after Sisi, as did the main liberal opposition leader, Nobel peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei.

International Community Shows Little Support To Arm Syrian Rebels.

Little international support for arming Syria rebels

Growing evidence that the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad may have used chemical weapons against its own people has led to a crescendo of demands for the US to intervene in the Syrian civil war.

But neither the American people, nor Europeans, nor Syria's neighbours wholeheartedly support such a move, writes Bruce Stokes of the Pew Research Center.

The lack of sustained public backing, both in America and in the region, is the political context in which the Obama White House will "rethink all options" - as Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel put it on Thursday.

Demands for some form of American action against Assad have intensified now that the US government has acknowledged that it too, along with the British, French and Israeli governments, thinks that chemical weapons have been employed by the regime.
In a recent Washington Post op-ed piece, Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former head of the policy planning office in the US State Department, plaintively asked Obama: "Mr President, how many uses of chemical weapons does it take to cross a red line against the use of chemical weapons?"
And Senator John McCain has called for arming the rebel troops, establishing a no-fly zone over Syria and for the United States to "be prepared with an international force to go in and secure these stocks of chemical, and perhaps biological, weapons".

But such exhortations seem to be out of step with public sentiment in the United States, in Europe and in the Middle East.
Just 45% of the American public favours military intervention in Syria, even if it is confirmed that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against anti-government groups, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center conducted 25-28 April 2013 among 1,003 adults in the United States. More than half (54%) of the American public opposes or has no opinion about such action.
Moreover, even such qualified American support for intervention is relatively new. In December 2012, 63% of Americans thought that the United States had no responsibility to do something about the fighting in Syria between government forces and anti-government groups.

"People in the region do not even want their own government to get involved”

And in a Pew Research Center survey conducted in March 2013, before news emerged of the alleged use of chemical agents, nearly two-thirds (64%) of Americans were against even arming the rebels.

At the time (March 2013) there was even less stomach for military assistance to the rebels. Eight out of 10 Germans (82%) opposed the idea, as did more than two-thirds of the French (69%) and a majority of the British (57%).

Public opinion in the region is even less supportive of Western involvement. In five of the six countries in the region that were surveyed in March - Lebanon (80%), Turkey (68%), Tunisia (60%), Egypt (59%) and the Palestinian territories (63%) - publics opposed Americans or Europeans supplying the Syrian rebels with weapons. Only in Jordan (53%) did people back Western intervention and then only barely.

People in the region do not even want their own government to get involved. Even the Turks (66%) and the Lebanese (60%), both of whom share a border with Syria and now house hundreds of thousands of refugees from the civil war, oppose Arab military aid to the rebels. And only the Jordanians (65%) back Arab countries sending arms and military supplies to anti-government groups in Syria.
This allied and regional reluctance to get involved in Syria poses a problem for the Obama administration.
As American pundits and politicians call for Syrian intervention, however merited or unjustified those appeals may be on humanitarian grounds, such pleas have yet to rally majority support for such action in America, Europe or the Middle East.
Bruce Stokes is director of global economic attitudes at the Pew Research Center.

I Would Be Remiss If I Did Not Recognize, With Profound Sorrow, The 10Th Anniversary Of The War Fought On Unimaginable Pack Of LIES: The Iraqi War.

Enough said. If you want to read more, let Google help here.

AP: Iraqi Terrorist Caught In Bowling Green, Kentucky, Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, Sent To Serve Life Sentence At Big Sandy.

Iraqi sent to federal prison in eastern Ky.  

An Iraqi man sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to terrorism charges has been assigned to a high-security facility in Kentucky.

The federal Bureau of Prisons lists 25-year-old Mohanad Shareef Hammadi as an inmate at the United States Penitentiary-Big Sandy in Inez. The prison is about 140 miles east of Lexington.

A co-defendant, 32-year-old Waad Ramadan Alwan, received a 40-year sentence in January. Alwan had not been sent to a prison as of Saturday.

Hammadi and Alwan pleaded guilty in 2011 and 2012 to ship thousands in cash, machine guns, rifles, grenades and shoulder-fired missiles to al-Qaida in Iraq in 2010 and 2011. Prosecutors said the two were working with a confidential informant.
Both were arrested in May 2011 in Bowling Green after a federal sting operation.

ACCUSED IRAQI TERRORISTS IN KENTUCKY, MOHANAD SHAREEF HAMMADI AND WAAD RAMADAN ALWAN, RECEIVE LIFE AND 40 YEAR SENTENCES FROM FEDERAL JUDGE THOMAS B. RUSSELL IN BOWLING GREEN.

Iraqi men sentenced in Ky. terrorism case
By BRETT BARROUQUERE

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. (AP) — An Iraqi man who pleaded guilty to terrorism charges in Kentucky was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison without parole and a co-defendant received a 40-year sentence for his role in a plot to ship weapons and cash to insurgents in Iraq.

Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, 25, protested U.S. District Judge Thomas B. Russell's decision to send him away for life while granting 30-year-old Waad Ramadan Alwan less time in prison. Hammadi told Russell about growing up poor in Bayji, Iraq, and said his role in the scheme was merely helping a friend load a truck for much-needed money.

Hammadi's attorney, James Earhart of Louisville, had sought 25 years in prison for his client and said he would appeal the life sentence.

"A 25-year-old getting a life sentence is a tragedy," Earhart said. "The life that he lived is a tragedy."

Hammadi and Alwan pleaded guilty in 2011 and 2012 to working with a man they thought was an insurgent in the United States to ship thousands in cash, machine guns, rifles, grenades and shoulder-fired missiles to al-Qaida in Iraq from 2010 through 2011. Prosecutors said the two were actually working with a confidential informant who recorded the pair's activities and no money or weapons ever left the United States.

The two were arrested in May 2011 in Bowling Green, Ky., after a federal sting operation.

Former Pennsylvania National Guard Sgt. Brandon Miller of Chadds Ford, Pa., described the sentences as "outstanding."

Ford received a Purple Heart for burn injuries sustained when his Humvee blew up after hitting a roadside bomb near Bayji, where Alwan and Hammadi admitted to planning explosives.

U.S. Attorney David Hale said if Alwan hadn't cooperated, he would also have gotten a life sentence, but his help was valuable to investigators.

Alwan's attorney, Scott Wendelsdorf, declined to comment after the hearing.

Prosecutors described Alwan as a seasoned terrorist in Iraq. They said he worked with the Mujahidin Shura Council, a violent group that claimed responsibility for the kidnapping, torture and deaths of two soldiers with the Fort Campbell-based 101st Airborne Division and the death of a third soldier from the same unit while they were patrolling about 60 miles south of Baghdad in June 2006.

Prosecutors linked Hammadi to Jaish al Mujahidin, also known as the Mujahidin Army, a group that claimed responsibility for shooting down American helicopters in Iraq in 2006 and 2007.

Alwan's sentencing went relatively smoothly, with prosecutors petitioning Russell for a lesser sentence because of the defendant's cooperation and guilty plea. But Hammadi's hearing grew contentious at times as prosecutors accused him of changing his story in an effort to secure less prison time.

At two points during the hearing, Justice Department prosecutor Larry Schneider confronted Hammadi after he changed his account of what happened in Iraq and later in Bowling Green. Hammadi told Russell he wasn't part of an insurgent group in Iraq, even though he told the confidential informant he took part in at least 11 improvised explosive-device attacks on U.S. soldiers.

Like Alwan, Hammadi pleaded guilty to falsifying immigration records by not disclosing insurgent activities, in order to get into the United States.

"You did lie on your immigration forms. ... Is that correct?" Schneider asked.

"Yes," Hammadi said after a long pause. "Because it was what you wanted to hear."

Hammadi described his comments to the confidential informant as "just talk" that prosecutors misunderstood.

"If I was asking you how many people in my country, my town were killed, what would you say?" Hammadi asked Schneider, who repeatedly described the defendant as a terrorist.

"Mr. Hammadi, you are facing a life sentence," Schneider replied. "You don't get to ask questions."

Alwan and Hammadi arrived in the United States in 2009. Both admitted to taking part in insurgent activities in Iraq in 2005 and 2006. Schneider said federal authorities became aware of Alwan when they found out he had been held in an Iraqi prison in June 2006 for insurgent activities. It is unclear how or why Alwan was released from prison. Later, federal authorities found his fingerprint on an unexploded bomb in Iraq and launched an investigation.

Alwan recruited Hammadi into the plot in January 2011 and the pair spent five months working with the informant, prosecutors said.

Russell describe Alwan as "eagerly joining the operations in Kentucky" and recruiting Hammadi as part of an attempt to lead a terrorist cell in the United States.

"His motivation was to help the insurgents in their activities," Schneider said.

Read more: http://www.seattlepi.com/news/crime/article/Iraqi-men-sentenced-in-Ky-terrorism-case-4231073.php#ixzz2JQKzJzHm

Afghan survivors Of Ganjgal Battle Join Mounting Dispute Of Official Account Of Medal Of Honor Receipient Dakota Meyer's Feats.

Afghan survivors of Ganjgal battle dispute official account of Medal of Honor feats
By Jonathan S. Landay

ASMAR, Afghanistan — Nine Afghan soldiers who survived a 2009 battle that brought the first Medal of Honor to a living Marine since the Vietnam War have disputed the official accounts of how Marine Sgt. Dakota Meyer won the country’s highest military decoration.

The Afghans, whom U.S. military officials never interviewed , contradict key details of the narratives cited by President Barack Obama and the Marine Corps in awarding the decoration to Meyer for his actions during a battle that took place in the Ganjgal Valley in Afghanistan three years ago this past weekend.

The Afghans said that Meyer, who received the Medal of Honor in a White House ceremony on Sept. 15, 2011, couldn’t have killed up to eight insurgents as they charged his Humvee and that he didn’t twice vault from the vehicle to load up two dozen Afghan soldiers and drive them to safety. They also insisted that it was the belated arrival of U.S. helicopters – not Meyer’s intervention – that ended the Taliban ambush, allowing the withdrawal of U.S. and Afghan troops who’d been trapped in the valley.

The Afghans didn’t dispute that Meyer, of Greensburg, Ky., who’s now a 24-year-old sergeant in the Marine reserves, risked his life by braving enemy fire in helping U.S. and Afghan personnel recover the bodies of four American servicemen.

Questions about what Meyer did during the battle touch on the rigor and integrity of a military awards process that’s supposed to leave no margin of doubt or possibility of error in granting the nation’s highest military honor. A McClatchy investigation published last December showed that many of the feats attributed to Meyer by the Marine Corps and the White House were embellished or invented and weren’t substantiated by sworn statements from Meyer himself and others who participated in the battle.

McClatchy raised more questions about the process in August, when it revealed that another Medal of Honor nomination from the same battle, for former Army Capt. William Swenson, conflicted with parts of the official narratives of Meyer’s achievements.

Swenson’s nomination mysteriously disappeared from military computers, though it was reinstated eventually and is awaiting Obama’s approval. Under normal circumstances, according to Pentagon regulations, that approval had to come by last Saturday, the third anniversary of the battle, but Pentagon officials say that because the original nomination went awry the president has two more years to make a decision.

Questions about whether the Marines embellished Meyer’s feats came against a backdrop of pressure on the Pentagon over how Medals of Honor have been handled during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with many in Congress, veterans groups and the military complaining that too few had been granted. The Marine Corps reportedly also was frustrated by what it saw as insufficient acknowledgement of its sacrifices in both conflicts.

The Afghan survivors of the battle, however, have no stake in the outcome of discussions of Meyer’s feats, making their recollections valuable in sorting through conflicting information.

More is at stake than the military awards process. Meyer’s forthcoming book, for which he shared a six-figure advance, according to a publishing industry executive who requested anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss it, contains new details about his actions, according to a report Aug. 20 in the Marine Corps Times, which obtained an advance copy of the book. They include a claim that Meyer killed an insurgent with a rock in hand-to-hand combat, something that isn’t mentioned in any official account or military document.

Meyer, responding Tuesday in a telephone interview to the Afghan survivors’ recollections, said, “I don’t care what Afghans say. They don’t speak the same language.”

He said that he’d killed insurgents during his runs into the ambush zone but didn’t count how many. “Where did you ever have me saying numbers?” he asked. When he was told that an account attributed to him published on the Marine Corps’ website said he’d “killed at least eight Taliban insurgents,” he replied, “You should talk to the Marine Corps.”

The Marine Corps remained adamant in the defense of its account of Meyer’s actions.

“Two comprehensive investigations, eyewitness statements, a command inquiry and other supporting documents present clear, compelling and well-documented justification that Sergeant Meyer deserves our nation’s highest military honor,” a Marine Corps statement said. “Any attempt to denigrate Meyer’s bravery or the merit of his Medal of Honor is regrettable.”

The Ganjgal battle produced a raft of other decorations for bravery after as many as 60 Taliban insurgents ambushed some 90 Afghan troops and border police, their American military trainers and a McClatchy correspondent who were on a patrol to meet village elders. Ten Afghans, three Marines and a U.S. Navy medic were killed, and a wounded U.S. Army sergeant died a month later.

The battle also resulted in reprimands for dereliction of duty for two Army officers, for failing to call in timely air, artillery and ground support.

Meyer wasn’t among those caught in the ambush; he arrived as the recovery operation began. He was nominated for the Medal of Honor for helping to recover casualties at the risk of his life.

The McClatchy correspondent who was embedded with Meyer’s unit of Marine trainers at the time of the ambush interviewed the nine survivors from the Afghan National Army’s 1st Kandak, 2nd Infantry Brigade, 201st Corps, in Kabul, in the eastern city of Jalalabad and at a small U.S.-Afghan base in Asmar, a mountain backwater in insurgency-wracked Kunar province, about 30 miles north of Ganjgal.

The men, none of whom had heard of Meyer’s Medal of Honor, spoke with permission from the Afghan Ministry of Defense. They were aided in their recollections by overhead photographs of the U-shaped valley of descending terraced fields divided by waist-high stone walls, and a Google Earth topographical model of the battlefield constructed by a military professional using date, time and location data obtained from digital pictures shot during the ambush.

The Afghans differed on some details, such as the timing of some developments. Several explained that they were illiterate and couldn’t read a watch.

All nine, however, were consistent in saying that the belated arrival of U.S. helicopters forced the insurgents to withdraw, allowing the pinned-down Afghan and American troops to pull back.

“The arrival of the helicopters had a 100 percent impact on the enemy,” said Maj. Talib Khan, 54, of Kabul, who was the senior Afghan officer caught in the ambush. “It was because of the firing by the helicopters that we were able to evacuate our wounded.”

His version was backed by Nematullah, a 30-year-old private from Fakhar, in northern Takhar province, who suffered three gunshot wounds to his abdomen. Nematullah uses just one name, like many Afghans.

“When the air support arrived, everyone who’d taken cover behind the rocks or terraces was able to leave the valley,” he recalled. “The helicopters saved us.”

Several of the Afghans disputed the official accounts that Meyer had jammed two dozen Afghans into his vehicle during two runs, saying there weren’t that many where the Humvee had stopped.

One, Afghan Army Sgt. Ataullah, 29, said he clearly recalled what had taken place. He was gravely wounded in the ambush, with a cheek slashed open by a Taliban bullet and a scarf knotted around a thigh to stanch bleeding from another, when a Humvee roared up.

As gunfire sparked around them, a Marine jumped from the vehicle, “picked me up and drove me to safety,” he said. But Ataullah contradicted the official version, saying his rescuer was Marine Gunnery Sgt. Juan Rodriguez-Chavez, not Meyer.

“He worked with me in HQ (headquarters) Company. He got off the Humvee and put me in it,” Ataullah said. “The driver got out. The other guy (Meyer) was in the turret, firing . . . a .50-caliber machine gun.”

Five days later, Ataullah said, Rodriguez-Chavez visited him as he recuperated from his wounds in a U.S. clinic, and “he asked me how I was doing and how I was feeling.”

McClatchy asked Marine Corps Public Affairs to make Rodriguez-Chavez available for questions, but it said he declined to be interviewed.

All nine Afghans said Meyer couldn’t have killed up to eight Taliban as they charged his vehicle on a third run.

Afghan troops advancing into the valley with the U.S. helicopters’ belated arrival recovered only two enemy bodies, they explained, and several said that both had died before Meyer and Rodriguez-Chavez drove in. One was found next to the rock-strewn wash that provides the only drivable track between the walled terraces, and the other was recovered from a terrace nearer to the village.

Nematullah, a rocket-propelled grenade gunner who’d exhausted his ammunition, related how the pair of insurgents – he said he saw the bodies at his base later that day – confronted him after they’d made their way down the southern valley slope as the ambush raged.

“They saw me . . . and I pointed the empty rocket launcher at them. They were more cowardly than me. When I pointed the empty rocket launcher at them, they dropped to the ground,” he recalled. “I ran from there. I was wounded, but I could still run.”

“I didn’t see any Taliban on the track,” asserted Sgt. Mohammad Gul, 26, of Sayed Karam, in Paktia province, who helped retrieve casualties after spending most of the ambush guarding vehicles with Meyer and Rodriguez-Chavez about a mile from the village.

Gul said he drove an unarmored light Ford truck ahead of Meyer and Rodriguez-Chavez on the first run into the ambush zone, and he returned numerous times. “The Taliban did not fight close to the track,” he said.

Capt. Mohammad Sharif, an intelligence officer who wasn’t involved in the battle, said the two dead insurgents were from Ganjgal and that he’d delivered their corpses to local officials, who returned them to their families.

U.S. special forces and Afghan troops found no other bodies during a house-to-house search of the village after the battle, said Sharif, who added that the Afghan force remained in the hamlet until the following morning.

All nine Afghan survivors said there weren’t any Taliban fighting close to the track who could have charged Meyer’s vehicle during the casualty recovery operation. To begin with, they recounted, there were U.S. helicopters overhead, firing at any insurgents they spotted.

“There were no Taliban down in the valley,” said Arab Khan, a 29-year-old private from eastern Panjshir province who was on the southern slope in an “overwatch” position, exchanging fire with insurgents on hilltops. “I didn’t see any Taliban down on the track. At that point, the helicopters were above the valley. The Taliban wouldn’t have dared move.”

Many Afghan and American troops escaped down the rocky wash on which Meyer and Rodriguez-Chavez drove in, and they would have been shot by any Taliban fighting there, the survivors said.

“There was no enemy to our rear,” Ataullah said. “There were only friendly forces behind us.”

McClatchy special correspondent Ali Safi in Kabul contributed to this report.

Editor's note: Read more here and here.

WATCH CBS 60 MINUTES' INTERVIEW OF KILLING OSAMA BIN LADEN BY AMERICA'S SEAL TEAM 6.

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