Wife Gets Green Card

Would like your opinion on this...

Missing Soldier's Wife Gets Green Card

AP

Posted: 2007-07-02 10:22:17

BOSTON (July 1) - A woman whose soldier husband is missing in Iraq has gotten her green card after authorities threatened to deport her for entering the U.S. illegally.

"Her immigration problems have been solved in their entirety and now her focus is completely dedicated to her hope and desire that she's going to see her husband again," Kolken said.

Army Spec. Alex Jimenez, of Lawrence, Mass., has been missing since his unit was attacked in Iraq on May 12.

His wife illegally entered the U.S. from the Dominican Republic in June 2001, paying $500 to a smuggler and walking three days from Mexico to California. The couple were married in 2004.
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Read the full article and then tell me in the comments what you think... I am completely in sympathy with her.

Photo: Army Spc. Alex R. Jimenez has been missing since a May 12 ambush in Iraq. His wife, who entered the U.S. illegally, was threatened with deportation.

Torture changes who we are.

From the Village Voice:

Dark Secrets at the Front

Prisoners and interrogators are both brutalized in a war that changes who we are.

by Nat Hentoff

May 30th, 2007 11:27 AM

In February 2006, then–Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned that our wars against terrorism "could last for decades." Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, he said of the multiplying enemy: "Compelled by a militant ideology that celebrates murder and suicide with no territory to defend, with little to lose, they will either succeed in changing our way of life, or we will succeed in changing theirs."

With a seemingly endless supply of suicide bombers in Iraq, the enemy certainly hasn't changed its way of life. However—as the world has witnessed—there's plenty of evidence that we've changed ours—namely, in America's professed values about how we treat our prisoners, euphemistically marginalized as "detainees."

On May 7 of this year, General David Petraeus—now commanding our "surge" in Iraq, emphasized: "It's time to adhere to American values. We must not sink to the level of our enemies."

Does General Petraeus think we're sinking to the level of our enemies with regard to interrogation of prisoners? Are there more than just a 'few bad apples" at Abu Ghraib?

What caused the new alarm by General Petraeus about sinking to the level of the enemy is a startling official report from the Office of the Surgeon General, United States Army Medical Command:

Less than half of other soldiers and Marines (in Iraq) believed that non- combatants should be treated with dignity and respect and well over a third believed that torture should be allowed to save the life of a fellow team member .

About ten percent of soldiers and Marines reported mistreating an Iraqi non-combatant when it wasn't necessary . . . Less than half of the soldiers and Marines would report a team member for unethical behavior . . .

You can read Nat Hentoff's full report here.

Abu Ghraib: Not just a case of bad apples over there.
photo: US Army Sgt. Sara Wood defenselink.mil

Soldier asks for half-staff for his dead

Associated Press
April 23, 2007

A U.S. Army sergeant complained in a rare opinion article that the U.S. flag flew at half-staff last week at the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan for those killed at Virginia Tech, but the same honor is not given to fallen U.S. troops here and in Iraq.

In the article issued Monday by the public affairs office at Bagram military base north of Kabul, Sgt. Jim Wilt lamented that his comrades' deaths have become a mere blip on the TV screen...

According to the Defense Department, 315 U.S. service members have died in and around Afghanistan since the U.S.-led offensive that toppled the Taliban regime in late 2001, 198 of them in combat.

"I think it is sad that we do not raise the bases' flag to half-staff when a member of our own task force dies," Wilt said.

"If the flags on our (operating bases) were lowered for just one day after the death of a service member, it would show the people who knew the person that society cared, the American people care."

This should take nothing away from the fallen at Virginia Tech but I think the sergeant has a point especially since the U.S. flag flew at half-staff on a U.S. base in Afghanistan.

Read full article here.

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