828 Iraqi Police recruits graduate training

Iraqi Police graduates stand in formation awaiting the start of their graduation ceremony at Iraq Army Camp India in Baghdad Sept. 25. More than 800 volunteers from the Abu Ghraib area of Baghdad graduated the 30 day training and are now Iraqi police officers. They will return to their own neighborhoods to help provide security. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. 1st Class Bryan Beach, 7th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment)

By Sgt. 1st Class Bryan Beach, 7th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment
Multi-National Division – Baghdad PAO

CAMP INDIA, Iraq — Gerian Mohamed is proud of many things in his life; his marriage and the birth of his children. But today, he said, is one of the proudest moments of his life.
Today he became a police officer. A few short months ago he was a farmer, growing vegetables sold in Baghdad markets. The 30-year-old proudly declared he is ready to serve his country.

“The training was very difficult, harder than I imagined,” Mohamed said through a translator.
But he said he feels ready for what lies ahead.
Mohamed was one of 828 volunteers to graduate the Iraqi Police training program here today. A separate class graduated from the Baghdad Police College Sept. 20. The goal is to expand the Iraqi Police force by 12,000 officers over the next six months throughout Iraq.
What lies ahead for Mohamed and the nearly 1,500 other volunteers from the Abu Ghraib area of western Baghdad, who will soon undergo the same training, is the opportunity to do their part in building a better and safer Iraq for themselves by starting in their own neighborhoods.

Mohamed said a few months ago he didn’t have a lot of hope for the future or his children’s future. Extremist and terrorists had infiltrated the area where he lived and made life very dangerous. In what has been widely publicized, sheiks of
Abu Ghraib formed an alliance with Coalition Forces and the government of Iraq, turning their backs on these extremist groups like al-Qaida.

Iraqi Police graduates celebrate at the conclusion of their graduation ceremony at Iraq Army Camp India Sept. 25. Nearly 750 volunteers from the Abu Ghraib area of Baghdad graduated the 30 day training and are now Iraqi police officers. They will return to their own neighborhoods to help provide security. The government of Iraq’s goal is to recruit more than 10,000 police officers across the country in the next six months. Nearly 1,500 recruits have come from Abu Ghraib and have now completed the training. (U.S. Army Photo by SFC Bryan Beach, 7th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment)

Sheik Talib Motlak Al Halous is one of them. For him, this graduation was a very important day.
“We must rid our country of the terrorist, and al-Qaida,” he said through a translator. “Then we, all Iraqis, must work to put aside sectarian differences.”
“This morning is a good morning, because today, we were able to put aside our sectarian differences and come together to start ridding our country of terrorists. Today is a start. Today is a very proud day,” Sheik Al Halous said.

Iraqi Police graduates carry Lt. Omar Thamer, an Iraqi Police officer instructor, on their shoulders after the graduation ceremony at Camp India Sept. 25. More than 800 volunteers from the Abu Ghraib area of Baghdad graduated the 30 day training and are now Iraqi police officers. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. 1st Class Bryan Beach, 7th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment)

For Lt. Omar Thamer, an Iraqi Police instructor, this day held special meaning as well. Immediately following the graduation, dozens of his former students surrounded him, taking turns hugging and kissing their teacher on his checks.
“We have to all work together to help make Iraq one,” said Thamer.
“That’s our jobs as police officers.”
Mohamed, his pale green eyes looking up at his instructor, nods his head in agreement.
“He taught us a lot,” Mohamed said. “I know I learned a lot, and I feel ready to start doing my part for my home and my country. We have to all learn to work together.”
Thamer explained he treated all the police candidates as human beings, showing them respect every step of the way.
“When you do that, you get respect back in return,” he said.

Before the ceremony, one of the recruits came to the podium and read from the Quran, his voice rhythmically singing the words of the holy book, filling the air and floating on the breeze. He recited a Surah, or verse, which commands all true believers to not fight one another; that all Muslims should work together and always look for peace.
“You have undergone very good training,” Iraqi Lt. Gen. Abud Qanbar, commanding general of the Baghdad Operations Command told to the graduates. “You know how to do your jobs now, and your first priority is to defeat the terrorist and help the Iraqi people.”
Abud went on to tell the graduates this was a very important first step for all of Iraq.
“You must enforce the law. You must work together to keep away sectarian violence. We must get all Iraqis to come together, as one people and one nation. We must stop the bloodshed,” Abud said. “In order to do that, you have to treat all Iraqi people with respect. You have to follow the laws you uphold and represent. Remember your training, and always strive to improve yourself.
Remember, it is Iraq first and last.”

Iraqi Police graduates carry Lt. Omar Thamer, an Iraqi Police officer instructor, on their shoulders after the graduation ceremony at Camp India Sept. 25. More than 800 volunteers from the Abu Ghraib area of Baghdad graduated the 30 day training and are now Iraqi police officers. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. 1st Class Bryan Beach, 7th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment)

For Lt Col. Kurt Pinkerton, the difference between a few months ago and now is night and day. Pinkerton, from San Jose, Calif., is the commander of 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division.
He said what made the difference was the young men filling the parade field.
“Since we got here, we have been working with the tribes,” Pinkerton said.
“Frankly, we have been reaching out to the people …trying to find out what they were resisting; what their goals and objective were.
“What we found was it was almost cultural. They didn’t have a purpose to resist. They did it, at first, because it was the thing to do as a culture. And then after a while it just sort of sustained the fight. They didn’t like the government, they didn’t like the security forces and they were jobless,” Pinkerton explained.
“So they voiced their anger through resisting. Once we started finding them jobs, working with them, letting them secure their own areas, integrating them with the
Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police, they turned completely and have helped us for several months to fight al-Qaida,” Pinkerton said. “These guys all started out as
volunteers, none of which got paid.”

Now that they have completed the 30 days of training, they are police officers and will return to their own neighborhoods where they are expected to serve and protect.
“There are two big advantages to doing it this way,” said Pinkerton. “One, they know the people and the people know them, so there is already mutual respect and cooperation. The second key thing is it’s going to build a stronger local economy, with 1,500 jobs for the local population. That’s a significant boost to the local economy.”
“My confidence is high,” said Mohamed surrounded by smiling classmates. “I see a good future for Iraq. I see a bright future for my children.
“Perhaps in a few years,” he said, “I can put away my uniform and my gun, and go back to farming.”

An Iraqi Police graduate hugs Lt. Omar Thamer, an Iraqi Police officer instructor, after the graduation ceremony at Camp India Sept. 25 (U.S. Army photo by Sgt.1st Class Bryan Beach, 7th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment)

-- Death to the hyphen --

This was interesting. Death to the hyphen. Hyphen stocks perished today, upon news of the new Oxford English Dictionary projected diminished usage by customers of the English language. On a serious note, does language get simpler through time or harder. Does languages simply evolve and "simple" or "complex" are purely subjective? Think of the silliness in many time travel movies, like Back to the Future series, where they play with the language and words [MARTY: Give me a Tab. CLERK: I can't give you a tab unless you order something. MARTY: Can I get a Pepsi free? CLERK: You can get a Pepsi pal, but your going to pay for it.]
Or what about all those Star Trek episodes where they travel back in time to early earth and words wreck havoc on the future born heroes.

Then a friend of mine pointed out all the words that do not follow the "i" and "e" rule. You know, "i" before "e" except after "c". That's just weird.
--bryan

Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on
By Simon RabinovitchFri Sep 21, 10:57 AM ET
About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.
Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly.
And if you've got a problem, don't be such a crybaby (formerly cry-baby).
The hyphen has been squeezed as informal ways of communicating, honed in text messages and emails, spread on Web sites and seep into newspapers and books.
"People are not confident about using hyphens anymore, they're not really sure what they are for," said Angus Stevenson, editor of the Shorter OED, the sixth edition of which was published this week.
Another factor in the hyphen's demise is designers' distaste for its ungainly horizontal bulk between words.
"Printed writing is very much design-led these days in adverts and Web sites, and people feel that hyphens mess up the look of a nice bit of typography," he said. "The hyphen is seen as messy looking and old-fashioned."
The team that compiled the Shorter OED, a two-volume tome despite its name, only committed the grammatical amputations after exhaustive research.
"The whole process of changing the spelling of words in the dictionary is all based on our analysis of evidence of language, it's not just what we think looks better," Stevenson said.
Researchers examined a corpus of more than 2 billion words, consisting of full sentences that appeared in newspapers, books, Web sites and blogs from 2000 onwards.
For the most part, the dictionary dropped hyphens from compound nouns, which were unified in a single word (e.g. pigeonhole) or split into two (e.g. test tube).
But hyphens have not lost their place altogether. The Shorter OED editor commended their first-rate service rendered to English in the form of compound adjectives, much like the one in the middle of this sentence.
"There are places where a hyphen is necessary," Stevenson said. "Because you can certainly start to get real ambiguity."
Twenty-odd people came to the party, he said. Or was it twenty odd people?
Some of the 16,000 hyphenation changes in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, sixth edition:
Formerly hyphenated words split in two:
fig leaf
hobby horse
ice cream
pin money
pot belly
test tube
water bed
Formerly hyphenated words unified in one:
bumblebee
chickpea
crybaby
leapfrog
logjam
lowlife
pigeonhole
touchline
waterborne

'Jena 6' protest in Louisiana

What is this all about? Some ignorant white kid(s) hang a noose in a tree. The poor tree gets cut down. And from what I understand, some other white kid gets beat unconscious by six black young males, who are arrested and charged with the crime.

Enter Sharpton and Jackson, mobilizing the black cause to right the "injustice" these young men face. Maybe I don't have the whole story, after all I am in Iraq, but sounds like B.S. to me!

Black and white relations will dramatically improve with the deaths of Sharpton and Jackson, or at least their retirment from public life. In my opinion, their time has long past for making improvements to our society, and new, younger, in-tune, black leadership is long overdo.

Such dramatic and wonderful gains have been made in the race relations over the past few decades, and there is more that can be done, but a blacklash is close at hand. Using the rhetoric of the 1950's and 1960's doesn't make and sense. It's not the same issues or problems of 40 or 50 years ago. There are a whole new set of complicated economic, political and social issues that need to be addressed.

Which brings me to Don Imas. The uprour over his use of "nappy headed hos" and the subsequent firestorm that followed. Much of the media talk-show disucssion with the likes of Sharpton and Jackson lead natually into the rhelm of hip-hop and rap music, and the need to address the shameful depiction of ALL women and black society as a whole. Just curious, but where is all the action they promised? WHere are the boycotts of hip-hop artists, record producers, and radio stations playing the music?

The words of Don Imas were pittyful. The words in many Ludicrous songs are too. They both claim to be entertainers. They both claimed their words don't really mean anything, but correct me if I'm not mistaken... but I serve and fight for this country based on a piece of paper in Washington D.C. that has "just words" on it. Words mean something. They always do. If we are going to address social and moral responcibility for word choices, then lets address it with equality in mind. Otherwise its just censorship.

Rev. Al Sharpton leads 'Jena 6' protest in Louisiana

JENA, La. - Draped in black and chanting "No justice, no peace," thousands of demonstrators marched through the streets of this racially polarized town yesterday to protest the treatment of six black teens charged with beating a white student.

Many residents of the mostly white town looked on with dismay from their porches while the Rev. Al Sharpton led as many as 20,000 protesters.

The demonstrators marched from the courthouse to the high school - where nooses were hung in a tree last year apparently as a warning or taunt aimed at black students.

Dozens of state troopers and local cops on horseback looked on as the crowd converged on the lawn of the courthouse. When Sharpton took to the stage, the pulsating mass erupted.

"This is the beginning of the 21st century civil rights movement," Sharpton said. "Martin Luther King Jr. faced Jim Crow. We've come to Jena to face James Crow Jr., Esq."

The violence and chaos that many locals had feared the protesters would bring never materialized.

Traveling in convoys of buses from around the nation, supporters of the so-called Jena 6 began arriving before dawn. They came to draw attention to the "injustice" of six black teens who were initially charged with attempted murder for allegedly beating a white student in December.

"This is history in the making," said protester Freamon Dixon, 59, a Vietnam veteran from Atlanta as he waved a 20-foot American flag. "I would've walked to get here if I had to."

Referring to the charges against the black teens and the racial divisiveness, President Bush said, "The events in Louisiana have saddened me."

In Brooklyn, hundreds of community members, activists, clergymen and politicians, dressed all in black, converged on the steps of Borough Hall yesterday to show solidarity with the Jena 6 and draw attention to racism in America.

"It's not just Jena, La.; it's Jena, N.Y.," the Rev. Conrad Tillard, interim pastor at Nazarene Congregational church in Bedford-Stuyvesant, told the crowd.

Jena was thrust into the spotlight in December after the black teens were charged with attempted murder in the beating of 16-year-old Justin Barker at Jena High School. The beating was one of a string of racial clashes that began after white teens hung nooses on a schoolyard tree.

One black teen, Mychal Bell, 17, was convicted of aggravated second-degree battery. The conviction was overturned last week by a state appeals court. The court said he should not have been tried as an adult. Bell is sitting in jail awaiting a bail hearing.

Several sour-faced residents disputed the notion that their rural town of roughly 3,000 people is full of racists.

One of them, a 47-year-old white man who identified himself as Alan, called the march "ridiculous."

"There's no racial thing here more than there is anywhere else," Alan said. He insisted that Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson "came here to start this trouble to get attention for themselves. That's all there is to it."

Hours after the march, most of the protesters began to leave town. Others gathered at the schoolyard, where only the roots remain of the tree where the nooses were hung.

"Just like the roots of that tree, racism is still alive and well," said Lois Carter, 45, of Maryland. "It's gonna come back. That tree is coming back."

It seems the Army has been so worried about Soldier-Bloggers spilling secret and personal info on the net, when really they should be more worried about the "OFFICIAL" website. OPSEC! OPSEC!

Good God! Where is a Public Affairs Officer when you need one?

Army Monitors Websites

September 17, 2007

Stars and Stripes reports that Army personnel in the Army's Web Risk Assessment Cell (AWRAC) have found, on average, more than two security violations for every Army site visited but only one such violation for every 23 blog sites researched. Documents released last month as part of a lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group, showed results of the Army's Web Risk Assessment Cell's (AWRAC) review of Army-run websites and Soldiers' blog sites between January 2006 and January 2007. For more information on the litigation including supporting documents, visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Surveillance of Soldiers' Blogs webpage.

Not just kittens anymore, Firefighters rescue Farmer's Ass

A donkey sits trapped in an abandoned well before being rescued Thursday, Sept. 13, 2007, at the Bryan Nelson residence about 10 miles northeast of Underwood, Minn. Firefighters dismantled the well to free the donkey which had some bruises and lost some fur where it rubbed against the concrete walls of the well, but was otherwise fine. (AP Photo/The Daily Journal, Jeffrey Hage)




This is the greatest story ever! Reminds me of an old tale, of a donkey trapped in a well. The farmer didn't know what to do. He finally decided there was no way to get the donkey out, so he thought it best to bury the animal alive. As the farmer tossed shovel fulls of dirt on the donkey's back, the donkey just shook the dirt off its back. After a couple hours of attempting to bury the ass, the farmer was shocked to see the animal walk out of the nearly filled in well. -- In this real life version, they used pulley's and a harness to save the farmer's ass.
bryan

Firefighters save donkey trapped in well

Fri Sep 14, 9:36 PM ET
UNDERWOOD, Minn. - A donkey is happily eating grass again after falling down a dry, abandoned well and being freed in an intensive rescue effort. It appeared that the animal wandered away from its farm and onto some boards covering the well, which broke, said Bruce Huseth, fire chief in this western Minnesota town.

Firefighters quickly realized that the animal, which belongs to farmer Warren Gundberg, couldn't just be pulled from the abandoned well on Bryan Nelson's land.

So they started pulling away earth with a tractor and dismantling the well block by block Thursday. Once one wall had been taken apart, firefighters put a harness around the donkey and guided it out with a rope.

"Whatever it takes," Nelson said as he watched his well come down. "I love animals, and I'm just glad it's OK."

Gundberg admonished the animal after the rescue: "I bet you'll think twice about doing that again. If you would have stayed home you wouldn't be in this trouble."

Huseth said that he has rescued cows that have fallen through ice, but that the donkey was a first.

DoD Holds Information Forum for Wearable Power Prize Competition Wed, 12 Sep 2007 23:00:00 -0500

U.S. Department of Defense Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs) Press Advisories

No. 101-07
September 13, 2007
DoD Holds Information Forum for Wearable Power Prize Competition
A public information forum regarding the first public competition to be sponsored by the director, defense research and engineering will be held Friday, Sept. 21, 2007, 9 a.m. - 1 p.m. EDT at the Federal Gateway Conference Center, 1100 New Jersey Ave., Suite 200, Washington, D.C. 20003.

The public will be briefed by the wearable power prize program managers on the details of the competition, objectives, rules, procedures, intent to compete notification, and the current plan for the Fall 2008 competition week. First prize for the wearable power competition will be awarded $1 million.

Attendees will have the opportunity to ask questions of the U.S. Army Program Manager Soldier Warrior and the U.S. Marine Corps Program Executive Officer for Expeditionary Power offices to provide a better understanding of current warfighter power requirements and battery burden.

A list of acceptable battery chemistries and fuels for use in competition will be available and all presentations will be posted on the Web site: http://www.dod.mil/ddre/prize/topic.html .

This prize program seeks to elicit innovative solutions from a broad range of sources to provide superior technical solutions to the individual energy needs of servicemembers in the field. DoD seeks a wearable power system that lasts four days and significantly reduces the weight of the battery load typically carried by those in the field.

Media and the public are invited to attend and must register by Monday, Sept.17 at http://www.dod.mil/ddre/prize/topic_wearpwr_forum.html#1 .


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Lettuce Prey on download.com!!!

Guess what! I got some of the old PR3 (Lettuce Prey) songs on CNet's download.com.

Go to the following link to check it out.

http://music.download.com/lettuceprey/3600-9025_32-100964191.html?tag=MDL_listing_song_artist

Lettuce Prey was a "band" name myself, Mikel Bradfield, and brothers Kirk and Trent Mace created when we recorded a phenomenal number of bad improvised songs. Most of the songs are off color and may even include bad language (okay, so they all do). Despite the song titles and lyrics, none of us are drug using homosexuals. It was all meant in fun.

Anyway, the original recorders were on simple analog cassette tapes, which I digitally transfered and then used Adobe Audition audio software to remaster and remove the pops and hiss. The results were not half bad, for a user with little experience with the program.

I was finally able to post these songs recorded over 15 years ago to the internet to share with an unsuspecting world.
--bryan