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The improbable restoration of Donald H. Rumsfeld to the seat of American military power was consummated on a cold Friday afternoon in January, 2001, when he was welcomed back to the Pentagon with a full-honors review. The ceremony, a ritual display of martial pomp and fanfare, was staged on the River Parade Field, the vast lawn on the Potomac side of the Pentagon, where Rumsfeld had been welcomed as Gerald Ford's Defense Secretary a quarter century earlier. Standing before the assemblage, Rumsfeld seemed like a figure lifted from another age. He had run the Pentagon in the time of the Berlin Wall, the era of Brezhnev and Kissinger, and the reunification of Vietnam under a Communist regime. Then he was the youngest-ever Secretary of Defense; now, at sixty-eight, he became one of the oldest, and the only man ever to serve in the position twice. His selection by George W. Bush had been a surprise, not least to Rumsfeld himself ("What in the world am I doing here?" he sometimes asked himself). Rumsfeld had been out of government since 1977, and although he was still well connected, he had not been a particularly close Bush adviser during the campaign. Even so, when General Henry H. Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who introduced Rumsfeld at the day's event, and declared him "exactly the right man for the job in this new century," everyone knew what he meant. Bush and Cheney had campaigned as friends of the military—"Help is on the way," the candidates had repeatedly proclaimed—and Rumsfeld, a totem of the Republican national-security establishment, was a promise delivered.
At the ceremony, Rumsfeld declared that the new President's first goal for defense was "to strengthen the bond of trust with the American military." Earlier that day, at Rumsfeld's swearing-in at the White House, the President had used the same phrase and promised to give Americans in uniform "the respect they deserve." The refrain was repeated so often that a reporter finally pressed Rumsfeld to spell out what he and the President really meant: had the "bond of trust" been ruptured by eight years of Bill Clinton? Rumsfeld allowed the question to speak for itself ("I'm looking forward, not back," he said), but no one missed the point: a central message of the Bush-Cheney campaign had been that the American military had somehow needed to be rescued from its Commander-in-Chief.
Of the several partisan fevers that afflicted the Clinton era, none was more acute than that having to do with Clinton and the military. Some of the disaffection reflected Clinton's moment in history: the end of the Cold War offered the chance for a "peace dividend" of a smaller military, which Clinton seized, but, in the eyes of many military leaders, he lacked a consistent doctrine for the use of American power. Early in his first term, a relief mission begun by the elder Bush in Somalia became a military mission aimed at capturing the nettlesome clan leader General Muhammad Farah Aydid. When eighteen Army Rangers were killed and one was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Clinton pulled out. The following year, when a humanitarian disaster unfolded in Rwanda, the United States stood aside, at the price of countless lives—for which Clinton later apologized on America's behalf. A "Clinton doctrine" eventually evolved, which defined the national interest partly in terms of humanitarian interventions, a construct that justified bombing in Bosnia, an air war in Kosovo, and the open-ended commitment of American troops to both. To Clinton's critics, it seemed as if American foreign policy were shaped by the latest ghastly images from the nightly news cycle, and Clinton himself seemed to confirm it, saying his aim was a world where "we don't have to worry about seeing scenes every night for the next forty years of ethnic cleansing in some part of the world." The military was deeply skeptical about what it called "operations other than war," such as peacekeeping and nation-building. The added duty for a smaller force put serious strains on the military's readiness for combat as well as its ability to retain people. Toward the end of Clinton's tenure, the Army, Navy, and Air Force each failed to meet its recruitment goals.
The revelation that President Clinton had had sexual relations with a female subordinate in the Oval Office, and then lied about it, struck a particular nerve in the military, and some of the deeply felt resentments began to surface. One Marine major wrote an article in the Navy Times referring to Clinton as "an adulterous liar." Another marine, a reserve officer, wrote an opinion article, in November, 1998, questioning a military officer's obligation to obey the orders of "a morally defective leader." The Marine Corps Deputy Commandant, General Terrence Drake, issued an order to all the Corps's generals to remind their officers of Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice—the provision prohibiting officers from using "contemptuous words" about the civilian authority.
And so, that January of 2001, when Donald Rumsfeld was officially welcomed back to the Pentagon, "There was just great relief in the military," recalled Kenneth Adelman, a former Reagan arms-control official, who was among the invited guests that day. "There was the feeling that now somebody was going to be on their side."
Bush had inherited a pressing problem. The American military continued through the nineteen-nineties to train, plan, and equip itself to fight an enemy—the Soviet Union—that no longer existed. It was hardly a secret that the military was badly in need of reform; everyone in uniform knew it, and those analysts and scholars who populated the think tanks of Washington had been fixated on the subject for most of a decade.
As a pro-defense Republican, Bush would have the political capital to bring about genuine, even historic, change. During the campaign, he had vowed to give his Secretary of Defense "a broad mandate to challenge the status quo and envision a new architecture of American defense for decades to come," and he had chosen Rumsfeld because he believed that he would be more willing and better able than the other candidates to pursue his agenda. The contents and scope of that agenda were not yet known, but Rumsfeld made it clear that his approach to the military was very much hands-on.
Among those gathered at the River Parade Field for the Rumsfeld ceremony was an elderly man with a pleasant, grandfatherly aspect, who, amid the political celebrities and military brass, might have been taken for someone who had strayed from a Pentagon tour group. But within the national-security priesthood Andrew Marshall was something of a legend. He headed a unit called the Office of Net Assessment (he was its first and only director), which had evolved over the years into a sort of in-house Pentagon think tank. That made him the resident deep thinker, and what Marshall, who was in his late seventies, had been thinking about for every President since Richard Nixon (and for two decades before that at the Rand Corporation) was how America could prevail in the next big war.
Marshall's professional life had paralleled the full sweep of the Cold War. He was admired as a boldly original theorist; in the forty-year strategic chess match between East and West, it sometimes seemed as if Marshall were playing a three-dimensional game. Marshall was among the very few who understood the Soviet vulnerability, and it was largely Marshall who imagined the strategy for exploiting it—the Reagan-era conceit of a winnable nuclear war, based on technologies (such as the unproved missile-defense shield) and levels of expenditure that the Soviets could not hope to match.
Marshall fell out of favor under the Clinton Administration, which saw less call for an esoteric Cold War strategist. But he had already turned his focus on something that he believed was of immense and pressing importance. It was a new way of thinking about the military, an idea with vast implications for every aspect of American defense, from the nation's weaponry to its global posture, because it would radically change the way America waged war—indeed, it could alter the very nature of war. It was called the Revolution in Military Affairs.
This revolution had begun to unfold in the Cold War's last stages. In the post-Vietnam nineteen-seventies, the Soviet-led forces of the Warsaw Pact conducted a steady, massive buildup of heavy forces—tanks and mechanized infantry—along the western edge of East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Twenty thousand battle tanks, mostly Soviet, faced west; on the other side, NATO fielded a force of only seven thousand tanks. In the event of a conventional Soviet attack, NATO forces would be forced to wage a fighting retreat until reinforcements arrived, mostly from the United States. One option for countering the Soviet advantage was the deployment of "tactical" nuclear weapons to Europe. Tactical nukes posed obvious political and strategic problems—the NATO allies did not welcome the prospect of even limited nuclear war in Europe, and there was always the chance of escalation into full-blown nuclear conflict.
But the Americans were also working on a non-nuclear weapons system that would change the equation. The top-secret Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was funding a program called Assault Breaker, which was designed to strike far behind enemy lines, disrupting or destroying follow-on forces, gaining time and cover for the Western alliance to launch a counter-offensive. Assault Breaker was meant to compress the process of locating a target and launching a strike into a synchronized target-and-fire action taking just minutes. DARPA equipped an Air Force plane with an advanced radar system and onboard computers that worked out the target's coördinates and transmitted them to an Army missile base, which fired rockets toward the target area. In a test of Assault Breaker at the White Sands Missile Range, in New Mexico, the system hit five out of five targets.
In the early nineteen-eighties, Marshall and his colleagues began to notice in their reading of Soviet military literature that the Russians were writing about this new American weaponry with increasing alarm. The Soviets assumed that deployment of Assault Breaker was imminent, and that this American advance represented the dawn of a new military epoch—what the Soviet analysts referred to as a "military-technical revolution." (The Americans weren't nearly as attuned to the implications of their own developments. Assault Breaker was not close to deployment; in fact, the Air Force and the Army were disinclined to coöperate, and the joint program eventually died.) Marshall began to analyze this idea, and, after months of study, his office concluded that the Russians had got it right. The Red Army's Chief of Staff, Marshal Nikolai V. Ogarkov, had recognized that advances such as those tested by the Americans would give conventional weapons many of the strengths of nuclear weapons, without the apocalyptic effects. Implicit in Ogarkov's insight was the idea that a key breakthrough in technology (for example, microprocessing) could suddenly reconfigure the battle-field—in this case, with accuracy so precise that, Ogarkov wrote, conventional warfare took on "qualitatively new and incomparably more destructive forms than before."
Marshall was struck by this idea, and, throughout the eighties, he assigned teams of analysts to search for historical instances of such advances. ("What's amazing," Marshall told me, "is how much we know, it turns out, about the chariot revolution back in 1700 B.C.") The example he found most compelling was that of Europe in the years between the twentieth century's two World Wars. After the Pyrrhic victory of the First World War, France built the finest Army in the world, and an imposing defensive complex of forts, bunkers, and tunnels—the Maginot Line—along its border with Germany. A defeated Germany, on the other hand, had to overcome the constraints of the Treaty of Versailles (forbidding Germany warplanes, tanks, submarines, or heavy guns, and outlawing its general-officer staff) to build Hitler's Wehrmacht. Yet, in the late spring of 1940, Germany invaded France and won a French surrender in less than six weeks. The stunning German victory was produced by a battlefield innovation, blitzkrieg, that married two relatively new technologies—radio and the internal-combustion engine—to facilitate a tactic of rapid, coördinated movement. The Germans had designed their new panzer divisions to suit this doctrine, and their impact was decisive. The German forces bypassed the Maginot Line, attacked directly through the Ardennes Forest, and dashed to the French rear, sowing chaos en route and forcing a quick surrender.
To Marshall and his associates, the lessons were clear. The side that recognized and exploited such advances gained not just an edge in warfare but an overwhelming advantage; for the side that missed the chance, the consequences could be fatal.
With the impending demise of the Soviet Union, the U.S. was entering a new interwar period. Marshall had no doubt that some new competitor would emerge to challenge the United States, and it struck him as exactly the moment to prepare for the next big war. The U.S. led the world in microchip technology, and the information age promised a dazzling range of military applications, such as advanced sensors, satellite imagery, robotics, and laser systems. The danger would not arise in Europe, Marshall believed, but in Asia—most likely China. The conflict would not be a prolonged ground war, involving massed formations of infantry and tank divisions; rather, there would be long-range precision strikes by "smart" missiles. If there was infantry in the fight at all, it would be in small, specialized units. Marshall supposed, too, that in the global economy these technologies would be available to all. This made it imperative that the U.S. push conflicts to distant battlefields, if possible, and to reduce (or eliminate) such easy American targets as overseas airbases and huge aircraft-carrier battle groups.
In July, 1992, during the race between George H. W. Bush and Clinton, Marshall gave the Pentagon's senior leaders a formal assessment reflecting his conclusions about the Revolution in Military Affairs. Marshall preferred that term to the Russians' "military-technical revolution," because he believed that technology only partly accounted for such bursts of progress. The other critical element was a military's adoption of entirely new operational concepts, organizational structures, and doctrines. For instance, the French and British had radios, tanks, and airplanes in 1940, but Germany put them to novel use. Marshall wrote that new ideas had to be tested, even if most of them failed. Perhaps most important, the Pentagon needed to stop depending exclusively on the big-ticket weapons that devoured defense dollars and perpetuated the status quo.
Marshall's assessment came just as the national-security establishment was trying to define America's posture in a world without a Soviet counterweight. Some, including the first President Bush, Brent Scowcroft, his national-security adviser, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, were avowed "realists," who believed that America's role was to be part of a new world order, with the emphasis on order. But others believed that the U.S. should embrace and, if possible, enhance its position as the world's sole superpower. Bush's Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, was inclined to this view, as was his top policy official, Paul Wolfowitz, who argued emphatically that the United States should strengthen its military superiority so that potential rivals would have no hope of catching up. Marshall's Revolution in Military Affairs offered a means to achieve that goal, and both Cheney and Wolfowitz became converts.
There were also converts within the uniformed military, including a few in the senior ranks, but the services were generally skeptical about the R.M.A., as it was now being called. Some of the resistance, particularly in the Army, reflected the belief that Marshall's vision of long-distance precision strikes ignored the gritty reality of actual war, with soldiers on the ground. Had President George H. W. Bush won another term, he might have been willing to impose upon the military the upheaval that a revolution in military affairs implied. But the last thing the Army was inclined to do while facing cutbacks under the Clinton Administration was tinker with its revered divisional structure, and the Navy was no less inclined to reduce the number of its aircraft-carrier battle groups. Clinton's last Secretary of Defense, William S. Cohen, had tried to get the Army to transform itself into a lighter, more expeditionary force. But Cohen, a Republican, was frustrated from the start. "I was coming into a Democratic Administration, and that had its own dynamic," Cohen recalled. "I must say that President Clinton gave me total authority, so it wasn't a question coming from him. But just dealing with the issue—how do you push transformation in a Democratic Administration? Is this something that's weakening the military? The perception on the Hill would be 'Here they go cutting back on the military powers of the Army.' "
Still, Marshall continued to promote his revolution. Using his budget at the Office of Net Assessment, he financed his own futuristic war games. The Revolution in Military Affairs thrived in think tanks and seminars.
As Marshall watched Rumsfeld's official welcoming ceremony, he was hopeful that the revolution's moment had arrived. During the Presidential campaign, George W. Bush had promised to build a new American military for the twenty-first century. In a speech at the Citadel in 1999, Bush had said that as President he would instruct his Defense Secretary to conduct a "comprehensive review" of the military, to question everything from its force structure and strategy to its acquisition process. He promised not just to make "marginal improvements" but "to replace existing programs with new technologies and strategies, to use this window of opportunity to skip a generation of technology." That speech was instantly recognized, by those with a trained ear, as the language of the Revolution in Military Affairs.
Marshall had known Rumsfeld over the years, and he liked him. Shortly after Rumsfeld's induction, the new Secretary arranged to have lunch with Marshall—not, as Marshall had expected, in Rumsfeld's private office but in the "Sec Def Mess," a nearby dining room where the guests seldom went unnoticed. "Oh, I think it was very clear," Richard Perle, a former Reagan defense official and a close adviser to Rumsfeld, recalled. "It went all over the building that Andy was back. It was like Deng Xiaoping's return." The President had pledged to conduct a comprehensive review, identifying probable American adversaries, and when and where the next wars would likely occur. Rumsfeld asked Marshall if he would like to take something like that on. Marshall said he could put a team together right away. The Pentagon's traditional review process, the Quadrennial Defense Review, was just getting under way, and wouldn't be finished for another nine months. Hundreds of uniformed staff officers from all the services had spent tens of thousands of man-hours trying to answer essentially those questions. This review tended to be an exercise in justifying the budgets, force size, and programs that the military services wanted to protect. Rumsfeld evidently intended to circumvent that process. He told Marshall that he'd like to have the first draft of his strategic review in six weeks. "We delivered on that," Marshall recalled.
Word of Marshall's new assignment rang through the Pentagon like a distress signal, which may have been part of Rumsfeld's plan. Rumsfeld had in mind for the military, and for the Pentagon itself, an agenda of radical reform. He called it "transformation," and the return of Andrew Marshall meant that it would be guided by the principles of the Revolution in Military Affairs. Rumsfeld intended to remake the American military into a lighter, more agile, more readily useful force that would be able to leverage new technology to project lethal power over great distances.
Marshall would have been the first to say that technology and the Revolution in Military Affairs had very little application to certain kinds of conflict, such as a counter-insurgency fight against some indigenous guerrilla force. But that was the sort of war that no one—on the new Bush national-security team, or certainly in the American military—had any intention of ever fighting. That would be a war like Vietnam.
When war came, with the invasion of Afghanistan, in late 2001, Rumsfeld had only the barest beginnings of a transformed military, but he had a fully formed philosophy that dictated how America would fight. In Afghanistan, it meant routing the Taliban with small bands of American Special Forces and coördinating long-distance air strikes and Afghan ground troops. For the subsequent invasion of Iraq, in March, 2003, the Rumsfeld vision meant getting to Baghdad and toppling Saddam Hussein's regime as quickly and with as small a force as prudence permitted. Many professional military men strenuously disagreed with Rumsfeld's war plan, but, fresh from the validating triumph in Afghanistan, he prevailed.
The man who came to exemplify this new way of war was Major General Buford (Buff) Blount, a courtly Mississippian who commanded the Army's 3rd Infantry Division—the 3rd I.D.—and who became a popular figure with reporters. ABC's Ted Koppel rode with Blount, as did the late David Bloom, the NBC News correspondent whose dust-blown satellite video reports provided the signature images of the conflict's early days, and Michael Kelly, the Atlantic editor, who died in a skirmish near Baghdad. The 3rd I.D., with its tanks and armored fighting vehicles, was, by training and structure, a relic of the pre-Rumsfeld Army. But Blount was a creative, daring general, who, after weathering a brief storm delay, pushed quickly through to Baghdad. And it was Blount who devised and executed the "thunder runs" from the outskirts of Baghdad to the heart of the Iraqi capital, providing the decisive blow in the stunningly short campaign to end the Saddam regime.
But within a few weeks Rumsfeld and his closest advisers came to regard Blount as part of a problem they had not foreseen and were wholly unprepared to handle: the gathering chaos that soon became an insurgency.
With American troops in Baghdad, General Tommy Franks, the top commander of the coalition forces, left his headquarters in Doha, Qatar, and flew in a Kevlar-lined helicopter and then a C-130 transport plane to Baghdad. He made his way to the Abu Ghraib North Palace, where he and his commanders shared a victory cigar, and Franks told them to start preparing to leave Iraq.
Blount's 3rd I.D. had been slated to go home, and his troops, having stormed into Baghdad, considered their mission accomplished. But the days passed, and Blount's unit found itself faced with a policing mission it didn't want and hadn't expected. Scores of looters appeared, and then hundreds and thousands, making off with anything that could be carried away.
"Never, from the first day that we ever started planning this until we got to Baghdad, in all the processes, rehearsals—nobody ever mentioned the word 'looter,' " Blount told me. "I mean, it was just never, ever, ever mentioned. Our focus was on fighting the war." Blount was loath to order his troops to use deadly force on looters. As he saw it, the raiders were indulging an impulse to street justice. "These are the people that we're liberating," he recalled. "The oppressed. You know, that have been without for centuries now, and they've got nothing, and they're trying to get a little bit back from the Baath Party."
Blount ordered patrols to secure hospitals, power facilities, and other key structures, but in many cases the looters had already come and gone. As it became apparent in Washington that the disorder might spin out of control, the 3rd I.D.'s pullout was delayed. At the division's home base, in Georgia, some of the troops' spouses began to voice their dismay, and in Baghdad, some of Blount's soldiers complained to reporters. One, a private named Matthew C. O'Dell, told the Times, "You call Donald Rumsfeld and tell him our sorry asses are ready to go home."
Blount's superiors in the Pentagon were furious, blaming his unit's recalcitrance on a lack of leadership. "We had no orders or plans to occupy Baghdad," Blount says. "There were just a lot of assumptions made. I've looked back at this a good bit at different times, wondering, you know, well, could we have done something differently?"
General Jack Keane, then the Army's Vice Chief of Staff and one of Rumsfeld's most trusted advisers in the force, flew to Iraq and was chagrined that the 3rd I.D.'s briefings failed to focus on containing the spreading disorder. But Keane later reflected that Blount's troops could hardly be blamed. "They were ill-prepared—they weren't educated to do it, and they weren't trained to do it, and they weren't expecting to do it," Keane said, of the unit's impromptu policing mission. When the 3rd I.D. eventually left Iraq, four months later, Blount was assigned to a desk job at the Pentagon, a role he served in for the remainder of his active career. He did not get a promotion and a third star, as many had once expected.
As chaos spread in and around Baghdad, Rumsfeld remained publicly serene. "You don't go from despotism to freedom on a feather bed," he told reporters on April 24th. Pressed to explain the vivid images of chaos in Iraq, Rumsfeld dryly observed that "freedom's untidy." From the start of the new Bush Administration, Rumsfeld had been the Administration's lightning rod, and he seemed almost to relish controversy. Just a few months into his tenure, as he was making enemies inside the Pentagon's bureaucracy with his insistent reform crusade, and on the Hill with his reluctance to pay deference, the political press had begun a deathwatch on his career. Maureen Dowd mocked him as Rip Van Rummy, and Slate observed, "Rumsfeld is probably toast." But by the time Baghdad fell, Rumsfeld believed he had seen his critics proved wrong so often that he had every reason to rely on his instincts.Two weeks before the Iraq invasion, a reporter had asked him, "Can you promise it won't be a quagmire?"
"I can almost promise you that someone in this room will say it's a quagmire," Rumsfeld replied. Indeed, by the second week of the drive to Baghdad, reporters had summoned the "quagmire" scenario, only to be chastened by the rapid fall of Saddam's regime. The subsequent failure of the search for weapons of mass destruction, whose existence had been a major justification for the war, may have been a blow to the Administration's credibility (as well as a distraction for troops engaged in the hunt), but it did not seem to affect Rumsfeld's certainty in his own judgment. More and more, he met questions about the progress of the mission in Iraq with ironic (and, some would say, arrogant) deflection.
In April, as the situation in the streets of Iraq grew messier, Rumsfeld said that "free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things." More pointedly, he refused to dignify the chaos with a name that might summon memories of Vietnam. To many conservatives, the Iraq war, quite apart from its strategic implications, was a way of exorcising those ghosts, a chance to demonstrate the national will and military prowess that had arisen in the decades since the humiliating withdrawal from Indochina. Long after others, on the ground in Iraq and even within Rumsfeld's inner circle in Washington, discerned the ominous signs of a gathering insurgency, Rumsfeld insistently declined to call it such.
Jack Keane, the Vice Chief of Staff, says that he was the first to raise the matter in the Tank, the super-secure Pentagon meeting room of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "I said, 'This is a low-level insurgency,' and I told them what the definition of that was, and what it looked like," Keane said. "They were targeting Americans, and it was organized. It was being done at multiple locations, which meant that there had to be some general guidance. . . . The operations they were conducting had some basic complexity to it. They were planned, and thought out, and well executed, in the sense that they were achieving success. They were killing us."
It was not a welcome observation, as General Richard B. Myers, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, made clear, according to Keane. "I got some pushback from the chairman, and he said, 'We've gotta be careful about that word,' " Keane said.
Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, also sensed that what was happening in Iraq was more than the untidy impulses of a newly free people. In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, two months after the fall of Baghdad, he conceded, "There's a guerrilla war there, but . . . we can win it."
Wolfowitz, too, got pushback, both from Rumsfeld and from Tommy Franks, who said three weeks later that "guerrilla and insurgency operations are supported by the people, and I've demonstrated to my own satisfaction that the people of Iraq do not support the violence that we're seeing right now."
Keane said, "They thought maybe it wouldn't be that bad, and there's no sense using those names associated with it, because you're gonna stomp it out in a couple, three months—it wasn't worth all the rhetoric."
In a remarkable exchange with reporters at a Pentagon briefing in late June, a reporter read Rumsfeld a dictionary definition of "guerrilla war" and asked why he was so reluctant to name it as such. "Can you remind us again why this isn't a quagmire?" the reporter asked. Rumsfeld replied, in his best vice-principal tone, as if patronizing a particularly dull student, "I guess the reason I don't use the phrase 'guerrilla war' is because there isn't one, and it would be a misunderstanding and a miscommunication to you and to the people of the country and the world." He explained that the disturbances in Iraq were being caused by looters, criminals, remnants of the regime, foreign terrorists, and Iranian agents. "Doesn't make it anything like a guerrilla war or an organized resistance. It makes it like five different things going on that are functioning much more like terrorists. . . . Now, that is not—it doesn't fit that word. So, I think, that if one analyzes what is going on in that country, they would find a different way to characterize it. I know it's nice to be—have a bumper sticker, but it's the wrong bumper sticker."
At this, the reporter pulled out the official Defense Department definition of "guerrilla war" ("I knew I should have looked it up!" Rumsfeld said. "I could die that I didn't look it up!"): " 'Military and paramilitary operations conducted in enemy-held or hostile territory by irregular, predominantly indigenous forces.' This seems to fit a lot of what's going on in Iraq."
To which Rumsfeld replied, "It really doesn't."
Two weeks later, Rumsfeld's top commander on the ground, General John Abizaid, a Rumsfeld favorite, who had just taken over the leadership of the Army's Central Command from Tommy Franks, addressed the question squarely. The insurgents who were attacking Americans, Abizaid said, "are conducting what I would describe as a classical guerrilla-type campaign against us. It's low-intensity conflict in our doctrinal terms, but it's war however you describe it."
Abizaid, a Lebanese-American who speaks Arabic, went on to note that the insurgents were mostly mid-level Baathists, members of Saddam's Special Republican Guard and security services, and that they had organized regionally into cells. For his efforts, Keane says, Abizaid "got his ass handed to him."
The American invading force had prepared for a chemical assault from Saddam's Army, for a set-piece battle with Saddam's armored units, and for a long, bloody battle for Baghdad. "What we didn't plan for," says Jack Keane, "is what happened."
The American military had spent thirty years avoiding the thought of fighting a counter-insurgency, a subject that hadn't been part of the curriculum at West Point since the Vietnam era. The proud, professional volunteer force constructed since Vietnam was not built for a protracted occupation, an eventuality that, in any case, the nation's political leadership reflexively rejected out of hand. Bill Clinton fought a war in Kosovo by announcing at the outset that the commitment of ground troops was not an option; the Bush Administration came into power renouncing the idea of nation-building as a foolish misuse of military resources.
But the inability quickly to recognize and formulate a coherent strategy to fight the insurgency that arose in Iraq reflected more than the military's institutional biases, or Donald Rumsfeld's intransigence. It also partly reflected a crucial policy decision in Washington, which effectively dashed any chance that the coalition forces would be received as liberators rather than as occupiers.
The circle of defense advisers that had most ardently advocated the Iraqi invasion, including Richard Perle and Newt Gingrich, had imagined a strategy that wouldn't require a lasting American presence in postwar Iraq. The plan depended on the recruitment and training of "free Iraqis" to participate in the combat phase of the operation, and the imposition of a provisional government, run mostly by Iraqi exiles, after the war. Something like that had worked in Afghanistan, and, the reasoning went, the approach stood an even better chance of working in Iraq; Iraqi exiles had been planning for such an eventuality for more than a decade. But the program to train Iraqi fighters produced fewer than a hundred recruits; it also ignored the reality that prominent exiles like Ahmad Chalabi had less credibility, and less of an indigenous base, than those whom the U.S. had relied on in Afghanistan. The Defense Department's plan to set up a provisional Iraqi government was abandoned after a bitter interagency argument within the Bush Administration that lasted until the very eve of the war. The State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency refused to endorse the imposition of a provisional government composed of Iraqi exiles, arguing that it would not be seen as legitimate. In the end, Rumsfeld surrendered on the point—to the lasting distress of the hawks nearest him. "I think he made a serious mistake," Perle, a member of Rumsfeld's advisory Defense Policy Board, recalled. "I think he underestimated the importance of getting those matters right."
President Bush, with Rumsfeld's approval, ultimately decided that postwar Iraq would be governed by an American-led Coalition Provisional Authority, to be headed by a veteran diplomat, L. Paul Bremer. With that appointment, and the implicit personal authority conveyed therein, came a critical, and not entirely intended, shift in American postwar policy. Bremer became the American proconsul in Iraq, technically reporting to Rumsfeld's Defense Department but exercising a degree of authority that came to surprise even Rumsfeld. Bremer began his tenure, in May, 2003, by issuing a series of edicts that included the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and the removal of senior Baath Party members from government jobs. (Bremer said that he was acting on instructions from the Pentagon.) The edicts signalled that Baathists would have no place in the new Iraq, but they also crippled the bureaucracy and eliminated the most important instrument of Iraqi unity and a crucial tool in establishing order. In effect, half a million men, many with guns, were sent into the streets.
These moves had a decisive impact on the coalition's response to the widening insurgency. A huge instant bureaucracy was set up inside the walls of Saddam's former Republican Palace, where Americans laboriously laid plans for undertakings ranging from the design of a new Iraqi flag to the restructuring of the Iraqi monetary system. Meanwhile, no coherent, unified plan to fight the insurgency emerged, which rendered such plans increasingly abstract. "It was Alice in Wonderland," recalled Gary Anderson, a defense specialist who was dispatched to Iraq by Paul Wolfowitz to help set up an Iraqi civil-defense corps. "It was surreal. I mean, I was so depressed the second time we went there, to see the lack of progress and the continuing confusion. The lack of coherence. You'd get two separate briefs, two separate cuts on the same subject, from the military and from the civilians."
To Wolfowitz and others who had advocated the quickest possible turnover of authority to Iraqis, the C.P.A. was a maddening obstacle to the ever-dwindling hope of replicating the Afghanistan success. "There was an explicit, coherent strategy," recalled Newt Gingrich, another influential neoconservative member of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board. "It was the strategy of staying light, getting in, rebuilding the Iraqis quickly, and getting out. The war plan was right. Bremer thought he was MacArthur in Japan. And Bremer, in thirty days, destroyed the strategy. And neither Bush nor Cheney nor Rumsfeld would intervene decisively enough, and neither would Franks or Abizaid. It was one of the most amazing strategic mistakes I've ever seen."
Such comments may be the retrospective rationale of men who'd advanced a war policy that had gone bad. Events in Iraq have provided no compelling evidence that the war hawks' plan stood any real chance of success, even if it had been followed. But Bremer did come to symbolize an occupying force that did not seem intent upon leaving anytime soon. "When one now looks back," Douglas J. Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense, would later observe, "and says, huh, we had an insurgency, and the insurgents were able to capitalize on the widespread perception that the United States wanted to occupy, own, exploit, and stay for a long time running Iraq—and that enormously valuable piece of information operations by the bad guys was facilitated by the way we organized the C.P.A. I mean, one can look back, make that point, and then say, what a dumb, obvious error."
As the weeks turned into ever more bloody months, it became increasingly clear that the coalition could lose in Iraq. General Abizaid, the CENTCOM commander, knew that the coalition had to have a single, coherent counter-insurgency strategy, and it had to have one soon.
On November 11, 2003, Abizaid sent a memorandum to Rumsfeld, in which he provided the Secretary with the definition of "counter-insurgency," taken from the Pentagon's own dictionary of military terms:
**{: .break one} ** Sir, our doctrine states: "Counterinsurgency—those military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency.". . . Clearly we must integrate elements of national power in any effort to defeat an insurgency. **
Abizaid attached to the memo a one-page primer called "Elements of Successful Counterinsurgency" ("worthy of your time to digest," Abizaid noted to Rumsfeld), which included the advice to "develop a coordinated, integrated plan based on an accurate assessment of the insurgency's goals, techniques, and strategies." It is difficult to imagine that, at that late date, the Secretary of Defense needed to be told the meaning of "counter-insurgency," but the likely purpose of Abizaid's memo is no less remarkable. Seven months after the fall of Baghdad, the Administration still lacked a strategy for countering an enemy it did not fully understand. Abizaid's memo underscoring the need for an "integrated" strategy arrived at the same moment that Bremer was summoned to Washington for a series of meetings that effectively reined him in. He returned to Baghdad with instructions to hasten the timetable for establishing Iraqi sovereignty. (Bremer said that the new timetable was his idea.)
Insurgency and the means to combat it soon became the hot new subjects in military circles; books on counter-insurgency, such as John Nagl's "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife," became required reading around the Pentagon and among junior military officers. Rumsfeld himself never quite surrendered to the language of Vietnam—preferring terms such as "terrorists" to "guerrillas" or "insurgents"—but he'd long since realized that Iraq had devolved into something much worse than untidy. Just a month before Abizaid's memo reached him, Rumsfeld had written to four top Pentagon officials, conceding that the war in Iraq would be "a long, hard slog."
By the end of George W. Bush's fifth year in office, the inner core of true believers around Rumsfeld, such Iraq hawks as Wolfowitz and Feith, were mostly gone from the Pentagon. Rumsfeld, meanwhile, was poised to become the longest-serving Defense Secretary ever, and was already a powerful token of the war itself, freighted with all its failures and controversies, from the abuses at Abu Ghraib to the harsh interrogation policy that Rumsfeld had personally endorsed. Among Democrats, insistence upon Rumsfeld's resignation became a kind of litmus test of antiwar seriousness. By the time of the 2006 midterm elections, more than a few Republicans were inclined to concur.
To the end, Rumsfeld seemed to embrace the controversy. When, on the day after the election—an emphatic no-confidence vote on Rumsfeld's war—he joined Bush at the White House and his departure from the Pentagon was announced, Rumsfeld could not resist comparing himself to another civilian warrior who believed himself misunderstood by his critics. "I have benefitted greatly from the criticism," he said, invoking Churchill, "and at no time have I suffered from the lack thereof."
In some way, Rumsfeld's long tenure has brought the relationship between the military and its civilian leadership full circle. At the end of the Clinton Administration, some uniformed critics of the President had to be warned about possible insubordination; Rumsfeld inspired similar passion among some senior military leaders. This spring, what appeared to be a coördinated wave of criticism of Rumsfeld by retired generals moved some of their peers to suggest that they, too, be mindful of the prohibition on "contemptuous" remarks. On March 19th, General Paul Eaton, who had been in charge of training Iraqi troops before his retirement, last January, wrote in the Times that the Defense Secretary "has shown himself incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically and is far more than anyone else responsible for what has happened to America's mission in Iraq. Rumsfeld must step down." Lieutenant General Greg Newbold, who retired in 2002, called for Rumsfeld's resignation in Time in an essay that cited "McNamara-like micromanagement" and stated that "a fundamentally flawed plan was executed for an invented war, while pursuing the real enemy, al-Qaeda, became a secondary effort."
Rumsfeld had arrived at the Pentagon convinced that the American military had to be broken down and rebuilt, and he had done just that. In Rumsfeld's six-year tenure, he had initiated a dizzying list of reforms, some deemed necessary even by his critics, from the restructuring of the Army's once-cumbersome fighting formations to the repositioning of American forces abroad, shifting them away from Western Europe. Less visible change was brought to the military culture, especially in the Army, which now sees itself as the force of first resort—an attitude once reserved for the Marines. But it is also true that the Iraq war has severely stressed the Army, and Rumsfeld's reluctance to significantly increase the size of the force has it stretched to its limits. It is a war-honed and immeasurably more knowledgeable Army, precisely because it is bound up in a conflict with no apparent end, facing a resourceful enemy who daily presents some new lethal challenge. It has truly been transformed, but not in the manner that Andy Marshall would have prescribed, or foreseen. It is caught in a de-facto civil war that has cost the lives of more than twenty-eight hundred service members, and those of many times that number of Iraqis.
Donald Rumsfeld might have made a fine peacetime Defense Secretary. But it may also be that Rumsfeld would never have lasted in peacetime. He survived in the job because war came, and he used the wars to force change upon a recalcitrant professional military. In a real sense, the war in Iraq allowed Rumsfeld to create his transformed military, even while presenting it with a mission that it may not be able to win—a war like Vietnam. ♦


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The endgame: NAT, P2P woes, and firewalls
Today, 99 percent of the Internet is still IPv4-only. There is just no way that everything will be IPv6-enabled before we run out of IPv4 addresses in two, maybe three years. So, we need to put IPv4 on some kind of life support.
There is no plan B. Despite the long list of the issues with IPv6 and its deployment, there are no alternatives... there's no way we can come up with, implement, and deploy an alternative before the lack of IPv4 addresses becomes a serious problem.
Actually, for those of us who have IPv4 addresses today, there really isn't much of a problem in the short term. It's just that there won't be any addresses for new users a few years from now. But obviously, just serving existing users without any opportunity to grow won't fly with businesses. So the solution is to have users share an IPv4 address. People already do this at home using NAT (Network Address Translation). This makes it possible to go online with an entire household using only one IP address. But that level of frugalness won't be enough: soon, ISPs will be doing NAT so multiple customers will share an IPv4 address.
Architecturally, NAT is a bad thing. It breaks all kinds of assumptions built into protocols, so it can get in the way of applications. This is especially true for peer-to-peer applications such as BitTorrent, but also VoIP (including Skype). However, over the years application builders have figured out ways to work around NAT. One method involves talking to the local home gateway that's performing NAT, and asking it to forward incoming connections using a port mapping protocol. This works very well when you run a NAT in your own home, but not so much when your ISP runs a big NAT. Not only will different users compete for the best port numbers, but also the commonly used port mapping protocols (UPnP IGD and NAT-PMP) can't talk to a NAT several hops away.
Making peer-to-peer applications work may or may not be a high priority for ISPs, who also tend to be in the video content distribution and/or voice calling business. Worse, ISP-provided NAT may actually break IPv6 tunneling mechanisms that allow people to gain IPv6 connectivity if their ISP doesn't provide it. And deploying these expensive and complex new NAT boxes may take away resources that could otherwise be used to deploy IPv6 in the network.
In the early 2000s, Windows shipped with lots of insecure protocols enabled by default, and an unintended side effect of NAT—the service prevents all the machines behind a shared IP from receiving incoming connections—actually became a marketable feature in home routers. But since IPv6 has no NAT (nor does it have any need for NAT), NAT routers had to create the same firewall effect using a stateless firewall.
However, NATs only break incoming connections by accident, so applications can work around that pretty easily (see the port mapping method described above). Firewalls, on the other hand, break connectivity on purpose, so it's generally not possible to easily work around them. And there are no port mapping mechanisms for IPv6 (there's no NAT, remember)? All of this means that peer-to-peer protocols such as VoIP solutions and BitTorrent work worse over IPv6 than over IPv4. This situation probably won't be resolved any time soon, as people with "security" in their job title refuse to consider passing through unsolicited, incoming packets in any way, shape, or form.
IPv6 NAT
In the meantime, there are heated discussions inside the IETF about whether to specify the dreaded IPv6 NAT after all. The argument against it is architectural disgust. (The IETF also passed on creating an IPv4 NAT specification, at first.) But the argument in favor is that a well-behaved IPv6 NAT wouldn't break as much software as an IPv4 NAT recompiled for 128-bit addresses. The thing that creates most of the problems with NAT is the address sharing. With IPv6 NAT, it would be possible to create 1-to-1 address mappings rather than the 1-to-many used with IPv4 NAT, So it would still be possible to obfuscate an internal network that uses private addresses, but peer-to-peer applications, if allowed through a firewall, could work with a little extra logic. The lack of IPv6 NAT is also cited as a hurdle in IPv6 deployment, as it's one more thing that's different between IPv4 and IPv6. IPv6 NAT that's different from IPv4 NAT wouldn't really help in this area. Then again, the only thing that really looks, smells, and tastes like authentic IPv4... is IPv4. At some point, IPv6 needs to be its own protocol.
Plan B
There is no plan B. Despite the long list of the issues with IPv6 and its deployment, there are no alternatives. It took us the better part of two decades to get this far with IPv6, and there's no way we can come up with, implement, and deploy an alternative before the lack of IPv4 addresses becomes a serious problem. Address sharing using NAT and some form of IPv4 address redistribution (for pay or otherwise) will allow IPv4 to continue to operate without too much trouble for a few years after the depletion of the various free address pools. However, we're currently putting about 200 million new addresses into use every year. That's with pretty tough rules about who can get addresses and fairly heavy NAT deployment in place already. Countries in northern and western Europe, which didn't receive large allotments of IPv4 address space when the getting was good in the 1980s, still use more than one IPv4 address per inhabitant and are still growing a little. Even the US, at 1.5 billion IPv4 addresses, is continuing to put more IPv4 addresses in use every year.
But no matter how the IPv4 address space is sliced and diced, it's not going to sustain a global network in a future where countries like China and Brazil are rapidly catching up to the many countries in the developing world which don't even have anything close to their fair share of addresses, yet. So, even though we're still trying to figure out the question, the answer will have to be "IPv6."
Some of the real and perceived shortcomings of IPv6 are currently being addressed by the IETF and other bodies. Even though there is very little IPv6 deployment today, there's already somewhat of a legacy problem: early IPv6 implementations don't support DHCPv6, for instance. But most IPv6-capable systems are still receiving (semi-) automated software updates, so the legacy issues may not be insurmountable this time around. We will have to move through a period where IPv4 is going from good to worse because of increasing layers of NAT, while IPv6 is still in its awkward phase and lacks the secondary features or the easy compatibility that we've grown accustomed to with IPv4. And maybe some systems will be IPv4-only while others are IPv6-only. Even though the transition is not going to be as smooth as we'd hoped, we'll end up with a stronger and more stable Internet, with almost infinite potential for growth after the transition. Just as long as we make sure there's a way to get there from here.

subset: commoncrawl


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What's My Home Worth
Enter your address below to compare automated home value estimates from Zillow and Eppraisal. These are some of the most widely used computer-generated algorithms shown on many web sites. Each uses public records, typically 4-8 months behind the most current market data. They are useful for general market trending but are often very inaccurate because they cannot take into account local market conditions, competitive properties for sale, condition and unique details of the home and proximity to area amenities. They should not be relied upon for specific valuations for a home sale or refinance. If you are considering listing your home, you will need a real-time valuation from a licensed Realtor who knows your market and can look at recent MLS activity to determine the recommended price for listing your home.


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Crush Davis: Slugger's record slam lifts O's
Becomes just fourth big leaguer to go deep in four games to start year
BALTIMORE -- The scene was picturesque, a threatening forecast that morphed into a sunny 60-degree afternoon allowing the sellout crowd of 46,653 at Camden Yards a perfect backdrop Friday to welcome the Orioles home to start the 2013 season against the Twins.
Following a touching tribute to late manager Earl Weaver and thunderous applause as the team's three American League Gold Glove Award winners were honored in a pregame ceremony, red-hot first baseman Chris Davis went out and made history.
With the score tied in the eighth, Davis blasted Tyler Robertson's first-pitch 86-mph fastball for a grand slam that marked his fourth homer in as many games.
"You put him in the Grand Canyon, he'll hit it out," cleanup hitter Adam Jones said of Davis, whose blast paved the way for the Orioles' 9-5 victory.
Davis joins Willie Mays, Mark McGwire and Nelson Cruz as the only big leaguers to homer in the first four games of a season. With five RBIs on Friday, Davis now has 16 this season, the most through a team's first four games since RBIs became an official stat in 1920.
"I'm more excited about the three wins," Davis said of an Orioles club that is 3-1 in its first four games. "There's a lot of good things going on in here. We started that in Spring Training. It was relaxed, we are having fun, but taking care of our business. A lot of guys stepped up and showed what they are capable of doing, and we carried that into the season so far."
No one has carried over that success at the same rate as Davis. He is also the first Oriole to hit a home run in each the team's first four games and is now two games shy of the club record for consecutive games with an RBI.
"It's extremely impressive to watch how he handles balls, especially breaking balls on the outside part of the plate," starter Jake Arrieta said of Davis, who drove the ball to the opposite field for his second career grand slam.
"I watched the replay a few times of that home run he hit. If you watch his head and his eyes, it's like his eyes light up on a ball that's a pitchers' pitch. It's not easy, [a] lefty-lefty slider like that to hit the ball the other way."
"You all know I'm usually one of those guys who can probably think back and take it [into context]," said manager Buck Showalter, who admitted Davis' hot streak is probably not comparable to anything he's seen. "I'm glad he's on our side."
Nolan Reimold and Nate McLouth started the game-winning rally with singles off Casey Fien, and then Manny Machado bunted the pair over. Twins manager Ron Gardenhire made the interesting call to intentionally walk Nick Markakis and get to Jones, who made him pay with a single to left field to tie the game and spell the end of Fien's day.
The move brought Robertson on and a crowd already on its feet went berserk from the moment Davis dug in at home plate.
"He barely swung," Robertson said of his fateful first offering to Davis. "He's just on fire right now. He's seeing it good."
Prior to the Orioles' five-run frame, the offense had squandered numerous chances, leaving 10 men on base and going 1-for-7 with runners in scoring position. Davis' heroics also negated a disappointingly uneven outing from Arrieta, who failed to record an out in the sixth inning.
"You can see why Jake has the chance to be so good and why he kind of gets away from it a little bit," Showalter said of Arrieta, who came out firing with 14 strikes in a 17-pitch first inning. "We got back in that ballgame, tied it up and then he struggled a little bit. That's something we need to be better at."
Arrieta, who won the final rotation spot in Spring Training, ran into trouble in the fourth, allowing a leadoff double and a walk that led to four two-out runs to erase a one-run lead. In that frame, Arrieta got ahead 1-2 of Chris Parmelee, who worked the count full before a broken-bat single scored Josh Willingham. Brian Dozier tripled to right-field on a ball that Markakis didn't get a good read on and Eduardo Escobar drove in the fourth run with a single that got the Orioles' bullpen stirring.
Arrieta bounced back with a 1-2-3 fifth inning, but he left after putting a pair of runners on to start the sixth in a 93-pitch start the left much to be desired. He was charged with five runs and gave up seven hits and a pair of walks plus a hit batsman.
"There's things I would have liked to do a little bit better, established a few more things earlier in the game and minimize the damage," said Arrieta, who is coming off a season in which he went 3-9 with a 6.20 ERA in 24 games. "That's the thing for me, to not let the inning get out of hand like it did in the fourth."
Troy Patton and Luis Ayala kept the Twins off the scoreboard after that, combining for three scoreless innings before turning the ball over to Pedro Strop, who sealed the win.
"That's our style, late innings," Jones said with a grin. "That's the way we play. We keep it close and somebody at the end is going to have to get a big hit. And today, it was CD."


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HomeToGo GmbH (US)
4.50 average rating based on 310 reviews
- Reviews.co.ukAug 4, 2017No response at all on 2 homes. I attempted contact 3 times over 5 days and have not gotten a response. Site should report response times on homes like air-b. Read more
- TrustpilotFeb 15, 2018Its good info but should have more real specials and also instructions on how to rent a csr in advance and drive to the house and of course where is situated the car rental\nOr can someone from the car rental drive us to the house of course there would be a fee if that would be available that would... Read more


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The aide, Bridget Kelly, was let go in January after emails revealed she set a traffic jam plot in motion with an email saying, "Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee," a New Jersey town at the base of a heavily traveled bridge where the tie-ups were created, apparently for political retribution against a Democrat who didn't endorse the Republican governor.
READ: A Timeline of the George Washington Bridge Scandal
Fred Kanter, a Boonton business owner at the town hall, asked the question and told the governor that Kelly should have been fired for the act of tying up traffic, which delayed emergency vehicles, school buses and thousands of commuters.
"There were lots of reasons for the firing," Christie replied. "If she had told me the truth, she would have been fired too, because of what she did."
"What happened was absolutely unacceptable," Christie added, and went on to deny involvement as he has repeatedly. "I didn't know anything about it and if I had, I wouldn't have permitted it."
The scandal has overshadowed Christie's administration, lowered his poll numbers, stalled his agenda and raised questions about his chances in a 2016 presidential race.
The U.S. attorney's office is conducting a criminal investigation into the lane closings and other allegations of wrongdoing by Christie aides. New Jersey lawmakers are also investigating, and Christie has hired an outside lawyer to conduct an internal review.
The governor, 51, has been carefully controlling his appearances since the scandal broke open this year. He has attended private, out-of-state fundraisers as president of the Republican Governors Association, and restricted in-state appearances to town hall events in Republican-friendly areas where he takes no press questions.
Hecklers who disrupted two prior town halls were in the audience again Thursday, seated together to spell out the word "Bridgegate" on T-shirts they wore. But they did not disrupt the event.
Afterward, one of the protesters, Fran Ehret, formerly head of a toll-takers union, said critics would continue to attend Christie events.
"There are some important questions he should be answering," she said, such as why Christie continues to stand by David Samson, the chairman of the transit agency who runs the bridge and a close Christie ally who ran the governor's transition. He faces allegations that clients of the private law firm he founded benefited from votes he made at the agency.
The protesters have also criticized Christie for being too slow in distributing Superstorm Sandy relief aid. The state is waiting for a second allocation of $1.4 billion from Washington.


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Get DVD Talk Feeds
Whack-fest. Kino Classics, under their Mario Bava Collection line, has released A Bay of Blood, the 1971 splatter giallo that you may also know as Twitch of the Death Nerve (its best, and best-known, title)...or Blood Bath...or Carnage...or Chain Reaction...or The Ecology of Crime...or Last House on the Left -- Part II...or New House on the Left...or any other number of titles it's gone under since its innumerable drive-in, grindhouse, VHS, and DVD releases. Starring Claudine Auger, Luigi Pistilli, Claudio Camaso, Anna Maria Rosati, Chris Avram, Leopoldo Trieste, Laura Betti, Brigitte Skay, Paola Montenero, Guido Boccaccini, Roberto Bonanni, and Isa Miranda, A Bay of Blood outraged and even disgusted many critics when it was first released (to less-than-impressive b.o.), but it has since gained quite the cult following, being rightfully acknowledged as the direct inspiration for the rip-off Friday the 13th franchise...which of course was instrumental here in America in starting our own "golden age" of splatter films in the 1980s. Seen today, A Bay of Blood is still top-tier splatter: clean, efficient butchery. A solid commentary track by Bava expert Tim Lucas is a nice extra for this clean HD widescreen transfer.
Countess Federica Donati (Isa Miranda), wheelchair-bound and alone at her villa on the bay, mournfully takes her last look out her rain-streaked window, before she is savagely strangled by a hanging rope. Her murderer, husband Count Filippo Donati (Giovanni Nuvoletti), impassively views his handiwork, leaving behind a bogus suicide note, before he is unexpectedly set-upon by a knife-wielding killer. Who, then, is his killer? There are many suspects at hand, right on the bay. Neighbor Frank Ventura (Chris Avram), a real estate developer, is interested in transforming the bay into a resort; did he kill the hold-out Countess? Or did his beautiful girlfriend, blonde Laura (Anna Maria Rosati), do it? What about sultry bitch Renata (Claudine Auger), the Countess' daughter, who's forced to live with her family in a squalid trailer on the estate? Maybe it was her weak-willed husband, Albert (Luigi Pistilli)? Maybe it was entomologist Paolo Fossati (Leopoldo Trieste), who lives nearby with his wife, psychic and tarot reader Anna (Laura Betti)? Or how about Simon (Claudio Camaso), the violent, anti-social half-son of the Countess, who lives in a shack on the estate? Did he kill the four sex-loving hippies (Brigitte Skay, Paola Montenero, Guido Boccaccini, Roberto Bonanni) who broke into Frank's abandoned bayside disco for a little fun and games? Who, indeed, will be left among these suspects, when one by one, they start getting bumped off, as well?
I doubt I can add too much to the reams that have been written about Bava's Twitch of the Death Nerve (that's the title I always associate with the movie, not this disc's A Bay of Blood). Hard-core splatter fans have already identified all the tropes Bava helped refine here in Twitch of the Death Nerve--visual, aural, and thematic motifs that have been imitated ad nauseum in subsequent horror/splatter outings. It's not a terribly difficult movie to dissect; as with many of Bava's movies, his themes are fairly accessible and he doesn't screw around when revealing them for us (when Bava would openly shoot for "art," such as in Lisa and the Devil, that's when he would get into trouble). That's his great strength: his powerful-yet-playful, relatively straightforward embrace of his own visual and aural conventions--conventions that are palpably, operatically visceral, leaving no mistake for the viewer about what he's trying to achieve with his horror and suspense efforts. You can intellectualize this particular movie if you want to, and you may be right in your theories...but on the same token, who doesn't understand the simple, primitive visual "poetry," if you will--the ironic, sick, perverted poetry, of course--of one of Bava's flamboyantly grotesque "kills"?
What works so well, so differently for Twitch of the Death Nerve, is Bava's insistence on stripping everything down to the absolute essentials of a murder mystery suspense thriller. There are no attempts to create fully dimensional characters, no attempt to create complex plotting, while mechanisms for suspense are pared back to their crudest, simplest expressions. Instead of elaborating on these elements as most suspense directors strive to do, Bava does the opposite here: paper-thin motivators with an almost clinical obsession put on depicting the actual killings. That isn't to say Bava doesn't have fun linking all these grotesqueries together (my favorite is when Rosati bares her breasts for Avram--a sight we unfortunately don't get to enjoy--right before Bava cuts to Camaso biting into what looks at first to be a repulsive, veiny breast...but which turns out to be an octopus). Setting up the first kill of the movie, he gives Italian movie legend Isa Miranda the Douglas Sirk treatment, with swirling, overripe music courtesy of Stelvio Cipriani, as she mournfully wheels around her opulent mausoleum of a mansion. Imagine, then, the shock Italian audiences in particular had when Bava then yanks the chair, literally, out from under them and hangs Miranda in a most horrifying manner; primed for Sirk, they're given sickness as Bava lingers over the strangulation, with Miranda's eyes bugged and tongue lolling, her guttural voice grunting and grasping. When Boccaccini and Rubens are harpooned during coitus, Bava cuts to a anthropomorphic dune buggy, complete with big Disney eyes and a smiling bumper. And when Betti gets her head chopped off, Bava cuts to Auger's kids breaking a ceramic head.
Quibbling about how Bava gets to his kills (I've read a few reviews that chide Bava's languid first act, as well as his leisurely montages) seems beside the point: the point of Twitch of the Death Nerve is the kills and nothing more. I rather like how the screenplay (credited to Bava, Giuseppe Zaccariello, Filippo Ottoni, and Sergio Canevari, from a story by Dardano Sacchetti and Franco Barberi) creates a ducks-in-a-shooting-gallery feel as each character is shown to be fairly loathsome in their venality--who cares if these creeps get it in the neck (you can take the four kids as either innocent victims caught in the crossfire of the bay's murderers...or callow hippies who deserve to die because they're interested in only their sexual appetites)? Unlike the imitators who came afterwards, particularly the ludicrous Friday the 13th series that introduced an increasingly silly supernatural element to the slice-and-dice, Bava's kills here are "human" at their most blankly base and terrifying (the money element here reminded me of William Castle's insistence on undercutting his villains' fake supernaturalism with good old-fashioned greed). I've never seen anything in one of those copycats (and I went to all of them...) that compares with the primitive, animal impact of the faceless killer prying that billhook out of still-blinking Bonanni's face, or with the simultaneously hilarious/deeply perverted death throes of nearly-decapitated Skay, who obligingly shoots the camera a sultry look while she assumes a calendar pin-up pose--she even crosses her ankles--before she expires. After Boccaccini and Rubens are speared during sex, Bava lets Rubens continue to grind Boccaccini until she perishes/climaxes...and then we get to sort out for ourselves how sick that is of us to notice. You don't see that kind of playful intelligence in too many of Bava's imitators. By the end of Twitch of the Death Nerve, MAJOR SPOILER ALERT! Bava yet again surprises us, reserving his best kill for last--"best" not because it's the most gruesome but because it's the most hilariously perverse: Auger and Pistilli's neglected children shotgun them down like something out of Looney Tunes, and then laugh at their silly game (their game...or the parents?). Did the kids do it by accident? Or have they inherited their parents' murderous disregard for human life? Who cares...it's the "kill" that counts here.
The DVD:
The Video:
According to the back of Kino's DVD hardcase, A Bay of Blood has been "mastered in HD from the 35mm negative of the English language version." Has that negative been cleaned up or restored? Can't say from the statement...but this anamorphically-enhanced, 1.78:1 widescreen looks far better than I've ever seen the title: colors are quite subtle, image sharpness is solid, contrast is decent, and no compression issues to speak of here. Very nice.
The Audio:
The split mono audio track is acceptable, with minimal hiss...and occasionally quite weird echo-chamber effect with some of the dialogue (is this original, or from the transfer?). No subtitles or closed-captions are available.
The Extras:
First, there's a good commentary track from Bava expert Tim Lucas, who gives plenty of background on the movie's production. Also very cool is an alternate European release version of A Bay of Blood, in Italian with English subtitles, that doesn't offer any new gore...but perhaps just a tiny bit more logical exposition. Not as nice looking, obviously, as the HD English version. Finally, an original trailer for A Bay of Blood, as well as other Bava films available through Kino.
Final Thoughts:
Pure and simple butchery...with a wink. If Bava didn't exactly invent modern splatter movies (Hitchcock and Psycho, don't you think?), he certainly definitively defined them, and probably the single most influential entry in the subgenre is 1971's A Bay of Blood. Stripped of all pretense, Bava skips any elaborate characterizations or suspense motivations, and gets down to work hacking apart and strangling and spearing his victims with single-minded, dirty-minded, perversely-mind good humor. I'm highly, highly recommending Kino's release of A Bay of Blood.


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Canastota wrestling tourney gets started
CANASTOTA -- Chittenango's youthful wrestling team had a rough outing Thursday, losing to Cazenovia by 23.
Friday was a different story for a handful of Bears as they began Canastota's annual Dick New Memorial Wrestling Tournament with wins.
The two-day affair got off to a fast start Friday afternoon and Rob Tyson's fast finish was one of the highlights of the first round for Dispatch-area wrestlers.
"Even if I'd lost, I'd still be proud," Tyson said after winning 7-6 against Canastota's Mike Zupan at 113 pounds. "That's my first match I left it all out there."
The senior needed to as Zupan had the upper hand at the start with two takedowns and a 6-4 lead with 25 seconds to go. Zupan still led 6-4 when the wrestlers went out of bounds nine seconds later but Tyson countered a move and caught Zupan in a half nelson and held him there for three back points as time expired to prevail.
"He was definitely better on the feet, and I didn't want to get too close and get turned," the Chittenango senior said.
Nick Harrington also won by decision for Chittenango, but had an easier time in doing so in his preliminary round match. The junior 170-pounder beat his foe from Homer 11-2.
"That's my first victory," a happy Harrington said afterward. "My first couple of matches this year my morale was lower and I was not putting my all into it."
It was extra tough for the Chittenango upper weight having wrestled the night before, but he pulled through thanks to back points in a dominant second period.
Will Young needed far less drama for his opening round win for the Bears. The 126-pounder pinned Cato-Meridian's Eric Annette in 2:24. He cradled his foe for a 5-2 lead in the first period and used the same move in the second to end the match and save some energy for the next round.
"I run crossface cradle pretty well," Young, a sophomore, said.
Canastota's Zack Zupan and Wyatt Albanese were among the local wrestlers to earn pins in the first round as well, and they did so in quick fashion in the DiMao gym. The tourney features three mats in the Laidlaw gym and two in the DiMao gym. Almost two dozen teams took part Friday evening and they'll return Saturday morning for a 9:00 a.m. start for wrestlebacks and 10:00 a.m. semifinals. The finals, never set for an exact time, are likely to begin around 4:00 p.m.


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William Christopher, Father Mulcahy on 'MASH,' dies at 84
December 31, 2016
William Christopher, the actor best known for his role as Father John Mulcahy on the hit TV show "M*A*S*H," died on Saturday, his family confirmed to Eyewitness News.
His son, John Christopher, said the actor died from non-lung small cell carcinoma at his home in Pasadena.
He was 84.
The actor played the role of Father John Mulcahy on "M*A*S*H" from 1972 to 1983 and in the follow-up series "After M*A*S*H*" from 1983 to 1985.
He also had parts in the movies "The Fortune Cookie," "With Six You Get Eggroll," and the TV show "Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C."
William Christopher leaves behind his wife Barbara and his sons John and Ned.
CHRISTOPHER, William
Born: 10/20/1932, Evanston, Illinois, U.S.A.
Died: 12/31/2016, Pasadena, California, U.S.A.
William Christopher's westerns – actor:
Death Valley Days (TV) – 1966 (Sonny)
The Shakiest Gun in the West – 1968 (hotel manager)
Alias Smith and Jones (TV) – 1971 (telegrapher)
Nichols (TV) – 1971-1972 (Niles)
The Virginian (TV) – 1971 (hotel clerk)
Hearts of the West – 1975 (bank teller)


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Mount Yoran Climber's Log
Nick Turtura - Jul 6, 2013 11:30 pm Date Climbed: Jul 4, 2013Thanks Brian
Climbed with Colton Palmer. We followed Brian Jenkins comments to a tee and were glad we did. I've added a picture of the two hemlocks so you know what you're shooting for. I don't think you can get into too much trouble on this one but there is definitely a easier way and a harder way.
coltonpalmer - Jul 4, 2013 7:13 pm Date Climbed: Jul 4, 2013South Gully's the choice.
Followed the south gully on the right side of the rock field, to the vertical headwall, went right scrambled up the right side of the wall just below two Mountain Hemlocks. Easy scramble, awesome view to the north, and great view of Diamond to the south. Great hike for young hikers.
kraymes - Aug 2, 2011 11:02 am Date Climbed: Jul 29, 2011South Gully
Followed the black rabbit up the south gully. A airy scramble and about a hour or two round trip from Divide Lake.
alpinedon - Nov 23, 2009 1:01 am Date Climbed: Aug 10, 2003Only Once, long ago
Went when the huckleberries were ripe and in profusion along the trail to Divide lake. Went with my landlady, Dorris and her boyfriend, Dennis, who climbed it with me while Doris remained behind.
JGHarrison - Sep 8, 2009 1:58 pm Date Climbed: Aug 28, 2009South Gully
Beautiful camping down at Divide lake. The forest in this area is gorgeous. The peak was quick, fun, and easy. Much better than I had been led to believe from online reports...its just simple. Also, it is much easier than it looks from the lake so dont worry.
I recommend walking up the peak just east(?) as well, even better views, 10 min walk up from the junction of the PCT and Mt. Yoran Trail
cdog - Dec 22, 2008 10:30 pmfall fun 2003
had a great backpacking trip to Yoran Lake with my girlfriend. Pretty good swimming for fall conditions. Scrambled up to the summit for some great views. Interesting peak. We found some decent rock on the way up, but I wasn't hanging all my body weight on it...
cascadetraveler - Sep 13, 2008 9:21 pm Date Climbed: Sep 13, 2008Manky sweet.
I have been making one to two trips into the divide lake basin over the last three years. I have not put this summit up until today. I had a some what late start, 10:30 at the trailhead. I still managed to stand on the summit by 1:30 p.m. It is more of a challenge than it's sister peak South Mt Yoran ( by there standard routes) I am a cascade peak native but I was still unerved by the mank. I still looked for fourth class were i could and tested everything "whew". It offered up some great views of the Willamette pass area and the Divide basin (always a treat). I very cautiously downclimbed and then did some scree skiing until I hit the trail. I have read that there is some fifth class lines on this peak (scary). It was still a worthy scramble despite the mank warning.
Karl Helser - Sep 23, 2007 9:24 pm Date Climbed: Sep 23, 2007Quick scramble...
Long drive from Portland for this one. I'm glad I got Diamond Peak in yesterday. This is a great little scramble with an approach that offers several beautiful lakes & ponds. Car to car is around 4.5 to 5 hours at an easy pace. Class 3 climb. It's a good idea to bring a helmet especially if there is someone above you...
thundercloud - Mar 13, 2007 8:36 pm Date Climbed: Aug 28, 2004South Gully
Nice little talus heap. Another one exists on the opposite side of the lake, what is that? Saw what must have been a Brian descending the scree while taking a break at the lake.
WY in OR - Oct 17, 2004 12:59 amRoute Climbed: South gully Date Climbed: October 2, 2004
Fun little scramble. Good views to the north, and a great view of Diamond Peak to the south. Hike in is rather boring, just a walk in the woods, with very infrequent views, but going up Yoran made it worthwhile. On my way down two guys and their dog passed me on their way up. The dog was a better route finder than they were! Alas, the dog also kicked some rocks down on my head, but these things happen.
cluck - Aug 30, 2004 2:40 pmRoute Climbed: South Date Climbed: 8/28/04
Small world.... After having no one sign this summit log, we get 2 in one day and had 2 Summitposters on the route on the same day.
Agree with Brian.... approach trail was nice, lake is beautiful and scramble was fun.
Since, like most everything in Oregon, there is lots of loose rock, would highly recommend folks in groups be very careful about party induced rock fall and bringing and wearing the brain bucket is a good idea.
Brian Jenkins - Aug 30, 2004 2:31 amRoute Climbed: South Gully Date Climbed: August 28, 2004
Great hike in with lots of lakes. Wondered how this route would go since it is supposed to be Class 4 but if you do it right, it is nice Class 3 the whole way. I'll make corrections/additions/suggestions to the route info which is lacking on this page (the way the route for this page is written is incorrect). Got up into the gully and then over the ridge to easy Class 3 on the back side. Views from Hood in the north to, well, Diamond Peak which pretty much blocks everything south except Cowhorn Peak. Super fun scramble on this one, highly recommended.


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In light of the recent events in Japan, we would like to share some websites that provide basic information on nuclear energy and reactors. We hope you find these to be helpful in the classroom.
U.S. Energy Information Administration: Energy Kids – http://www.eia.doe.gov/kids/energy.cfm?page=nuclear_home-basics
Scientific American – http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=nuclear-energy-primer
Video from The Advocate, Baton Rouge – http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/files/specials/interactives/_international/nuclear-explainer-video/index.html?SITE=LABAT&SECTION=MULTIMEDIA
Mathematical Model Could Help Predict and Prevent Future Extinctions
In an effort to better understand the dynamics of complex networks, scientists have developed a mathematical model to describe interactions within ecological food webs. This research, performed by Northwestern University physics professor Adilson Motter and his student, Sagar Sahasrabudhe, is published in the January 25 issue of Nature Communications. The work illustrates how human intervention may effectively aid species conservation efforts. Read article at: http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=118384&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click
New 6 Minute Video on CWPPRA's Marsh Creation
CWPPRA recently completed a new video short to share its hard work in Louisiana's coastal restoration activities. The new video titled "Marsh Creation – Step-by-Step" can be found on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkwYSHJWyTE and also the CWPRPA web site www.LACoast.gov. The video highlights the East Marsh Island Marsh Creation project (TV-21) while sharing basic information about using sediment in re-establishing and re-creating healthy wetland ecosystems. Through the use of sediments and hydrology, new marsh is being created where standing water once was. CWPPRA project managers and scientists explain and demonstrate the process of the rebirth of this once lost marsh.
National Science Foundation - Climate Change Communications with Lesson Plans
A climate change communications project is being funded and carried out by NSF's Office of Legislative and Public Affairs, in partnership with NBC Learn, the educational arm of NBC News. (Not associated with an NSF grant.) The project, "Changing Planet," includes 13 videos with associated lesson plans, being posted online over 13 weeks.
Videos: Changing Planet http://www.nbclearn.com/changingplanet
Lesson Plans: Windows to the Universe http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/changing_planet/changing_planet.html
We are also holding three town halls with NBC TV personalities at US universities: Yale in January with Tom Brokaw, George Washington University in April, and an Arizona university in August. These panel discussions, at which the high school and college students making up the live audience can ask questions, focus on various aspects of climate change and are taped for later airing on TV. The Yale event focused on the impacts of climate change on lives; GWU will focus on clean energy; and Arizona on water resources.
Learning Ocean Science through Ocean Exploration Curriculum Part II – Saturday, April 2, 8:00 am–3:30 pm (Registration Deadline: March 18)
Join educators during this follow-up session to the introductory professional development workshop on Learning Ocean Science through Ocean Exploration, a curriculum developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of Ocean Exploration and Research (OER). Conduct inquiry- and standards-based activities tied directly to ocean expeditions with facilitator, Dr. Beth Day-Miller. In addition, participants will have the opportunity to hear from and interact with ocean explorer, Dr. Peter Etnoyer. Dr. Etnoyer will discuss the importance of seamounts and share submersible video highlights of deep-sea coral communities in the Gulf of Alaska from NOAA OER funded cruises in 2002 and 2004. Pre-registration is required and space is limited. Each participant will receive unique take-home materials, a NOAA Ocean Exploration Certificate of Participation, a continental breakfast, and lunch. A $100 stipend will be available for those who participate in both the Introductory and Followup full-day workshops. If spaces are available, educators who have not yet participated in a NOAA Ocean Exploration Introductory Workshop are still welcome to join us for this Follow-up Workshop. To register: Contact Tricia LeBlanc at the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas, (504) 378-2675 or firstname.lastname@example.com.
Gulf Lappniappe Adult Education Workshop Series - Louisiana Fisheries II
LUMCON's Gulf Lagniappe adult education workshop Louisiana Fisheries II with Dr. Ed Chesney is being held on April 2, 2011 from 9am-3:30pm at the DeFelice Marine Center in Cocodrie, LA. This workshop will focus on Louisiana fisheries and related topics. Attendance of the first session is not required for the participation in the second session. Participants must be 18 years or older. The cost is $10/person. Activities include a presentation by Dr. Chesney, lab activities on fish anatomy, a cruise aboard the R/V Acadiana, and a tour of the marine center. Lunch will be provided for those that pre-register. For more information or to register please contact either Murt Conover at (985) 851-2860 / firstname.lastname@example.com or Holly Hebert at (985) 851-2842 / email@example.com. Funding for this program is provided by a grant from the Gulf of Mexico Alliance and Dauphin Island Sea Lab.
Volunteers Needed – Cypress Planting in Southern Louisiana
The Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, the Office of Coastal Protection and Restoration, and RPM Ecosystems Gulf Coast LLC, Restore the Earth Foundation invite you to come volunteer to plant cypress trees in New Iberia. The objective of this volunteer project is to increase habitat quality and promote a healthy cypress forest at wetland sites in southern Louisiana. The restored cypress forest will provide critical habit for wildlife and provide storm protection to adjacent marsh and communities.
Cypress Planting – Spanish Lake Game and Fish Preserve (1 day event)
When: Thursday March 17th from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm
Where: Spanish Lake Game and Fish Preserve, 117 Spanish Lake Rd. New Iberia, LA 70560
All planting equipment (gloves, shovels, dibbles, etc.), refreshments and lunch will be provided. This is a strenuous activity so physical fitness is required. Volunteers must be over 15 years old. Please feel free to volunteer for one, two or three days. Additional information, including detailed directions and what to bring, will be provided to volunteers prior to the event.
Register online at www.crcl.org or by calling (888) LACOAST
Volunteers Needed – Planting Marsh Grasses to Restore Wetlands
The Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana and the America's WETLAND Foundation are looking for volunteers to help plant 5,000 plugs of marsh grass at the Black Lake Marsh/Marcantel Property wetland restoration site in Hackberry, LA. The Black Lake Marsh site has been suffering land loss due to saltwater intrusion, wave erosion and hurricane damage from the storms of the last five years. The objective of this volunteer project would be to plant marsh grass along a newly constructed levee to help prevent further erosion and to stabilize the soil. Volunteer efforts will produce new habitats that will support a variety of aquatic wildlife and migratory birds.
When: Monday March 21, 2011 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Where: Volunteers will meet at St. Peter Church located on the corner of Highway 27 and West Main Drive in Hackberry, Louisiana. From there we will caravan approximately 5 miles to the planting site.
Volunteers will be planting grasses along a newly constructed levee in Black Lake. Volunteers will be able to walk along the levee to plant or will be transported down the levee by boat. All planting equipment (gloves, shovels, dibbles, etc.), sunscreen and bug spray will be provided. Drinks and lunch will be provided to all volunteers.
Additional information will be sent out to registered volunteers a few days before the event. Register online at https://www.thedatabank.com/dpg/316/mtglist.asp?formid=event
The National Environmental Justice Advisory Council National – Public Teleconference Meeting
Thursday, March 31, 2011, 1:00 pm-4:00 pm Eastern Time
The primary topic of discussion will be EPA's charge to the NEJAC on ensuring long-term engagement of communities in Gulf Coast eco-system restoration efforts. There will be a public comment period from 2:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Comments requested should respond to how best to:
1. Engage minority, low-income, and tribal/indigenous communities for input into decisions about Gulf Coast restoration plans, particularly for the impacts of such plans on permitting and how best to facilitate the participation of immigrant populations and communities with potential language barriers.
2. Consider indigenous, cultural, and historical concerns during restoration and recovery
3. Identify any regulatory and policy hurdles that impede, complicate, or discourage sustained community engagement in decisions about restoration and recovery.
To Register By E-mail: Send an e-mail to email@example.com with "Register for the NEJAC-March Teleconference" in the subject line. Please provide your name, organization, city and state, e-mail address, and telephone number for future follow-up.
To Register By Phone or Fax: Send a fax (please print) or leave a voice message, with your name, organization, city and state, e-mail address, and telephone number to 877-773-1489. Please specify which meeting you are registering to attend (e.g., NEJAC-March Teleconference).
Please also state whether you would like to be put on the list to provide public comment, and whether you are submitting written comments before the Wednesday, March 23 deadline. Non-English speaking attendees wishing to arrange for a foreign language interpreter may also make appropriate arrangements using the email address or telephone/fax number.
Members of the public who wish to attend or to provide public comment must pre-register by 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, March 23, 2011. Individuals or groups making remarks during the public comment period will be limited to five minutes. To accommodate the large number of people who want to address the NEJAC, only one representative of a community, organization, or group will be allowed to speak. The suggested format for written public comments is as follows: A brief description of the concern and what you want the NEJAC to advise EPA to do; Name of Speaker; Name of Organization/Community; City and State; and E-mail address.
Written comments received by 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, March 23, 2011, will be included in the materials distributed to the members of the NEJAC prior to the teleconference meeting. Written comments received after that time will be provided to the NEJAC as time allows.
All written comments should be sent to EPA's support contractor, APEX Direct, Inc., via e-mail at firstname.lastname@example.com or fax at 877-773-1489.
For information about access or services for individuals with disabilities, please contact Ms. Estela Rosas, APEX Direct, Inc., at 877-773-1489 or via e-mail at firstname.lastname@example.com.
Louisiana Earth Day is Sunday, April 17th from noon to 8:00 PM
Join in on the 22nd Earth Day Celebration. This year's theme is "This Land is Our Land". For more information, contact Dianne Lindstedt at email@example.com or 225-578-1558.
Eco-Art Kayak Adventures (Weekdays in April 2011)
A Once in a Lifetime Environmental Field Experience for Students in Galveston Bay
Don't miss this great opportunity in April for public and private schools, universities, and educational groups to experience hands-on education kayaking and exploring Galveston Bay with Artist Boat at an extremely affordable price. The Adventures are life changing. Cost is $450 (transportation not included) for up to 25 participants. Your day will include a 4 hour Eco-Art adventure. Activities will include water color painting, paddling lessons, birding, and other sightseeing while observing local ecology!
Call us today to see how much fun you can have learning!! www.artistboat.org
Louisiana's 9th Environmental Awareness Student Art & Language Arts Contests (Deadline: April 21)
The Louisiana Environmental Education Commission and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife & Fisheries, along with contest sponsor Alcoa Foundation, announces the 9th Environmental Awareness Student Art & Language Arts Contests. This year's theme is "Louisiana Outdoors: A Beautiful Experience!" Louisiana students may enter their original work in the art and/or the language arts area of the contest. Winning art and language arts entries will be published in our 2012 calendar. All winners will be honored at a reception to be held at the Governor's Mansion. All entries must be postmarked by April 21, 2011.
Categories for both art and language arts contests: Group 1 – Ages 5-7, Group 2 – Ages 8-10, Group 3 – Ages 11-13, Group 4 – Ages 14-18
Prizes awarded to contest winners: 1st place in each category – $200, 2nd place in each category – $100, 3rd place in each category – $75
An official entry form and release must accompany each entry. Entries that do not comply with contest rules will be disqualified. The reproducible registration form can be downloaded from our website and MUST accompany the entry and MUST be signed by the contestant and parent or guardian. For more information, full contest guidelines, and contest entry form, please visit http://www.wlf.louisiana.gov/environmental-awareness-art-language-arts-contest or contact Juliet Raffray at firstname.lastname@example.com.
Announcing International Marine Debris Art Contest (Deadline: May 15, 2011)
Calling all artists! Kids in grades K-12 are invited to participate in an international art contest sponsored by Immersion Learning, The JASON Project, the North American Marine Environmental Protection Association (NAMEPA), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The theme of the contest is "Marine Debris." Marine debris is any human-made waste that has ended up in a lake, sea, ocean, or other waterway either by accident or on purpose. Examples include plastic bags, glass bottles, old fishing equipment, and abandoned boats. Contest submissions should focus on the types, sources, and/or impacts of marine debris on the environment. To learn more about marine debris, visit www.marinedebris.noaa.gov. All entries must be uploaded by May 15, 2011.
LOWA 2011 Youth Outdoor Journalism Contest Begins (Deadline: June 3)
The Louisiana Outdoor Writers Association announced the start of its 2011 Youth Journalism Contest. Open to all youth 18 and under, the contest is designed to stimulate an interest in outdoor activities such as hunting, fishing, boating, camping, hiking, and most outdoor activities--and the ability to communicate this interest to the public. This highly popular contest attracts entrants from all over Louisiana and neighboring states, and is lauded by educators statewide as an effective youth literacy project. The contest has three categories consisting of Senior Essay (14-18 YOA), Junior Essay (13 YOA and under), and Photography (18 YOA and under). Awards are given in 1st through 4th place in each category, and the winning students will be recognized by the LOWA at the annual conference banquet to be held in August. For more information on contest rules and submissions, interested persons can go to the LOWA website at www.laoutdoorwriters.com or they may email Gordon Hutchinson, contest chairman, at email@example.com.
EPA Gulf Guardian Award (Deadline: March 31, 2011)
The U. S. Environmental Protection Agency's Gulf of Mexico Program partnership developed the Gulf Guardian awards as a way to recognize and honor the businesses, community groups, individuals, and organizations that are taking extraordinary steps to keep the Gulf healthy, beautiful and productive. For the year 2011, the Gulf of Mexico Program partnership will be awarding 1st, 2nd and 3rd place awards for seven (7) categories: Business & Industry, Environmental Justice/Cultural Diversity, Civic/NonProfit
Organizations, Partnerships, Youth Environmental Education, Individual, and BiNational partnership efforts. To complete a nomination application for 2011, go to the Gulf of Mexico Program's web site at http://www.epa.gov/gmpo, and then click on the Gulf Guardian Application button. Applications are available in both English and Spanish. Email your nomination to email@example.com by March 31, 2011.