Soldier's Death Strengthens Senators' Antiwar Resolve- Kerry, Dodd Demand Stronger Challenge to Bush

[bigtree]

By Jonathan Weisman and Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, January 30, 2007; Page A03

Just before Christmas, an Army captain named Brian Freeman cornered Sens. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) at a Baghdad helicopter landing zone. The war was going badly, he told them. Troops were stretched so thin they were doing tasks they never dreamed of, let alone trained for.

Freeman, 31, took a short holiday leave to see his 14-month-old daughter and 2-year-old son, returned to his base in Karbala, Iraq, and less than two weeks ago died in a hail of bullets and grenades. Insurgents, dressed in U.S. military uniforms, speaking English and driving black American SUVs, got through a checkpoint and attacked, kidnapped four soldiers and later shot them. Freeman died in the assault, the fifth casualty of the brazen attack.

The death of the West Point graduate -- a star athlete from Temecula, Calif., who ran bobsleds and skeletons with Winter Olympians -- has radicalized Dodd, energized Kerry and girded the ever-more confrontational stance of Democrats in the Senate. Freeman's death has reverberated on the Senate floor, in committee deliberations and on television talk shows.

"This was the kind of person you don't forget," Dodd said yesterday. "You mention the number dead, 3,000, the 22,000 wounded, and you almost see the eyes glaze over. But you talk about an individual like this, who was doing his job, a hell of a job, but was also willing to talk about what was wrong, it's a way to really bring it to life, to connect."

"When I returned from war, almost 40 years ago now, I stood up and spoke from my heart and my gut about what I thought was wrong," Kerry said on the Senate floor last week as he recounted his meeting with Freeman. "I asked the question in 1971: How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? . . . I never thought that I would be reliving the need to ask that question again."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/29/AR2007012902002_pf.html


IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 071-07
January 23, 2007
DoD Identifies Army Casualty

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Capt. Brian S. Freeman, 31, of Temecula, Calif., died Jan. 20 in Karbala, Iraq, of wounds suffered when his meeting area came under attack by mortar and smalls arms fire. Freeman was assigned to the 412th Civil Affairs Battalion, Whitehall, Ohio.

http://www.defenselink.mil/Releases/Release.aspx?ReleaseID=10426




http://journals.democraticunderground.com/bigtree

[illinoisprogressive]

1. Sadness haunts everyday. heartbreaking

[bigtree]

3. this soldier's death seems to be reverberating through some of the debates.

unfortunately, that's how these things sometimes get resolved, by the increased sacrifices of the soldiers and Congress finally letting the deaths affect them.

[magellan]

2. So they didn't find Freeman's input compelling enough until he was dead?

Nice. Well, at least Freeman didn't die in vain if it means Dodd and Kerry are finally ANGRY about Bush**'s war...3080 troops killed and 4 years into it.

:mad:

[bigtree]

4. that's just not at all what was reported here.

and, I don't believe for a moment that's true.

Both Kerry and Dodd have been actively, and vocally in opposition to Bush's invasion and occupation from the time Bush committed.

edit: Read the frickin article for shitsakes . . .

[magellan]

13. You edited just to add

..."Read the frickin article for shitsakes . . ."? Real nice. FYI I did read the article and neither it, nor your added abuse, has changed my opinion about how proactive most of the Dem senators have been about stopping Bush**'s war and lies over the last four years. Most of them need a kick in the pants, it's just tragic it came at the expense of another soldier's life.

[sandnsea]

14. Sadly, what it really means

Is that YOU haven't paid a word of attention to what he has been saying for the last 2+ years. It took the story of a dead soldier to get YOUR attention. So maybe YOU are the one who needs the kick in the pants so YOU know what our Senators are actually doing. It takes massive pressure from everybody, every single day, to make change.

[magellan]

15. Right.

Reading comprehension skills. Get some.

[bigtree]

18. What's tragic is the tendency of some in our party to do the republican's dirty work for them

and kick our own, even as they are working as hard as they are able against the republicans' obstinacy.

REPUBLICANS had the majority, and THEY kept good senators and legislators from making any difference with Bush's Iraq occupation. So, here we are at the point where our legislators get the actual power to do more than talk, and they are working even harder than they did when they were in the minority. They still don't have a veto-proof majority , so it's absurd to ride them for not overcoming the republican obstruction yet.

While there are some who need a kick on Iraq. Dodd and Kerry most certainly do not need anyone to kick them. They've both been working their asses off and getting more than a little flack from the republicans for it. Nice of you to join in the abuse though.

[magellan]

19. Criticism equals doing the enemy's work for them?

Gee, where have I heard that before?

The rest is the usual excuses. Sorry you don't get my frustration with your party. They're the only one we've got to fix what the Repugs have broken and after four years of Iraq and an election win and a looming strike on Iran they're still busy carrying out political maneuvers instead of acting to STOP THE BASTARDS.

[bigtree]

21. scattershot criticism of our party is self-serving and destructive

They are operating in a political system where virtue is trampled if not married to an effective legislative vehicle. Political maneuvers are frustrating, but are not always a cop out. If we are to get any substantial movement on a binding legislative rebuke to Bush it will have to come in the form of a veto-proof compromise. Our troops can't afford to wait until 2008 for us to sort all of this out. Political maneuvering by republicans won't end just because we're standing unified among ourselves with our principles and not enough votes to overcome a certain veto and a likely filibuster.

[TayTay]

5. Yeah, right

ah, that's why Sen. Dodd began a personal e-mail conversation with the guy to take his views into account.

Gawd, sometimes the need to trash Democrats overwhelms even the need to end the war. How sad.

[blm]

7. Kerry submitted THREE withdrawal plans since Oct. 2005. He's talked about the immorality

of the war many times, and has taken hit after hit for it, along with John Murtha. Kerry-Feingold vote last year was about recognizing that Iraq was already in civil war and the troops HAD to be withdrawn by July 2007.

If you supported any of those withdrawal plans you would know who was spearheading them in Congress and the Senate.

[dwahzon]

9. So just how illiterate are you?

Do you think that Kerry has been making all these speeches against the war and put his family through the hell of a presidential campaign because he thought it was fun? Have you read any of them or watched them?

Marie Cocco acknowledged Kerry yesterday:

It is worth noting that when Kerry proposed a similar approach last June, most of the political commentariat ridiculed him as pandering to antiwar activists, a supposedly crucial bloc of support needed for a 2008 Democratic presidential run. Kerry’s resolution went down by a vote of 86 to 13. Republicans were still echoing White House talking points that ridiculed all alternatives as “cut and run.” Most Democrats were still cowering.

Now, having given up his dream of becoming president, Kerry is more public servant than politician. He has reached down inside to tap that same quality that led him to volunteer for duty in Vietnam when others of his social status found safe havens from the fight. It is the same impulse that led him to win medals for his valor, the same courage that led him to return home to protest a dirty war when he could have tucked away his medals and marched off to law school.

It is, in fact, a quality we are always saying we want in a president: character.

...

More than two years have passed since Kerry first outlined, as part of his presidential bid, a regional diplomatic initiative to involve Iraq’s neighbors. Its goals would be to keep Iraq’s borders intact, prevent outside interference in Iraq’s internal affairs and protect its minorities. Last fall, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group endorsed the same approach.

...

Now that we have no particular reason to listen to John Kerry, will we?

Certainly we should. The attentiveness should begin in the Senate, where Kerry announced he would not seek the presidency and returned instead to his political roots as an unconstrained opponent of a failed war. He reminded his colleagues of what they all know and have refused thus far to admit: “The mistakes of the past do not change the fact that Congress bears some responsibility for getting us into this war and, therefore, must take responsibility for getting us out."

You want to hear anger? Here's a reading list ... go educate yourself before making more snarky remarks.

Speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, April 30, 2004

Speech at Georgetown University, October 26, 2005

Speech at New York University, September 20, 2004

Speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C., December 8, 2005

Op-Ed in New York Times: Two Deadlines and an Exit, April 5, 2006

Speech at Faneuil Hall in Boston, April 22, 2006

And there's more where that came from ... the johnkerry.com blog.

Here's a place to start: Kerry Says, Others Agree - Part 1


Sorry -- I don't normally go off like that but your gratuitous slam really ticked me off. Especially because it's so far from the truth. He's one of the good guys. For all our sakes, give him some credit for trying when so many others haven't.

[magellan]

12. Trying is a good way to describe him

...and his cheerleaders.

But I'm glad to hear he and the other senators are finally getting off their keisters and may be about to do something other than blah-blah. It's about time.

[w4rma]

16. "Finally"? Kerry and Dodd have been working to end this war for a while. It's the ones who supported

this war who have been on their "keisters" and who will be most affected by this man's death.

Blame it on the war supporters the very people fighting to end it.


People who blame the people who are working to fight bad things, rather than the people who fight for bad things, have have problems of judgment.

[magellan]

17. There's blame enough to go around

I don't live in a black and white world. Just because I think people like Kerry and Dodd should have been doing more sooner doesn't mean I let the people who've done nothing or who fully support the war off the hook. Using such oversimplifications to attack my judgement really is annoying, not to mention hardly likely to have a positive effect on my opinion.

I've been watching Kerry for over nearly three years. I participated on his message board when he ran in '04, I persuaded others as best I could to vote for him just as I did. But I've never been a cheerleader for any politician, and I won't don those rose-tinted glasses now. So you can keep them.

[blm]

20. Kerry goes to Syria and Iraq and keeps talking to Iranian officials to PREVENT widening

war and to bring an end to current war in Iraq and has been doing so continually since Jan. 2005.

[_dynamicdems]

11. Not true.

Talk about distortion!

Ever hear of the Kerry-Feingold amendment to get out troops out of Iraq? Or do you remember who was calling Iraq the "wrong war, at the wrong time, in the wrong place" back as far as 2004?


"As in Vietnam, we engaged militarily in Iraq based on official deception ... and as in Vietnam, we have stayed and fought and died even though it is time for us to go.”
— Senator John Kerry Time Magazine Quote of the Day 5/8/2006

[NewYorkerfromMass]

6. An armor officer (tanks) doing civil affairs duty

really sad story.
But a nice SNAFU there governor Bush.

[bigtree]

10. not our soldiers' best duty

not for defense forces trained and equipped for deadly combat.

They're being made to work for a miracle to clean up Bush's fiasco.

[Ghost in the Machine]

8. ....