Flag Day: U.S. Flag Has Been Powerful Symbol, Rallying Point

Today is Flag Day and below is a piece offered by the American Forces Press Service:

WASHINGTON – It wasn't all that long ago that everyone seemed to be flying an American flag.

In the days and weeks after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, American flags sprouted from everywhere.  

At the World Trade Center site, New York firemen hoisted an American flag amid the rubble. At the Pentagon, workers paused and saluted as a huge garrison flag was draped next to the impact point.

Flags sprouted on mini-vans and motorcycles. People raised flags on new flagpoles on front lawns and atop apartment buildings. It seemed that every overpass on interstate highways had a flag. And this doesn't count the millions of decals, rub-ons and bumper stickers that featured the flag.  

That was the latest manifestation of the flag of the United States of America as a symbol for all that the country stands for.  

It seems in time of crisis, the flag is a rallying point.  

On June 14, 1777, the Continental Congress approved the U.S. flag and detailed the composition.  Originally, it was literally a rallying point for the troops of the Continental Army.

In battle, the unit flag was the center of mass, and from the area around the flag commanders gave orders and rallied troops.  

The flag as a symbol of America grew out of the War of 1812. Francis Scott Key was so inspired by the sight of the American flag flying over Fort McHenry on Sept. 12, 1814, that he wrote "The Star Spangled Banner."  

"And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night, that our flag was still there."   These words inspire Americans today, and when U.S. citizens see the flag they are reminded that America is still "the land of the free, and the home of the brave."  

The American flag has become more than just a red, white and blue design. It has become a symbol of what we stand for as a country. America reunited under the flag following the Civil War. The American flag flew at the Marne in World War I and at Iwo Jima during World War II.  

The American flag flew at Porkchop Hill in Korea and Hamburger Hill in Vietnam. It has flown over Grenada, Kuwait, Kabul and Baghdad. It covers the caskets of the fallen as they come home. And just last week, we saw it adorn the coffin of President Ronald Reagan, who in life created new respect for the stars and stripes.  

The United States is more than just land fortunately located in North America. The United States is a republic, and Americans do not swear fealty to royalty or land or nobility.

Rather, Americans swear to uphold the Constitution of the United States, and the American flag is a symbol of that oath.  

On Flag Day, remember that oath and those who have died for the freedom the American flag represents.

Conficts End When The Enemy Is Defeated: Senator McCain Calls For Obama To Fire National Security Team

Evan McMurry at mediaite.com offers a piece on Senator John McCain:

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) took to the floor of his chamber Thursday morning and called upon President Barack Obama to replace his entire national security staff in the wake of Islamic militant victories in several large Iraqi cities.

“I say to the President of the United States, get a new national security team in place,” McCain said. “You have been ill-served by the national security team you have in place now, and the decisions you have made. Have that new national security team come up with a strategy to do whatever we can to prevent this direct threat to the national security of this nation.”

McCain blamed the deterioration of the Iraq situation on Obama’s “withdrawal without victory,” and warned the same thing could now occur in Afghanistan without a change of policy.

“Because the President of the United States declares a conflict over does mean that in the eyes of the enemy it is over,” McCain said. “Conflicts end when the enemy is defeated.”

You can watch the video of Senator McCain via the below link:

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/mccain-to-obama-fire-your-entire-national-security-staff/

Owner Of Defense Contracting Company Charged With Wire Fraud Conspiracy For Providing Nonconforming Parts To Government

The U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey released the below information:

TRENTON, N.J. – The former president of a Burlington, N.J.,-based defense contracting business was arrested and charged today with allegedly stealing $3 million through fraudulent contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman announced.

Richard Melton, 44, of Moorestown, N.J., was charged by complaint with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud for receiving $3 million from 2008 to 2009 as a result of allegedly fraudulent contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). Melton is scheduled to make his initial court appearance this afternoon before U.S. Magistrate Judge Tonianne J. Bongiovanni in Trenton federal court.

According to documents filed in this case and statements made in court:

Melton was the founder, owner, and president of Partz Network LLC (Partz Network), a company located in Burlington. Melton owned and operated Partz Network from April 2003 to December 2009. Partz Network contracted with the government to supply the DoD with parts on small-dollar contracts. The majority of the contracts were for replacement parts for military rolling stock: trucks, trailers, and engineering equipment. The majority of Partz Network’s DoD contracts required that the items provided be manufactured by DoD-recognized qualified manufacturers. 

Melton and his conspirators allegedly lied on Partz Network’s bids for DoD contracts, stating that they would be providing the “exact product” sought by the DoD, meaning that the product was manufactured by a DoD-recognized qualified manufacturer. In fact, Partz Network was allegedly providing parts made by unapproved, and oftentimes unknown, sources.

In 2007, the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), a DoD contracting agency, became aware of reports of nonconforming parts being received from Partz Network. As a result, DLA required Partz Network to provide “traceability documents” to confirm that the items it was supplying were actually being manufactured by DoD recognized qualified manufacturers. Partz Network provided traceability documents and invoices to DLA regarding items provided under the DoD contracts.  When DLA researched the traceability documents supplied by Partz Network, DLA learned that the documents were either altered or completely fictitious.

 For example, on Nov. 15, 2007, Partz Network submitted a bid electronically through the DoD’s internet bid system to supply the DoD with 1,400 oil pans for $53.85 per item. Partz Network represented that the company was providing the exact product manufactured by one of the two DoD-recognized qualified manufacturers. Partz Network was subsequently awarded the contract for 1,400 oil pans for a total contract price of $75,390. Both the request for quotation (RFQ) and the final contract included the language that the exact product was required. The items ultimately provided by Partz Network were not the exact products required under the contract because the items were not manufactured by a qualified manufacturer. In fact, on Nov. 10, 2007, five days prior to Partz Network submitting its bid for the contract, Melton sent an e-mail to a Partz Network employee with a link to the DoD RFQ that stated the following: “Bid these (1400) HMMWW oil pans at $53.85 and I will have them made overseas by [a company located in the People’s Republic of China] or another overseas firm, 200-day lead time.” Based on Partz Network documents related to that contract, Partz Network purchased the oil pans that were provided to the DoD from a company located in India in January 2008.

On Aug. 27, 2009, Partz Network was awarded a contract to supply the DoD with 887 bearing half sets for a total contract price of $16,010.35. Partz Network certified that the items would be the exact product required under the contract. The items ultimately provided by Partz Network under the contract were not the exact products required because the items were not manufactured by the qualified manufacturer. DoD ultimately inspected the items and determined that the items were manufactured by an unapproved source. 

The wire fraud conspiracy count with which Melton is charged carries a maximum potential penalty of 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000, or twice the gain or loss from the offense. 
 
U.S. Attorney Fishman credited special agents of the U.S. Department of Defense, Criminal Investigative Service, under the direction of Director James Burch; special agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Homeland Security Investigations (HIS), under the direction of Special Agent in Charge Andrew M. McLees, with the investigation leading to today’s arrest.

The government is represented by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Fabiana Pierre-Louis of the U.S. Attorney’s Office Criminal Division in Trenton and Evan Weitz of the Office’s Asset Forfeiture Unit in Newark.

The charge and allegations contained in the complaint are merely accusations, and the defendant is considered innocent unless and until proven guilty.

Do Something! Obama's Iraq

A New York Post editorial covers the situation in Iraq.

When in 2011 President Obama announced, against the advice of his commanders, the complete withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq, he grandly declared “the tide of war is receding.”

Two days later, his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, answered critics such as John McCain, who said the president’s announcement was a victory for Iran.

Said Mrs. Clinton: “No one, most particularly Iran, should miscalculate about our continuing commitment to and with the Iraqis going forward.”

This week these promises have been rendered hollow by the humanitarian and strategic crisis unfolding in Iraq. There, key northern cities have been falling to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, an offshoot of al Qaeda.

The horrors we are seeing fulfill some of the worst fears of critics who had warned that leaving Iraq without a new status of forces agreement imperiled the gains bought with American blood and treasure. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://nypost.com/2014/06/13/obamas-iraq/

Note: The above map of Iraq is from the CIA.

Review Of Jack Devine's CIA Memoir "Good Hunting"

Philip Mudd, a retired CIA officer, reviewed Jack Devine's CIA memoir Good Hunting for The Nation.

Nearly two decades into Jack Devine’s career at the CIA, he was tasked with what was then the agency’s largest-ever covert program: the effort to aid the ‘mujahedeen’ fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Should the agency take a huge risk by providing the Afghan fighters with sophisticated shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles? Mr Devine and his colleagues decided that the answer was yes.

He remembers walking into the CIA director’s office in 1986 with a report on the controversial introduction of hundreds of these Stingers. “Mr Director,” he recalls saying, “we had a tremendous breakthrough yesterday. We deployed the Stinger and we shot down three helicopters.” Director William Casey, a passionate Cold Warrior, responded: “Jack, this changes it all, doesn’t it?”

“Good Hunting,” Mr Devine’s memoir, is a refresher course on the breadth of America’s covert campaigns against the spread of Soviet influence and ideology, and Mr Devine’s 32-year career is a microcosm of the secret thrust and counterthrust that defined those years.

The son of a blue-collar, Irish-Catholic family from Philadelphia, Mr Devine began at the CIA in the 1960s after reading a book about the agency and sending in a handwritten request for employment. He rose through the ranks, ultimately overseeing the entirety of the agency’s clandestine operations in the mid-1990s.   

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.nation.com.pk/international/12-Jun-2014/secret-agent-man

I interviewed Philip Mudd, who was the former deputy director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, for Counterterrorism magazine. You can read the interview via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2013/08/a-q-with-philip-mudd-former-deputy.html

Convicted Of Espionage & Theft Of Government Property And Then Pardoned By Clinton, Samuel Morison Is Now Accused of Stealing U.S. Navy Files of Famed Historian Grandfather

Ian Duncan at the Baltimore Sun reports on the arrest of Samuel L. Morison (seen in the above photo from his Facebook page) for the theft of U.S. Navy historical records.

A grandson of the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Samuel Eliot Morison has been charged with stealing nearly three boxes of documents that his grandfather used to write a 15-volume history of World War II commissioned by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Authorities found some of the documents when they raided the Crofton home of Samuel L. Morison in May, according to federal charges unsealed Tuesday. Others had been put up for sale. They had been missing for more than a year.

Morison, 69, appeared briefly in court following his arrest Tuesday morning, according to the U.S. attorney's office. Morison's lawyer said the case is only in its very beginning stages.

... Morison was convicted in the 1980s on charges that he leaked classified satellite images of a Soviet aircraft carrier then under construction to a British magazine. He was pardoned by President Bill Clinton in 2001.

... Both Morison and his late grandfather served in the Navy. The younger Morison served in Vietnam. The elder Morison, a professor of history at Harvard and author of the two-volume "Oxford History of the United States," at the outbreak of World War II pitched the idea of writing a history of the conflict to Roosevelt, was commissioned a lieutenant commander in the Navy Reserve and sent to fight.

Samuel Eliot Morison was eventually promoted to rear admiral. He published his history of the war at sea between 1947 and 1962.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/blog/bs-md-navy-document-theft-20140610,0,751933.story

You can read more about Samuel L. Morison in my Crime Beat column on the U.S. Navy's Cold War traitors and spies via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2010/07/us-navys-cold-war-spies-traitors.html

Operation Bodyguard: FBI Recognizes WWII Counterintelligence Landmark in New York

The FBI web site offers the below piece:

In honor of the 70th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, the FBI last weekend celebrated a landmark that was home to one of the Bureau’s intelligence successes during World War II. At a ceremony in recognition of the effort of FBI employees during World War II, the Society of Former Special Agents, the Episcopal Diocese of New York, the Suffolk County Historical Society, and the FBI’s New York Division placed a plaque at a quaint building known as Benson House in Wading River, New York, overlooking Long Island Sound.

It was there, from January 1942 until the end of the war in Europe in 1945, that FBI agents and radio technicians lived and worked undercover, secretly transmitting coded messages that the Nazis believed came from their own spies operating in New York. The Nazis believed their operatives were funneling significant details about U.S. forces, munitions, and war preparations. But in fact, the transmissions were controlled by the FBI—the Nazi spies were FBI double agents. The Bureau’s work - known as Operation Ostrich - was central to our counterintelligence operations throughout the war and was part of a larger effort by Allied Forces to deceive the enemy called Operation Bodyguard.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2014/june/operation-bodyguard/operation-bodyguard?utm_campaign=email-Daily&utm_medium=email&utm_source=fbi-top-stories&utm_content=327927