Tag: american
U.S.-Led Coalition Troops Seen Near Front Line In New Iraq Offensive

U.S.-Led Coalition Troops Seen Near Front Line In New Iraq Offensive

By Isabel Coles

HASSAN SHAMI, Iraq (Reuters) – Servicemen from the U.S.-led coalition were seen near the front line of a new offensive in northern Iraq launched on Sunday by Kurdish peshmerga forces that aims to retake a handful of villages from Islamic State east of their Mosul stronghold.

A Reuters correspondent saw the soldiers loading armored vehicles outside the village of Hassan Shami, a few miles east of the frontline. They told people present not to take photographs.

They spoke in English but their nationality was not clear. Reuters had earlier reported that they were American but this could not be confirmed officially.

Commenting on the ground deployment of coalition soldiers seen near the battle front, Baghdad-based spokesman for then coalition, U.S. Army Colonel Steve Warren, said: “U.S. and coalition forces are conducting advise and assist operations to help Kurdish Peshmerga forces”.

He said he could not confirm which country those seen by Reuters were from.

“They may be Americans, they may be Canadians or from other nationalities,” he said, when told that some forces were reported to be wearing maple leaf patches, the emblem of Canada.

The sighting of the servicemen near the frontline is a measure of the U.S.-led coalition’s deepening involvement on the ground in Iraq as the war against Islamic State approaches its third year.

Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga forces in the early hours of Sunday launched an attack to dislodge Islamic State fighters from villages located about 20 km (13 miles) east of Mosul on the road to the regional capital, Erbil.

Fighting appeared heavy. Pick up trucks raced back from the frontline with wounded people in the back, and two of the U.S.-led coalition servicemen helped haul one man onto a stretcher.

Gunfire and airstrikes could be heard at a distance, while Apache helicopters flew overhead. One of the villages, Mufti, was captured by mid-day, the Kurdistan Region Security Council said in a statement.

Mosul, with a pre-war population of about 2 million, is the largest city under control of the militants in both Iraq and Syria. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi at the end of last year expressed hope that the “final victory” in the war on Islamic State would come in 2016 with the capture of Mosul.

About 5,500 Peshmergas are taking part in Sunday’s operation, said the Kurdish Region Security council.

“This is one of the many shaping operations expected to increase pressure on ISIL in and around Mosul in preparation for an eventual assault on the city,” the council said.

The Peshmerga have driven the militants back in northern Iraq last year with the help of airstrikes from a U.S.-led coalition, and are positioned around Mosul in an arc running from northwest of the city to southeast.

The Iraqi army is also keeping up the pressure on Islamic State in their stronghold of Falluja, 50 kilometers (32 miles) west of Baghdad, in central Iraq.

Backed by Shi’ite militias on the ground and airstrikes from the U.S.-led coalition, the army is about to complete the encirclement of the city in an operation that started on May 23, state TV said Sunday citing military statements.

Counter-terrorism forces specialized in urban warfare have taken up positions around Falluja and should begin advancing in inside the city when the encirclement is complete, the TV said.
Reporting by Isabel Coles, Writing by Maher Chmaytelli, Editing by Angus MacSwan

Photo: Kurdish Peshmerga forces keep watch in a village east of Mosul, Iraq, May 29, 2016.  REUTERS/Azad Lashkari

No, Canada: Sen. Ted Cruz Has Formally Shed His Dual Citizenship

No, Canada: Sen. Ted Cruz Has Formally Shed His Dual Citizenship

By Todd J. Gillman, The Dallas Morning News

WASHINGTON—Alberta-born Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has given up his Canadian dual citizenship. The renunciation became official on May 14, roughly 9 months after he learned he wasn’t only an American.

Cruz received notification by mail on Tuesday at his home in Houston.

“He’s pleased to receive the notification and glad to have this process finalized,” said spokeswoman Catherine Frazier.

Cruz’s birth in Canada was never a secret. But it proved a political liability, with detractors taunting him as “Canadian Ted” and critics suggesting that his birthplace made him ineligible to run for president.

The dual citizenship came as a surprise to Cruz and his parents when The Dallas Morning News reported on it last August.

The senator provided a copy of his Canadian birth certificate at the time. He vowed almost immediately to shed his Canadian citizenship, and promised to tell The News first as soon as he succeeded.

“Nothing against Canada, but I’m an American by birth and as a U.S. senator, I believe I should be only an American,” he said the day of the initial report.

Canadian law is similar to that in the United States. Citizenship is automatic for nearly everyone born on the country’s soil, whether that person wants it or not, and without any need to request it. In theory, Cruz could have asserted the right to vote in Canada, or even to run for Parliament, and he could have received a Canadian passport.

Under U.S. law, a foreign-born baby is entitled to American citizenship if at least one parent is an American. That was the case for Cruz — and it’s a crucial point if he makes a White House run in 2016, as is widely expected.

The U.S. Constitution requires a president to be a “natural born” citizen. The popular understanding has long been that this means being born on American soil. But Cruz was entitled to American citizenship at birth. Because of that, a strong legal consensus has emerged that Cruz is, in fact, eligible.

That’s something the tea party senator has in common with President Barack Obama, whose father was Kenyan but whose mother was from Kansas. So-called “birthers” have proposed that Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii. But even if true, he would have been an American at birth.

In December, Cruz said he had hired lawyers to assist in the effort to renounce his Canadian citizenship.

When he was born on Dec. 22, 1970, his parents were living in the Canadian oil patch in Calgary. His mother is a native-born American. His father, a Cuban émigré who later became a naturalized American, was still a Cuban citizen.

Cruz has said that when he was a child, his mother had told him she would have had to make an affirmative act to claim Canadian citizenship for him. Since that never happened, the family always had assumed that he did not hold Canadian citizenship.

jbouie via Flickr.com

Our Trust Survives

Last month, I was reading a newspaper in a coffeehouse in downtown Providence, R.I., when a stranger walked over to me and pointed to a nearby table.

“Would you mind watching my laptop while I run to my car?” he said.

I returned his smile and said, “Sure.”

I must look pretty harmless, because it’s not unusual for strangers to ask me to guard their stuff. Over the years, I’ve kept watch over lots of luggage, purses, newspapers and, on one memorable occasion, a Chihuahua sleeping in a hot-pink pet carrier.

This time felt different, probably because I was thinking about the upcoming anniversary of the terrorist attacks. Every newspaper in the country was planning special commemorations.

For the first time, it struck me as quite remarkable that most Americans still want to trust one another in this post-9/11 world. So many predicted otherwise, you might remember. So many thought our grand experiment was over.

Certainly, we’ve stooped to unthinkable lows. We’ve made a blood sport of stereotyping and targeting Muslims, most of whom are good and decent people. Fear-mongers now dominate talk show airwaves, fueling the worst among us. They are loud, but they are outliers.

True, we have constant reminders of that horrible day. A lot of us think about it every time we throw our shoes into a bin at the airport or produce a passport to cross the Canadian border. But we still get on planes, many of them bound for faraway places. We board trains, buses and subways. We slide into cars and share the highways with thousands of strangers every day.

We fill arenas for concerts and sporting events. We attend political rallies and town hall meetings and knock on strangers’ doors for campaigns and causes. We send our children off to school, to camp and to college. We stroll in shopping malls, feast at crowded festivals and throng to amusement parks. We gather every week in churches, temples and mosques around the country.

In the weeks and months after the 9/11 attacks, discussions on talk shows and across kitchen tables focused on what we had lost. Almost 3,000 innocent Americans died that day. I remember thinking for weeks that everyone must be scared to death, but I can speak only for myself: I was terrified.

Frantic phone calls that day — to my daughter, my son, my dad. I remember my father saying the same thing over and over into the phone: Jesus. Jesus, Connie. He was not a religious man, but he told me that day he thought he’d stop by the church where my mother used to sing in the choir.

“Just, you know,” he said. And I did.

I have often wished I’d met my husband sooner than 2003, but whenever I recall how I felt on the day of the attacks, I’m glad I didn’t know him then. He was a member of the House of Representatives at the time, and his two daughters — now my beloved stepdaughters — endured several anguishing hours when they couldn’t reach him. Even now, I fight the urge to walk away from my computer and shove that story out of my mind.

All of us have our own fears, our own worst-case scenarios.

This weekend, as a nation, we remember a moment in America when we huddled with those we loved, reeling from a collective shock. We mourn whom and what we lost, search for evidence of what remains. We will marvel at all that has come to pass, all that we’ve survived, in 10 years’ time. Many of us will bend our heads in prayer.

And then it’s onward, into tomorrow, where most of us will continue to believe in the good intentions of total strangers. How else to avoid becoming our own worst nightmares?

We are Americans.

We may not be fearless, but we refuse to be afraid.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and an essayist for Parade magazine. To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM

Four In Ten American Teenagers Support Other Countries Torturing American Troops

A new study from the American Red Cross reveals that 4 in 10 American teenagers believe foreign countries should be allowed to torture captured American troops. The study also found that 6 in 10 teenagers support America torturing foreign soldiers, and more than half believe it is justified for the US to kill foreign prisoners of war who have killed Americans.

Lawrence Tribe, a Harvard professor of constitutional law, believes that American teenagers are simply less able to empathize with American soldiers. “For young people,” he told The Daily Beast, “to put themselves in place of a soldier is a level of empathy that most people simply don’t have anymore.” Part of the reason may be the lack of a military draft and mandatory military service.

Legal scholars believe torture could just seem natural to a generation that came of age immediately after September 11th, when conservatives argued that torturing enemy combatants, even in violation of the Geneva Conventions, was necessary to protect the United States against terrorism. Isabelle Doust, the head of the humanitarian law division of the American Red Cross, told The Daily Beast that “over the past 10 years, they’ve been exposed to many new conflicts, but they haven’t been exposed to the rules.”

They also have not been exposed to the fact that torture is ineffective and counterproductive.

One irony was revealed in a striking study earlier this year from Brown University showing that enhanced interrogations may not even be an effective way to gather intelligence. Compared with traditional police questioning techniques like building rapport or offering positive reinforcement, the study found that torture more frequently alienates the subject, or produces unreliable information. The marquee example researchers point to is the Libyan detainee in 2002 who, under torture, claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, a major premise in launching the war in Iraq. [The Daily Beast]