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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; colonel</title>
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		<title>Colonel George &#8216;Bud&#8217; Day, R.I.P.</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/peter-collier/colonel-george-bud-day-r-i-p/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=colonel-george-bud-day-r-i-p</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Jul 2013 04:59:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Peter Collier]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bud Day]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[colonel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[POW]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rip]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vietnam]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=198635</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Farewell to an American warrior and patriot -- for whom uncommon valor was a common virtue.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Bud-Day.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-198638" alt="Bud-Day" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Bud-Day-350x350.jpg" width="350" height="350" /></a>America is a poorer place today, a place whose reservoir of valor and determination has been depleted, because George “Bud” Day passed away over the weekend at the age of 88.  He was a synecdoche for heroism, a military man’s military man.  At Medal of Honor get-togethers, his fellow recipients, all of whom had accomplished legendary feats of bravery of their own, would pay special attention when Bud Day appeared.</p>
<p>Bud was at war on behalf of America most of his life and never called a truce even as age and infirmity slowed him down.  He was a 17-year-old high school junior in Sioux City, Iowa when he dropped out to join the Marines in 1942.  He spent nearly three years in the Pacific as a member of a 130 mm gun battery, then came home to get his diploma, attend college and get a law degree.  He passed the bar in 1949, but felt that the weak, piping time of peace would be a brief interlude.  He joined the Iowa Air National Guard and after pilot training was called to active duty during the Korean War as a fighter jock.  After two tours, he decided to become a “lifer” in the Air Force.</p>
<p>In the spring of 1967, Day, by then  just a year away from retirement,  decided to volunteer for a tour in Vietnam.  In June, he became commander of an all-volunteer fighter wing operating out of the Phu Cat Air Base.  He and his men were flying F-100 Super Sabres as part of a top secret program to act as Forward Air Controllers for U.S. fighter bombers operating over North Vietnam, selecting targets and calling in air strikes on them.</p>
<p>On August 26, Day, who now had 65 missions, was directing a flight of F-105s striking an enemy surface-to-air missile site near the DMZ in North Vietnam.   His plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire, destroying its hydraulics and sending it into a death spiral.  As he ejected, he smashed into the fuselage, breaking his arm in three places and injuring his back.  North Vietnamese militiamen below watched his parachute bloom and were waiting for him when he landed.  They marched him to a camouflaged underground shelter and began a violent interrogation. When Day refused to answer their questions, his captors staged a mock execution, then hung him from a rafter by his feet.  After several hours, the North Vietnamese, believing him to be so badly hurt that he wouldn’t try to escape, let Day down and tied him up with a loosely knotted rope.</p>
<p>Four days later, as a pair of distracted teenaged soldiers stood guard, Day managed to untie himself and escape.  He headed south at the beginning of one of the most remarkable episodes of resistance and survival of the Vietnam war.</p>
<p>On his second night on the run, Day, feverish from his wounds, was dozing in thick undergrowth when a renegade bomb or rocket landed nearby.  The concussion left him bleeding from his ears and sinuses and lanced one leg with  shrapnel.  Day collected himself and continued to hobble south, eating berries and frogs he trapped while successfully evading the enemy patrols on his trail.</p>
<p>Sometime between the twelfth and fifteenth day after his escape &#8212; by then Day had lost track of time &#8212; he heard helicopters and stumbled toward the sound.  It was U.S. choppers evacuating a Marine unit and he limped toward the landing zone.  But the helicopters left before he got close enough to get their attention.  The next morning, still heading south, the delirious Day was spotted by an enemy patrol.  He tried to hide in the jungle, but was shot in the hand and leg.  He was recaptured within a mile or so of the U.S. Marine firebase at Con Thien.</p>
<p>Taken back to the camp from which he had escaped, he was subjected to starvation, staged execution and torture; his right arm was rebroken.  He was held in an archipelago of camps as he was moved north, finally reaching the “Hanoi Hilton.”</p>
<p>When he arrived at the prison, his untreated wounds were infected, and he was suffering from malnutrition and unable to perform even the most rudimentary task for himself.  The fingers on both hands had curled into fists; he regained some motion by peeling them back, flattening them against the wall of his cell and leaning into them with all his weight. His cellmate was John McCain, who himself had recently been nursed through his own physical nightmare. McCain, who would routinely refer to Day as “the bravest man I ever knew,” put together a homemade split to help heal Day’s damaged arm.</p>
<p>Over the next five years, Day earned his reputation as one of the Hanoi Hilton’s hard men by offering maximum resistance 24 hours a day for all the days of his imprisonment.  Subjected to unremitting torture, he gave his captors only false information.  He provided leadership to the other POWs by his example and by his words, helping create the patriotic elan that would see them through their captivity and immunize them against anti-American despair when they came home.  On one well-remembered occasion in 1971, when rifle wielding guards burst into the cell where some of the prisoners were holding a forbidden religious service, Day moved closer to stare into the muzzles of the guns and began to sing The Star Spangled Banner.  The other men, including James Stockdale, ranking U.S. officer in the prison, joined him.  They always credited him with sharpening their own will to resist and to survive.</p>
<p>Bud Day was released on March 14, 1973.  Three years later President Gerald Ford presented him with the Medal of Honor.  By then he was one of America’s most highly decorated servicemen.</p>
<p>His service to his country and its military men never stopped.  Working as an attorney after his retirement from the Air Force, he filed a class action suit against the U.S. in 1996 on behalf of retired servicemen who were stripped of medical benefits at age 65 and instructed to apply for Medicare.  It was a fight he ultimately won.</p>
<p>In 2004 Bud Day returned more explicitly to the battle when he joined others in Swift Vets and POWs for Truth in attacking John Kerry’s slander of the military in his unrelenting campaign for public office after Vietnam and for his dishonesty in characterizing the war.  And in the years that followed, Day continued to warn about Islamic extremism and against the efforts to disarm the U.S. in the fight against the jihad whose sole objective, he said, was to “make America kneel.”</p>
<p>A warrior and a patriot, Bud Day has now joined John Stockdale, his comrade in defiance at the Hanoi Hilton, and Alvin York, Jimmy Doolittle, Audie Murphy, and all the others, fallen now, who also wore the Medal of Honor and for whom, as Admiral Chester Nimitz said, uncommon valor was a common virtue.</p>
<p><strong>Among Peter Collier’s works <i>is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Medal-Honor-Portraits-Valor-beyond/dp/1579652409">Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty </a></i>(Workman Publishers) where he writes about Bud Day and other Medal recipients.</strong></p>
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		<item>
		<title>War By Other Means</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/alan-m-dershowitz/war-by-other-means/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=war-by-other-means</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/alan-m-dershowitz/war-by-other-means/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Feb 2010 05:06:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Alan M. Dershowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[anti]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[appointment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attack]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[ceasefire]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[checkpoint]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[claim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[colonel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Colonel Desmond Travers]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[evidence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fact]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[firing]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Gaza]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gaza Strip]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Goldstone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[groucho mark]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hell]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[interview]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Irish]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[israeli civilians]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[lying eyes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mark]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[military munitions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[minister]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[month]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mosque]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[number]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[paranoid fantasies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[photographic evidence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Propaganda]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[quip]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rejection]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[revenge]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rockets]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[schoolchildren]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[shot]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[something]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[southern lebanon]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=50414</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An anti-Israel extremist seeks revenge through the Goldstone report.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/610x.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-50428" title="SWITZERLAND-UN-MIDEAST-GAZA" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/610x.jpg" alt="" width="610" height="405" /></a></p>
<p>When Irish Colonel Desmond Travers eagerly accepted an appointment to the Goldstone Commission, he was hell-bent on revenge against Israel based on paranoid fantasies and hard left anti-Israel propaganda.  He actually believed, as he put it in a recent interview, that “so many Irish soldiers had been killed by Israelis,” with “a significant number who were taken out deliberately and shot (in southern Lebanon.)”  This is of course complete and utter fantasy, but it was obviously part of Colonel Travers bigoted reality.</p>
<p>Travers came to the job having already made up his mind not to believe anything Israel said and to accept everything Hamas put forward.  For example, Israel produced hard photographic evidence that Gaza mosques were used to store rockets and other weapons.  Other photographs taken by journalists, also proved what everybody now acknowledges to be true: namely that Hamas, as its leaders frequently boasted, routinely use mosques as military munitions depots.  When confronted with this photographic evidence, Travers said “I don’t believe the photographs.”  Of course he doesn’t since they don’t comport with his politically correct and ideologically skewed world view.  This is what he had previously said about why he didn’t believe that Hamas used the mosques to store weapons:</p>
<blockquote><p>“We also found no evidence that mosques were used to store munitions.  Those were a Hamas operative the last place I’d store munitions would be in a mosque.  It’s not secure, is very visible, and would probably be pre-targeted by Israeli surveillance.  There are a [sic] many better places to store munitions.”</p></blockquote>
<p>But that is exactly what Hamas did, despite Travers insistence on paraphrasing Groucho Mark’s famous quip, “Who are you going to believe?  Me, or your lying eyes?”</p>
<p>Most disturbing, however, was Travers’ categorical rejection of Israel’s claim that it attacked Gaza only after enduring thousands of anti-personnel rockets intended to target Israeli civilians, mainly schoolchildren.  In fact, Hamas rockets hit several schools, though fortunately the teachers had dismissed the students just before the rockets would have killed dozens, perhaps hundreds, of them.  This is what Travers said about Hamas rockets.</p>
<blockquote><p>“Hamas rockets had ceased being fired into Israel and not only that but Hamas sought a continuation of the ceasefire&#8230; and Israel said no.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Travers then claimed that Hamas had fired <em>no</em> rockets at Israel in the month leading up to the Israeli invasion:</p>
<blockquote><p>“…the number of rockets that had been fired into Israel in the month preceding their operations was something like two. The Hamas rockets had ceased being fired into Israel and not only that but Hamas sought a continuation of the ceasefire.<strong><em> </em></strong>Two had been fired from Gaza, but they are likely to have been fired by <span style="text-decoration: underline;">dissident groups</span>, [i.e. groups that were violating a Hamas order not to fire rockets].”  (emphasis added).</p></blockquote>
<p>Again, Travers’ rendition defies the historical record and tells us more about Travers than it does about what actually provoked Israel into finally taking action to protect a m il lion civilians who were in range of the thousands of Hamas rockets that had been fired at its civilians.  In fact Israel complied with the cease fire under whose terms Israel reserved the right to engage in self-defense actions such as attacking terrorists who were in the process of firing rockets at its civilians.</p>
<p>Just before the hostilities began, Israel offered Hamas a carrot and a stick: it reopened a checkpoint to allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza.  It had closed the point of entry after the checkpoint had been targeted by Gazan rockets  Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, also issued a stern, final warning to Hamas that unless it stopped the rockets, there would be a full-scale military response.</p>
<p>This is the way Reuters reported it:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Israel reopened border crossings with the Gaza Strip on Friday, a day after Prime Minister warned militants there to stop firing rockets or they would pay a heavy price.  Despite the movement of relief supplies, <span style="text-decoration: underline;">militants fired about a dozen rockets and mortar shafts from </span><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Gaza</span><span style="text-decoration: underline;"> at </span><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Israel</span><span style="text-decoration: underline;"> on Friday</span>.  One accidentally struck a house in Gaza, killing two Palestinian sisters, ages 5 and 13.&#8221; (emphasis added)</p></blockquote>
<p>Despite the opening of the crossings, the Hamas rockets continued—not none, not “something like two,” but many—and Israel kept its word, implementing a targeted air attack against Hamas facilities and combatants.</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, Travers said that he “rejected…entirely” Israel’s claim that its “attack on Gaza was based on self-defense.”  Instead, he compared Israel’s attack on Hamas to the unprovoked Fascist bombing of “Guirnica.”</p>
<p>Travers has repeatedly claimed that “no substantive critique of the [Goldstone] report has been received.”  This is an out and out lie.  I have read dozens of substantive critiques and have written <a href="http://www.alandershowitz.com/goldstone.pdf">a 49 page one myself</a>.  The truth is that Travers has studiously ignored and refused to respond to these critiques.  And of course he blames everything on “Jewish lobbyists.”</p>
<p>Nor was Travers the only member of the commission with predetermined views and an anti-Israel agenda.  Christine Chinken had already declared Israel guilty of war crimes before seeing any evidence.  Hina Jilani had also condemned Israel before her appointment to the group, and then said that it would be “very cruel to not give credence to [the] voices” of the victims, apparently without regard to whether they were telling the truth.  And then there is Richard Goldstone, who told friends that he too took the job with an agenda, which he says was to help Israel!  Why any reasonable person would pay any attention to a report written by four people who had prejudged the evidence and came to their jobs with agendas and biases is beyond comprehension.</p>
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