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FROM ANA
Passing of Mrs.
Sue Henderson
It is with
profound regret that we inform you and the membership of ANA of
the
passing of Sue Henderson, our long-time Secretary/Treasurer. From
1985 until her
retirement due to lung cancer in 2002, Sue was the very heart of
the
Association. Her cheerful presence, wonderful sense of humor, total
dedication
to ANA and sparkling personality made life a little better not only
for our
small staff here at headquarters but for the multitude of members
who called in
and inevitably had a friendly, and often uplifting chat with her.
She loved ANA
and its people and this love shined through every day on the job.
When her illness led her to resign, she regretted the inevitable
loss of contact with the
countless members she got to know through convention gatherings
and over the
phone. Despite her illness, Sue maintained her optimism and her
undaunted
spirit.
Sue and her
husband, Marsh, moved to Tucson in December 2003 to be
nearer their grandchildren. They were planning to attend our June
convention in
Northern Virginia and were excited about renewing friendships with
members from
all over the country. With her huge heart and a selfless outlook
on life Sue was
a natural at comforting members who often conversed with her about
their
suffering from sickness and age.
She passed away
quietly in her sleep early on Monday, 26 April. The exact cause
of death is unknown at this time. Her untimely passing at the age
of 64 leaves an enormous void which will be most difficult to fill
because she remained in touch even though she had moved away. We
will miss her very much.
By The Staff
at ANA
TRIP REPORT
TO THE NEW NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM
Submitted by
GPS Staff Member
Andy Gilcrest
I recently returned
from a two day visit to the new National Air and Space
Museum (NASM) that was opened in Dec 2003 (100th year anniversary
of flight).
The new museum is located at Dulles International in Virginia and
is known as
the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, the museums main benefactor, to
distinguish it
from the Washington D.C. branch which remains open B in fact there
are frequent
shuttle runs between the two facilities to facilitate the tourists
who wish to
visit both facilities.
This facility
is gigantic. The main hanger is 1000 feet long, 250 feet wide,
and 100 feet high with a Quonset Hut like shape. There is also a
very large box
like structure (the James S. McDonnel Space Hangar) that currently
houses the
Enterprise Shuttle. This hangar will also be used to house booster
and
satellite artifacts. Aircraft are displayed at three levels B floor,
hanging at
midlevel, and hanging high. The five largest aircraft in the main
hangar are:
B-29 Enola Gay, Concorde, Dash-80 (707 Prototype), SR-71 Blackbird,
and the
Boeing Stratoliner (first pressurized airliner). Each hangar truss
can support
the equivalent in weight of two WWII fighter aircraft or many more
lighter
aircraft. There are at least 20 trusses so it gives you some idea
of the
display potential.
There are observation
platforms at two levels above the ground floor. Thus,
one can view the midlevel aircraft from above, level with, and from
below. Many
WWII fighters are displayed in various attitudes. The higher displays
have
racing, sport, acrobatic, and glider type aircraft in many interesting
attitudes. For instance, some of the famous acrobatic planes are
hanging with
attitudes straight up or upside down.
There are currently
80 artifacts on display, but they are ultimately planning
to have 300. The display groupings are interesting. There are certainly
the
traditional groupings of Pre WWI. WWI., 1920's & 30's, WWII,
Korea, Vietnam,
etc. but they will often have an American aircraft paired wih an
enemy A/C. For
instance, for Korea, an F-86 and Mig-15 are in opposing positions.
Likewise,
for Vietnam, it is an F4H and a MIG-17.
The latest A/C
on display is the winning Lockheed Martin prototype for the
Joint Strike Fighter (XF-35). Facility wise, there is also an IMAX
Theater, an
observation tower to view operations at Dulles that houses displays
of traffic
control equipment, airport control aids, safety equipment, and pictorializations
of the airways & control zones, an administrative building that
also houses the
gift shop and restaurant.
But so much
for word descriptions. As they say, the accompanying pictures are
worth thousands of words.
MEMORIAL DAY IS MAY 31ST.
Orange County Veterans Council Memorial Dad Ceremony will be held
at the Walk of
Honor, Santa Ana Civic Center on 27 May at 11AM
Submitted by Former GPS CO Dennis Bowen From the Internet 13 May
04
"OUR ENEMY IS NOT TERRORISM"
An Address by
Former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, Member of the 9/11
Commission, given at The U.S. Naval Institute 130th Annual Meeting
and
Annapolis Naval History Symposium (2004)
We are at a
juncture today that really is more of a threshold, even more of
a
watershed, than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was in 1941.
We are
currently in a war, but it is not a war on terrorism. In fact, that
has been a
great confusion, and the sooner we drop that term, the better.
This would be
like President Franklin Roosevelt saying in World War II, "We
are
engaged in a war against kamikazes and blitzkrieg." Like them,
terrorism is a
method, a tool, a weapon that has been used against us. And part
of the reason
we suffered such a horrific attack is that we were not prepared.
Let's not kid
ourselves. Some very smart people defeated every single defense
this country
had, and defeated them easily, with confidence and arrogance. There
are many
lessons we must learn from this.
We were not
prepared intellectually. Those of us in the national security
field still carried the baggage of the Cold War. We thought in concepts
of
coalition warfare and the Warsaw Pact. When we thought of terrorism,
we thought
only of state-sponsored terrorism, which is why the immediate reaction
of many
in our government agencies after 9/11 was: Which state did it? Saddam,
it must
have been Saddam. We had failed to grasp, for a variety of reasons,
the new
phenomenon that had emerged in the world. This was not state-sponsored
terrorism. This was religious war.
This was the
emergence of a transnational enemy driven by religious fervor
and fanaticism. Our enemy is not terrorism. Our enemy is violent,
Islamic
fundamentalism. None of our government institutions was set up with
receptors,
or even vocabulary, to deal with this. So we left ourselves completely
vulnerable to a concerted attack. Where are we today? I'd like to
say we have
fixed these problems, but we haven't. We have very real vulnerabilities.
We
have not diminished in any way the fervor and ideology of our enemy.
We are
fighting them in many areas of the world, and I must say with much
better
awareness of the issues and their nature. We're fighting with better
tools. But
I cannot say we are now safe from the kind of attack we saw on 9/11.
I think we
are much safer than we were on 9/11; the ability of our enemies
to launch a
concerted, sophisticated attack is much less than it was then. Still,
we're
totally vulnerable to the kinds of attacks we've seen in Madrid,
for instance.
We face a very sophisticated and intelligent enemy who has been
trained, in
many cases, in our universities and gone to school on our methods,
learned from
their mistakes, and continued to use the very nature of our free
society and
its aversion to intrusion in privacy and discrimination to their
benefit.
For example,
today it is still a prohibited offense for an airline to have
two people of the same ethnic background interviewed at one time,
because that
is discrimination. Our airline security is still full of holes.
Our ability to
carry out covert operations abroad is only marginally better than
it was at the
time of 9/11. A huge amount of fundamental cultural and institutional
change
must be carried out in the United States before we can effectively
deal with
the nature of the threat. Today, probably 50 or more states have
schools that
are teaching jihad, preaching, recruiting, and training. We have
absolutely no
successful programs even begun to remediate against those efforts.
It's very important
that people understand the complexity of this threat. We
have had to institute new approaches to protecting our civil liberties
- the
way we authorize surveillance, the way we conduct our immigration
and
naturalization policies, and the way we issue passports. That's
only the
beginning. The beginning of wisdom is to recognize the problem,
to recognize
that for every jihadist we kill or capture - as we carry out an
aggressive and
positive policy in Afghanistan and elsewhere - another 50 are being
trained in
schools and mosques around the world.
This problem
goes back a long way. We have been asleep. Just by chance about
six months ago, I picked up a book by V. S. Naipaul, one of the
great English
prose writers. I love to read his short stories and travelogues.
The book was
titled Among the Believers (New York: Vintage, 1982) and was an
account of his
travels in Indonesia, where he found that Saudi-funded schools and
mosques were
transforming Indonesian society from a very relaxed, syncretist
Islam to a
jihadist fundamentalist fanatical society, all paid for with Saudi
Arabian
funding. Nobody paid attention. Presidents in four administrations
put their
arms around Saudi ambassadors, ignored the Wahhabi jihadism, and
said these are
our eternal friends.
We have seen
throughout the last 20 years a kind of head-in-the-sand approach
to national security in the Pentagon. We were comfortable with the
existing
concept of what the threat was, what threat analysis was, and how
we derived
our requirements, still using the same old tools we all grew up
with. We paid
no attention to the real nature of this emerging threat, even though
there were
warning signs.
Many will recall
with pain what we went through in the Reagan administration
in 1983, when the Marine barracks were bombed in Beirut - 241 Marines
and Navy
corpsmen were killed. We immediately got an intercept from NSA [National
Security Agency], a total smoking gun from the foreign ministry
of Iran,
ordering the murder of our Marines. Nothing was done to retaliate.
Instead, we
did exactly what the terrorists wanted us to do, which was to withdraw.
Osama
bin Laden has cited this as one of his dawning moments. The vaunted
United
States is a paper tiger; Americans are afraid of casualties; they
run like
cowards when attacked; and they don't even bother to take their
dead with them.
This was a seminal moment for Osama.
After that,
we had our CIA station chief kidnapped and tortured to death.
Nothing was done. Then, we had our Marine Colonel [William R.] Higgins
kidnapped and publicly hanged. Nothing was done. We fueled and made
these
people aware of the tremendous effectiveness of terrorism as a tool
of jihad.
It worked. They chased us out of one place after another, because
we would not
retaliate.
The Secretary
of Defense at the time has said he never received those
intercepts. That's an example of one of the huge problems our commission
has
uncovered. We have allowed the intelligence community to evolve
into a
bureaucratic archipelago of baronies in the Defense Department,
the CIA, and 95
other different intelligence units in our government. None of them
talked to
one another in the same computerized system. There was no systemic
sharing.
Some will recall the Phoenix memo and the fact that there were people
in the
FBI saying, "Hey, there are young Arabs learning to fly and
they don't want to
learn how to take off or land. Maybe we should look into them."
It went
nowhere.
We had watch
lists with 65,000 terrorists' names on them, created by a very
sophisticated system in the State Department called Tip-Off. That
existed
before 9/11, but nobody in the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration]
bothered
to look at it. The FAA had 12 names on its no-fly list. The State
Department
had a guy on its list named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He was already
under
indictment for his role in planning the 1993 attack on the World
Trade Center.
The State Department issued him a visa. I could go on and on.
Two big lessons
glare out from what our investigations have discovered so
far. Number one, in our government bureaucracy today there is no
accountability. Since 9/11 - the greatest failure of American defenses
in the
history of our country, at least since the burning of Washington
in 1814 - only
one person has been fired. He is a hero, in my judgment: [retired
Vice] Admiral
John Poindexter. He got fired because of an excessive zeal to catch
these
bastards. But he was the only one fired. Not any of the 19 officers
lost their
jobs at Immigration for allowing the 19 terrorists - 9 who presented
grossly
falsified passports - to enter the country. One Customs Service
officer stopped
the 20th terrorist, at risk to his own career. Do you think he's
been promoted?
Not a chance.
That is the
culture we've allowed to develop, except in the Navy. We've all
felt the pain over the last year of the number of skippers who have
been
relieved in the U.S. Navy: two on one cruiser in one year. That's
a problem for
us. It's also something we should be mightily proud of, because
it stands out
in stark contrast to the rest of the U.S. government. In the United
States
Navy, we still have accountability. It's bred into our culture.
And what we
stand for here has to be respread into our government and our nation.
Actions have
consequences, and people must be held accountable. Customs
officer Jose Melendez-Perez stopped the 20th terrorist, who was
supposed to be
on Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania. Probably because of the
shorthanded
muscle on that team, the passengers were able to overcome the terrorists.
Melendez-Perez did this at great personal risk, because his colleagues
and his
supervisors told him, "You can't do this. This guy is an Arab
ethnic. You're
racially profiling. You're going to get in real trouble, because
it's against
Department of Transportation policy to racially profile." He
said, "I don't
care. This guy's a bad guy. I can see it in his eyes." As he
sent this guy back
out of the United States, the guy turned around to him and said,
"I'll be
back." You know, he is back. He's in Guantanamo. We captured
him in
Afghanistan. Do you think Melendez-Perez got a promotion? Do you
think he got
any recognition? Do you think he is doing any better than the 19
of his
time-serving, unaccountable colleagues? Don't think any bit of it.
We have no
accountability, but we're going to restore it.
The other glaring
lack that has been discovered throughout the investigation
is in leadership. Leadership is the willingness to accept the burdens
and the
risks, the potential embarrassment, and the occasional failure of
leading men
and women. It is saying: We will do it this way. I won't let that
guy in. I
will do this and I'll take the consequences. That's what we stand
for here.
That's what the crucible of the U.S. Naval Academy has carried on
now since
1845, and what the U.S. Naval Institute has carried on for 130 years
and hasn't
compromised. We all should be very proud of it. We need leadership
now more
than ever. We need to respread this culture, which is so rare today,
into the
way we conduct our government business, let alone our private business.
Having said
all this, I'm very optimistic. We have seen come forward in this
investigation people from every part of our bureaucracy to say they
screwed up
and to tell what went wrong and what we've got to do to change it.
We have an
agenda for change. I think we're going to see a very fundamental
shift in the
culture of our government as a result of this. I certainly hope
so.
This should be a true wake-up call. We cannot let this be swept
under the
rug, put on the shelf like one more of the hundreds of other commissions
that
have gone right into the memory hole. This time, I truly believe
it's going to
be different.
FROM YOUR
MEMBERSHIP OFFICER
Fran Pieri
I was very
pleased with the turnout at the May luncheon. Lou Zamperini has
more guardian angels than any person I've ever met. Kudos to all
of you who
brought a guest. I hope they enjoyed hearing about Lou's experience
during the
war. Always be sure your guest gets a copy of the most recent Op_Plan.
That will
let them know who our speaker was last month and who will be our
speaker next
month. Most important is to do "follow up". If they didn't
sign up on the day
of the luncheon, wait a few days or even a week, then while its
still fresh in
their memory, ask them about joining the GRAMPS squadron. Maybe
some time when
you are with them on the golf course, playing cards or just hanging
out.
ust a reminder;
if you don't renew your membership on time, you will get a post
card from GRAMPS reminding you to re-up. The Post Card reminder
system was
approved at the last staff meeting and implemented by Bob Olds,
Hal McDonnel,
Don Palmer with yours truly doing the work of keeping tract of everything.
The Ray Pett,
"let me buy you a drink" contest with $150.00 is still
up for
grabs. Also; the ANA national contest applies to all ANA members.
When you sign
up five (5) new members or more, you become an ACE and will be awarded
a free
annual membership. Tell your friends that they don't have to have
had any prior
military service to join the GRAMPS squadron. Hope to see you at
the June 10th
luncheon. Keep the blue side up.
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