House committee schedules contempt vote against Holder.
CBS News has learned the House Oversight Committee will vote next week on whether to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress. It's the fourth time in 30 years that Congress has launched a contempt action against an executive branch member.
This time, the dispute stems from Holder failing to turn over documents subpoenaed on October 12, 2011 in the Fast and Furious "gunwalking" investigation.
The Justice Department has maintained it has cooperated fully with the congressional investigation, turning over tens of thousands of documents and having Holder testify to Congress on the topic at least eight times.
However, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., says the Justice Department has refused to turn over tens of thousands of pages of documents. Those include materials created after Feb. 4, 2011, when the Justice Department wrote a letter to Congress saying no gunwalking had occurred. The Justice Department later retracted the denial.
"The Obama Administration has not asserted Executive Privilege or any other valid privilege over these materials and it is unacceptable that the Department of Justice refuses to produce them. These documents pertain to Operation Fast and Furious, the claims of whistleblowers, and why it took the Department nearly a year to retract false denials of reckless tactics," Issa wrote in an announcement of the vote to be released shortly. It will reveal the vote is scheduled for Wednesday, June 20.
Issa says the Justice Department can still put a stop to the contempt process at any time by turning over the subpoenaed documents.
If the House Oversight Committee approves the contempt citation, the matter would likely be scheduled for a full House vote.
For several weeks, there has been closed-door discussions and debate among House Republicans as to whether to move forward with contempt. Some have expressed concern that it could distract from the Republican's focus on the economy in this election year.
Led by Republicans Senator Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Issa, Congress' investigation into Fast and Furious is now in its second year. In the ATF operation, agents allowed thousands of weapons to "walk" into the hands of Mexican drug cartels in the hope it would somehow help ATF take down a major cartel. Some of the weapons were used in the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry at the hands of illegal immigrants crossing into Arizona. Mexican press reports say hundreds of Mexicans have died at the hands of the trafficked weapons. The story was exposed nationally for the first time by CBS News in February 2011.
Considering that CBS got to the whistleblowers through David and me (and we have the emails to prove it), that last statement is a cheeky bit of hubris.
A new kind of inflatable tourniquet created by Dr. John Croushorn and materials experts will soon be in the hands of U.S. Army combat medics. It was named by Popular Science as one of the top 10 inventions of the year. (Photo credit Birmingham News.)
This showed up in my local paper yesterday.
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- On Friday morning the U.S. Special Operations Command received its first shipment of a medical device that has Birmingham roots and promises to save lives on the battlefield.
The Abdominal Aortic Tourniquet will be used when soldiers or Marines are injured in the pelvis or upper leg by gunshot, shrapnel or a blast, causing a wound that could bleed a person to death within minutes. A medic quickly straps the AAT around the belly of the victim, tightens it with a windlass and pumps in air.
This pushes a balloon into the belly with the force of more than 80 pounds, clamping the abdominal aorta against the spine to cut off blood flow to the legs.
"The idea is you're turning off the faucet," said Dr. John Croushorn, one of the inventors. Croushorn is an emergency department doctor at Trinity Medical Center and a former U.S. Army surgeon, and his start-up company, Compression Works, is based in Hoover.
Four plastic parts of the one-pound AAT are made by Innovative Composite Solutions, a UAB spinoff co-founded by Uday Vaidya, a UAB professor of mechanical engineering. ICS develops and makes high-strength thermoplastic composite components, and it won $100,000 in the 2009 Alabama Launchpad business plan competition sponsored by the Alabama Economic Development Partnership Foundation.
The AAT "soldier saver" was picked as one of the top 10 inventions of the year in the June issue of Popular Science.
Compression Works will ship 500 of the AATs by the end of June, and the device is getting further testing by the Army, Navy and the United Kingdom at the U.S. Army's Institute of Surgical Research in San Antonio, Texas.
Croushorn filmed a training video in Hoover last month, using volunteers from metro-area police departments dressed as Army soldiers, with one wounded in the pelvic area and covered with Halloween-store fake blood. The video simulates a firefight, and Croushorn plays the Army medic who straps on the AAT and pumps it up in a minute and a half.
Capability gap
Military surgical interest is high, because the wounds called "pelvic-junctional hemorrhage" have been the number-one capability gap for the past five years. Terrorists seem to be aiming at that part of the body, which is unprotected by body armor.
In the 1800s Joseph Lister created, and briefly used, a large C-clamp device called the Lister tourniquet to press on the belly to stop blood flow during leg amputations.
U.S. military medics had been kneeling on the bellies of wounded men to mimic that clamping, Croushorn said. In 2006, a group of doctors at the Medical College of Georgia's emergency medical department decided to see how hard you had to push on the belly to stop the blood flow in the femoral artery of the leg.
The volunteers were the doctors themselves. They put a tightly bundled pad about the size of a human knee on the belly, and then put dumbbells on it, starting at 20 pounds and increasing the weight by 20-pound increments to 140 pounds.
Blood flow stopped at 80 pounds or above, with an average of 104 pounds of pressure.
Croushorn and co-inventor Dr. Richard Schwartz, head of emergency medicine at the Georgia Health Sciences University, heard the dumbbell study at an emergency physicians meeting in New Orleans, and talked about making a device to simulate the dumbbell pressure.
The first prototypes came in 2007, and the key step was a test on eight anesthetized pigs to see what happened if the prototype was left on for an hour, instead of just minutes for the human volunteers. This simulates the time needed to get the wounded soldier to a surgeon.
"We thought we were going to kill the pigs,'" Croushorn said, but the results were surprising -- no signs of dangerous changes in blood potassium or lactate levels, and no sign of damage to the small and large intestines.
Their final device got quick approval by the FDA last year, and a potential order for 10,000 to 30,000 units is in the works.
An even bigger market may be civilian EMS teams, Croushorn said. Dog experiments suggest that clamping the abdominal artery results in better chest compression results to push blood and oxygen to the brain. This could be vital for people who have suffered out-of-hospital cardiac arrests.
Independence Day?
VAN SUSTEREN: And why doesn't the speaker then say, Let's fish or cut bait, either do this or don't do this, and either issue the contempt -- I mean, I don't know if you're right or wrong, but at least that would move it forward.
ISSA: I believe that the speaker is close to the end of his rope. My job, of course, is to do my job until the speaker makes that decision. I'm comfortable that he will make the decision relatively soon.
VAN SUSTEREN: What's relatively soon, a week, two weeks, a month, two months?
ISSA: I don't expect to go home for 4th of July without having a date for contempt or knowing that it's time to wrap up this investigation and just admit that Justice is not transparent, that you're not going to get the kind of cooperation you want.
I spoke with Mr. Issa as well on Thursday evening before a series of votes and he confirmed the contempt charge against Mr. Holder"could be at anytime." within the next few weeks.
"The attitude of the Attorney General...the defiance--the refusal to even admit evidence that he was asked about directly...Jason Chaffetz reading an e-mail to him directly and him denying that it meant what it said and claiming superior knowledge," said Mr. Issa.
We shall see. I will have more on this tomorrow morning.
Old School Scout Trackers on Today's Battlefield by Sergeant First Class Brian Lackey.
(Originally published in Armor Magazine)
When we hear the term "tracker," most of us think back to the days of John Wayne and the 7th Cavalry, conjuring up images of the tracker dismounting his horse, observing the ground, and quickly relaying fascinating information from a single traqck. What most would consider "only in the movies" is very close to reality and is currently employed as a viable skill set in numerous low-intensity conflicts in more relevant and modern times. These skills have been used in Borneo, Malaya, Kenya, Rhodesia, Vietnam, South-West Africa, and currently on a limited scale in Afghanistan and Iraq. Countless reports of successful operations in these areas have been associated or accredited, either directly or indirectly, to intelligence gathered by trackers due to their enhanced observation and awareness skills.
Throughout history, commanders have taken advantage of these skills by gathering vital intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) to better understand the battlefield. Whether on an active track or simple patrol, tracker-trained soldiers possess a keen sense of detail and quickly recognize what is out of place or missing from the surrounding environment. Early tracking was primarily based on micro-tracking (tracking from print to print), but quickly took on a different role when implemented into the small team concept of combat tracker teams.
With the need for teams to provide their own security, and rapidly track or develop a situation, they moved toward a very aggressive method called "macro-tracking," which, when done correctly, can incorporate the entire team and quickly cover ground, decreasing the time and distance interval of their quarry. This aggressive style of tracking was revolutionized by David Scott-Donelane, formerly of the Rhodesian Selous Scouts, which are considered the most effective unit ever to fight an insurgency. (MBV Note: Also see this link.)
Primitive tracking skills can be employed throughout the operational continuum, but are ideal for counterinsurgency operations. One of the major problems facing U.S. forces during counterinsurgency operations is tracking insurgents after contact is made and they disperse among the population. Only by vigorously pursuing the insurgent, wherever he is located, will it be possible for the military to dominate an area and reduce insurgent activities. To accomplish this effort, soldiers trained in tracking skills must learn to watch for clues or signs of passage inconsistent with normal patterns or an environmental baseline. Forced as they are to move on foot, it impossible for insurgents to avoid leaving traces of passage through an area. It is these traces that the tracker uses to reveal valuable information, such as number of insurgents in a group; direction of travel; time and distance gap between tracker and insurgent; and through deductive reasoning develop, determine, or confirm tactical intelligence.
Trackers are capable of quickly multiplying squadron or battalion capabilities. Battalion scouts often assume the quick reaction force (QRF)/explosive ordnance detachment (EOD) role for their organizations; versatile and flexible units of this nature greatly benefit from this skill set. We have all experienced the frustration felt following an improvised explosive device (IED) attack and more times than not, we end the day reading a storyboard compiled by law enforcement personnel (LEP), EOD, or weapons intelligence team (WIT), outlining the basic information of type and employment method. Integrating trackers with these contracted agencies could deliver intelligence from blast radios to the the insurgent's door step. Effective tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) would place LEP/EOD/WIT 100 meters in to investigate the blast radius.
Scout trackers, while providing 300-meter cordon, would complete 360-degree command post operations, identifying all incoming and outgoing traffic, as well as movement direction. The combat tracker team could easily move into an active-track mode, leading to vehicles, villages, houses, caches, and initiating points, virtually doubling its chances of apprehending the enemy. Today's trackers have battlefield enablers, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), rotary wing, camera towers, and blimps, which can quickly aid apprehension. During our last deployment, our squadron immediately opened a target information center (TIC) following an IED strike, and we had rotary wing and UAV on site. However, due to a lack of ground information, the rotary wing spent much of its time providing security rather than hunting down the enemy. With a tracker, we could quickly relay vital information, which helped direct air assets to the correct area. We also established a time distance interval, reducing a 360-degree 3-km area to a 30-degree cone, which greatly increased additional blocking or cordon possibilities.
The Tactical Tracking Operations School (TTOS) currently offers a 100-hour mobile training team (MTT) combat tracker course, which is designed to complement any unit's operating procedures. TTOS guides scouts through a well-designed program, moving soldiers from basic to advanced tracking skills, and incorporates training into daily excursions. When I attended the course, we executed nearly 6 hours of field time, putting to use skills we had just learned, to every 2 hours of class time. My team, on several occasions, tracked individuals up to 6kms over the diverse terrain of Fort Irwin, California, maintaining both security and forward movement, which are two key ingredients to apprehension of the quarry/enemy. General operations provide an overwhelming amount of intelligence to today's commanders in every environment. Simplistic in theory and in action, scout trackers belong in our units . . . without question.
Okay, so one day you're walking down a road in your AO and you find this Interceptor body armor in a ditch, maybe it's got a few stains on it and what not. So, you say a quick "thank You!" to the Great Jehovah and go about your merry way wondering just what you may do to clean it up and wear it properly, since you have no experience with such garments. Now, if you had previously printed out the manuals below, you would have no problem.
TM 10-8470-208-10: TECHNICAL/OPERATOR MANUAL FOR IMPROVED OUTER TACTICAL VEST (IOTV) AND IMPROVED OUTER TACTICAL VEST GEN II (IOTV GEN II)
TM 10-8470-208-10: CREW/OPERATOR DAILY PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE CHECKLIST FOR IMPROVED OUTER TACTICAL VEST (IOTV) AND IMPROVED OUTER TACTICAL VEST GEN II (IOTV GEN II)
Here is a Scribd posting of a handy checklist of marksmanship fundamentals put out by the Army. I have about 2 dozen of these I've picked up over the years and hand them out periodically to newbies. The original is printed on weatherproof card stock for carrying in a BDU shirt pocket. Both instructors and students will find this card handy and useful as a reminder.
Ragtag
David Codrea: Holder testimony belies early and continued citizen journalist reports
Mychal Massie: See No Evil, Speak No Truth, And Us
It wasn’t Fox News or the mainstream media outlets that broke the news of Fast and Furious–it was a ragtag collection of bloggers and whistleblowers at CleanUpATF.org who broke the story.
Dave Workman: Furious hearing’s telling moment was not the Issa-Jackson Lee outburst.
Issa last night told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren that House Speaker John Boehner is “close” to making a decision on holding Holder in contempt of Congress over the Fast and Furious stonewalling. Boehner needs to hustle on that, according to blogger Mike Vanderboegh, who along with National Gun Rights Examiner David Codrea, broke the Fast and Furious gun walking story.
Holder’s performance Thursday suggests he has nothing but contempt for Republicans in Congress who want to get at the truth of Fast and Furious.
If these guys train like they fight, I'd say this is fairly begging for a long burst from an M240B.
“Just training Ma’am. Joining up with another patrol at the rally point.”
Courtesy of John Robb at Global Guerrillas there is this interesting bit about Chinese Wheelbarrows.
Gotta go this morning and see a man about a mule.
John Boehner's fresh start. It will be interesting to see if this presages any change in Old Yellowstain's Gunwalker cover-up assistance.
