http://iran.whyweprotest.net/news-current-events/21782-letter-fayah.html

A letter from Fayah:

“I love life. I love to laugh and be with my friends. There are so many books I want to read, movies I want to see, people I want to meet. I want to marry, to be a good wife and mother. I want to grow old with the people I love, to feel the sun on my face, to see the ocean, to travel.

My country is in a terrible state. People have no jobs. There is no money. People have no freedom. Women must hide themselves from the world, and we have no choices.

Our people–we are not terrorists. We hate terrorists. And that is what our government has become. They kill our people for no reason. They torture us in their prisons because we want freedom. They make our country look evil, they make our religion look evil.

We are fighting for our freedom, for our religion, for our country. If we do nothing while injustice abounds, we become unjust. We turn into the ones we hate.

I have to fight. I have to go back on the streets. I will make them kill me. I will join Neda, with my friends, and then maybe the world will hear us.

I never thought I would become a martyr, but it is needed. The more of us they kill, the smaller they become, the more strength the people will have. Maybe my death will mean nothing, but maybe it will buy my country freedom.

I am very sad that I will never be a mother, that I will never do the things I love, but I would rather die than do nothing and know that I am to blame for the tortures, the murder, the hatred.

Please tell the world how much we love life. That we are not terrorists. We just want to be free.”

——————————————————————————————————————————

http://iran.whyweprotest.net/news-current-events/33625-update-fayah-found-her-martyrdom.html

Fayah Azadi June 23, 1986-August 2, 2009

I heartily wish I didn’t have to report this. I just found out that Fayah was one of the women who led the protests on July 30th at Neda Agha Soltan’s gravesite.

She was beaten severely by several Basij militiamen with batons, and struck repeatedly on the head.

Her friends carried her away from the cemetary to a friend’s house. She died on August 2nd, having never regained consciousness.

Fayah Azadi was 23 years old, a student at Tehran University, studying art. She was a talented painter, and a staunch supporter of democracy and women’s rights

http://www.kanoon-zendanian.org//Movies/witnesses.swf

There was part of the video, where what he said caught my attention, really stood out, and I had to go back and listen to it again, and then write it down, and now put it here.

This is what he says, near the middle of the video:

It seems to me that there are not enough and right words to describe the horrible scenes and sufferings. The condition, which many Iranians have been experienced during the last 25 years, had been created by the Islamic regime.

Silence means survival, and it means the permanent sheltering of injustice inside the victim. There is no tranquility in silence. If there is tranquility, it is in breaking the silence.

Why does this mean anything to me? I have never lived in Iran. Never been in their prisons, or experienced their torture. Why can’t I be silent?

This thread describes my connection. The hook that has taken me in. I am the one who posts down at the end of the first page, named Coyote.

http://iran.whyweprotest.net/news-current-events/21782-letter-fayah.html

Here is the summary. Fayah is a protester, an young Iranian woman, who went out to protest on July 30th. That day, they mourned for Neda, a protester who was killed 40 days earlier. This is what Fayah wrote a friend of hers before she went out to protest. She has not been heard from since the day she went out to protest, by the way.

A letter from Fayah:

I love life. I love to laugh and be with my friends. There are so many books I want to read, movies I want to see, people I want to meet. I want to marry, to be a good wife and mother. I want to grow old with the people I love, to feel the sun on my face, to see the ocean, to travel.

Please tell the world how much we love life. That we are not terrorists. We just want to be free.

I read this, and I immediately knew exactly how she felt. It gave me a moment of clarity myself, where I could put exactly how I feel into words. So this is what I wrote.

I have been posting in this board as an unregistered since the day it was created, and I posted in this thread up above in post #6, but I want to be known for who I am here. This letter has been eating at me. I wish I could take this letter and scream it into everyone in the world’s ears with a bullhorn, and then crawl inside their heads and make sure they were listening, that they understand.

I’d like to scream that in everyone’s ears with a bullhorn, too.

Now, as I write this, I don’t even want to go back and re-read what I wrote there. Saying it once is enough. Read it, and you know why I feel the same way.

There is a part of the video I posted to and talked about at the beginning of this post, where the Iranian prison survivors talk about a special punishment their government had for them that they called being put “in the grave”. They were put into small wooden boxes, and made to kneel inside of them for months, listening to verses from the Koran blasted into their ears from loudspeakers. Verses from the Koran, and also, as one of the people said very briefly, they would broadcast other prisoners “interviews”. I knew what she meant from the look in her eyes. Those “interviews” were mainly screams and pleading. They would put those people in little boxes and make them listen to other prisoners screaming over loudspeakers for months and months.

I had to listen to my mother scream through a wall my entire childhood. Or my sister. Or my brother. I know, in a small way, what they went through. I have had a taste, however small it may be in comparison. So I know how they feel. My torture was not all day, it was mainly at night, and I was not beaten, or all the other hell they had to go through. It was partial, in comparison to what they went through. But I have had a taste.

No one should ever have to feel this way. The man is right. Keeping it silent, that is keeping an injustice secret inside of you, letting it eat away at you. Anyone who has seen it, come near it, even had a taste of it, if there is a shred of humanity in them, they cannot see it happen again and not want to join in with those who are suffering, and scream for it to stop with them.

So if I seem weird, obsessed, at least try to understand why. I couldn’t be different no matter how much I wanted to be. I can’t see the looks in their faces, hear the inflictions in their voices, and not be hooked. Part of it. With them.

To forget is to let it happen again. To ignore is to let it keep happening. To look away is to murder by inaction.

Sometimes things just stick with you, and you only get part of it until much later. Maybe wasn’t David’s hands, or the hands of anyone who is sinless. It is the blood on their hands, and the blood is growing more each day.

I put my note in the Wall, and in it I prayed for understanding. Is this understanding? That we bleed? Or what? It’s still not completely clear.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M93vGtdFxgc&feature=channel_page

When I was in college, I participated in a study on homeless veterans. As my part of the study, I hung out at the Homeless Veterans Fellowship and handed out care packages, and interviewed homeless veterans who came in.

One day, when I came in, there was a table with fliers on it for missing veterans. I did not know that, and when I looked at the stack of fliers there must have been a trick of light, or my mind was elsewhere, or something, because I thought the top flier was a piece of cardboard with a drying pool of blood on it. It was really a picture of an eagle, but I didn’t see that. I saw blood, and I started to ask the guy who ran the fellowship if there had been a fight in front of the building, and someone had used the cardboard to catch their blood, so they did not bleed all over the floor.

As I was asking this, the blood seemed to disappear and I realized that I was looking at a picture of an eagle.

It kind of freaked me out. I don’t think I’ve ever said anything about it. I thought I was having some weird flashback or something, of something that never happened.

Instead of asking about a fight, I asked him if I could have the flier, and he said something like “yes” and then farted. He walked around all day farting really loud. He was a strange guy. I still have the flier.

But it made me think, this blood, that is what you see every day in war. Blood in the ground, on tanks, buildings, people. This is what the veterans with post traumatic stress disorder so bad they couldn’t live in society or even in a building saw every day. When they woke, when they slept, when they went to sleep at night.

What kind of blood will the people of Iran see from this point on? Will they look at their children and see blood? Will they see blood so much, it becomes nothing to them? And when it becomes nothing, just another of the countless things you see every day, will it become cheap? And will they then feel nothing when they spill it themselves? Nothing until later, when they try to go to sleep.

I hope not.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6618756.ece

From The Times
July 2, 2009
Opposition leaders court arrest by defying ‘unlawful Iranian regime’
Mirhossein Mousavi

(Raheb Homavandi/Reuters)

Mir Hossein Mousavi said Iranians had to ‘defend the rights of our people’
Martin Fletcher

Three of Iran’s most prominent opposition leaders flagrantly courted arrest yesterday by denouncing President Ahmadinejad’s Government as illegitimate, one day after the regime said that it would tolerate no more challenges to the election result.

Mir Hossein Mousavi, the former Prime Minister who lost the election, said that the suppression of dissent was tantamount to a coup. “It’s not yet too late,” he declared on his website. “It is our historical responsibility to continue our protests to defend the rights of the people . . . and prevent the blood spilt by hundreds of thousands of martyrs from leading to a police state.”

Ayatollah Mohammed Khatami, 65, a popular former President, accused the regime of mounting a “velvet revolution against the people and democracy” and called the security crackdown “poisonous”.

Mehdi Karroubi, 72, another defeated presidential candidate, said that “visible and invisible forces blocked any change in the executive power”. He added: “I will continue the fight under any circumstances and using every means.” The regime responded by shutting down his newspaper.

One Iranian analyst expressed astonishment at their audacity. “It looks like they’re trying to become living martyrs,” he said. “At the very least they will be put under house arrest. At worst they will be taken to jail and charged with threatening national security.” The regime might hesitate to lock them up because of the prospect of hundreds of thousands of supporters taking to the streets. “The only question is how big the demonstrations would be and how long the people could fight the might of a military state,” the analyst said.

Mr Mousavi, 67, is living at home with his family in Tehran, with security and intelligence agents watching his every move. They have arrested most of his inner circle and made it progressively harder for him to communicate with his followers.

Since Tuesday, when Iran’s Guardian Council declared that a partial recount had confirmed Mr Ahmadinejad’s disputed re-election, hardliners have all but accused Mr Mousavi of treason. Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, a hardline cleric close to the regime, called him “anti-revolutionary”. The Basij — the regime’s volunteer militia — sent Iran’s chief prosecutor a letter accusing him of nine offences including threatening national security.

Mr Mousavi’s statement said that he was forming a political group to defend citizens’ rights and votes, which suggested that he is preparing a campaign of resistance against Mr Ahmadinejad and his patron, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader.

He still has powerful supporters including two former presidents, Mr Khatami and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Ali Larijani, the parliamentary speaker, Mohammed Baqer Qalibaf, the Mayor of Tehran, and several leading clerics. Mr Ahmadinejad’s fiscal profligacy means that Iran faces huge economic problems that could eat into his support over the coming months.

Forced from the streets by the security forces, Mr Mousavi’s supporters are also preparing a campaign of civil disobedience. They are talking of strikes, boycotting goods advertised in the state-controlled media, moving money out of government-controlled banks and giving money directly to the needy instead of government-controlled charities.

Analysts say that anger will grow and could erupt at football matches, prayer meetings or anywhere that large numbers gather. They say that opposition supporters will go underground and stage lightning demonstrations. They also expect some elements to start launching violent attacks on government targets.

In a possible sign of the regime’s anxiety Mr Ahmadinejad abruptly cancelled a visit to Libya for an African Union summit yesterday.

The regime appeared to have released two more of the nine Iranians working for the British Embassy in Tehran who were arrested last weekend. One or two are still in custody.

Iran’s police chief, Esmaeil Ahmadi-Moghaddam, said that the authorities were seeking Arash Hejazi, the doctor who tried to save the life of Neda Soltan who was shot dead during a demonstration. Dr Hejazi fled to Britain last week and told The Times how Miss Soltan had been shot by a Basiji. Mr Ahmadi-Moghaddam accused him of encouraging Western media hype.

This article explains it very well.

http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Revolutionary_Guard_gains_power_in_Iran_999.html

Revolutionary Guard gains power in Iran

The 125,000-strong Guard Corps was formed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979 as an ideologically pure force to protect the infant Islamic regime following the overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
by Staff Writers
Tehran (UPI) Jun 29, 2009
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the praetorian guard of the Tehran regime, has gained immense power with the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president and is likely to gain more in the months ahead by crushing his political opponents.

The Guard Corps, or Pasdaran as it is known in Farsi, has established a parallel authority in the Islamic Republic over the last few years, giving it wide-ranging political and economic power to a degree that surpasses that held by the military in other authoritarian states in the region.

By keeping Ahmadinejad, one of their own, in the presidency, the Pasdaran will ensure that the immense military, political and economic power it has amassed in recent years also remains intact — and a constant threat to Iran’s neighbors.

The 125,000-strong Guard Corps was formed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979 as an ideologically pure force to protect the infant Islamic regime following the overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

It soon became the regime’s muscle and was largely responsible for repelling Saddam Hussein’s army when it invaded in September 1980. Over the eight years of war that ensued, the Pasdaran became known for its suicidal determination and was hailed as the savior of the republic.

Ahmadinejad, a revolutionary hard-liner, was a Pasdaran field commander during that war, often operating behind enemy lines. When he was first elected in 2005, he appointed senior officers of the corps to key positions in the government, in particular the Interior and Intelligence ministries, whose pervasive networks dominate life in Iran.

Dozens won election to Parliament with the support of Ahmadinejad’s government and the financial and political support of the corps. Before Ahmadinejad’s 2005 victory, the Pasdaran had been steadily taking control of whole sectors of the economy.

After 2005, it became an economic powerhouse that was handed huge government contracts in construction, engineering, transportation and the all-important energy sector.

The corps’ critics say it also runs illegal ports through which pass an estimated one-third of Iran’s total imports — without any state scrutiny.

According to various accounts, the Pasdaran now controls at least one-third of the economy. Critics say that as much as $46 billion has vanished over the years, with much of it being used to fund proxies such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The corps’ treasury is used to finance its military programs. These include Iran’s controversial nuclear program and ballistic missile forces, both of which it controls.

In 2008 the Guard Corps was given the mission of protecting Iran’s coastal regions on the Gulf against U.S. or Israeli attack.

That put serious decision-making authority and military firepower in the hands of the Pasdaran should current tensions with the United States or Israel spill over into conflict.

But, possibly more worrying than that is the fact that the Pasdaran’s wealth is used to finance its clandestine operations outside the country, in Iraq, the Gulf and the Levant. Since 2006 Hezbollah and Hamas have both blunted Israeli military offensives aimed at eliminating them.

The corps’ elite Al-Quds Force, which conducts clandestine operations outside Iran, has become extremely active. In the event of conflict it would be the regime’s strike arm against U.S. and Israeli interests on a global scale.

“The striking influence that the Guard Corps gained beyond Iran’s borders in the four years of President Ahmadinejad’s presidency, especially in Iraq, is arguably one of the main factors that established the position of Iran as a decisive player in the region, threatening the authority of the United States,” says Canadian-Iranian analyst Shahir Shahidsaless, who has written extensively on Iran and the Middle East.

All this gives the Pasdaran a big stake in maintaining Ahmadinejad as president, by subduing and crushing the current upheaval in Iran over his disputed June 12 re-election, and ensuring that the fundamentalist regime headed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei remains in place.

“It is widely believed that only an exclusive group of individuals, including Â… Khamenei, have been in the loop of dealings with the Guards’ finances,” Shahidsaless observed. “This would make it very costly for the corps if an outsider came to power Â…

“No one knows better than the exclusive group which deals with the secret projects of the corps how costly and risky it would be to let a team of strangers taker over the administration.”

June 28, 2009

Millions of sympathizers around the world looked forward to seeing Iran’s protest movement using the Internet for the first online coup in history. Instead, the Iranian Islamic regime turned the tables: Its Internet police, arguably the largest in the world, pushed “control,” “halt,” “delete” and “send” buttons to activate a deadly weapon for suppressing the movement, as soon as it took to the streets to protest the June 12 election which was believed to have given Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a false victory.

By Sunday, June 28, when the Guardian Council was to hand down its final verdict on their complaints, the street rallies had petered out.

Part of the reason was their organizers’ heavy reliance on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other social sites to orchestrate their protest movement. They did not at first appreciate that Iranian intelligence Internet experts, operating from secret headquarters established months ago, were using their communications to shoot them down.

According to our sources, that headquarters is located at the telecom center on Sepah (Khomenei) Square in Tehran. It was built for the Shah in the 1970s by the Israel construction contractors Solel Boneh and designed by Israeli intelligence and telecommunications experts.

The high-end apparatus, installed in late 2008 by the German Siemens AG and Finnish Nokia Corp. cell phone giant, gave Iranian intelligence the most advanced tools anywhere for controlling, inspecting, censoring and altering Internet and cell phone messaging. Those tools were being used weeks before the poll to identify penetrations by alien spy services, their local agents and dissident activists.

This system is capable of conducting “deep packet inspection” of every type of text and video communication in all parts of Iran on three tracks:

1. Like other advanced electronic spy systems in the world, this one uses such keywords as attack, weapons, cash, data, explosives, meeting, demonstration, resistance, protest, etc. to alert Iran within milliseconds to feeds of interest by computer or phone – mail, signals or visuals.

In a flash, intelligence analysts get a fix on the sender and the electronic addressee which are then placed on a surveillance list for further monitoring. Once identified, the sender or receiver and their connections are closely shadowed by field agents.

2. By “deep packet inspection,” the secret controllers can cause delays in online data transfers, which surfers may attribute to glitches connected with their providers. The more targets under surveillance, the more online transfers are slowed down.

Iranian sources report that the day after the presidential poll and resulting street outbreaks, Iran’s Internet control and tracking supervisors took over the 10 leading service providers in the country. Their first action was to slow down incoming and outgoing cyber traffic from 1,500 to 54 kilobytes to make sure that not a single byte by Internet or cell phone to or from protest leaders escaped their notice.

Tehran has vented its ire on Britain because it is accused of providing the organizers of the dissident movement with London telephone numbers to circumvent the deliberate slowdown of online traffic from inside the country. These numbers gave anti-government activists instant, direct links through Western Internet providers for getting their messages out to the world. Iran suspects they were laid on by British intelligence.

Eventually, the British lines became jammed by overload.

3. Iranian intelligence made cynical use of the large amount of electronic and personal data accumulated on anti-regime elements. Instead of detaining their prey at once, Iranian intelligence invaded their computers and cell phones to plant false leads for smoking unsuspecting activists out in the open and keeping them under inspection.

Within a few days of their protest, Mir Hossein Mousavi and the bulk of his supporters, realizing their electronic campaign had been taken over by the regime to hunt them down, disappeared from the streets of Tehran.

Wednesday, June 24, when the extent of the damage the Iranian Internet invasion had inflicted on American interests was brought home to him, US secretary of defense Robert Gates ordered a special cyber defense system set up to protect the US armed forces’ 15,000 Web sites, which encompass seven million computers. Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the National Security Agency, was put in charge of getting the new system up and running by the end of 2010.

Tuesday, June 23, a group of US senators led by the Republic presidential candidate John McCain and independent Joe Lieberman initiated legislation to fund a cyber defense system capable of combating Internet assaults like the one mounted by the Iranian government.

—————-

The Iranian protesters need to lean how to use Stenography. You don’t need a complicated computer program to do it, just a shared set of words or symbols that have a special meaning only for you and the people you are trying to communicate with. A language all of your own.

But software helps too.

The best place to hide something is right out in the open. Think of it as communication via riddles, but the riddles are arranged in such a way that the casual observer doesn’t even know there is a riddle there.

Aside from that, Iran may have traced back many of the protesters via their digital communication and arrested them, but the sheer numbers of the opposition has made it impossible for them to attack them all. And the ones they have hit has only given fuel to the rest. Iran has just made a sea of martyrs, and showed that much more to the people of their country why the regime needs to change. If they needed a reason before, they have one on a silver platter now. The regime may be able to arrest scattered numbers, solely for the purpose of intimidation, but they can never deal with them all. They are far outnumbered, and the sooner the ones they cannot deal with help the ones that have been arrested, the better. The Iranian government is far weaker than it pretends to be. It is a paper tiger trying to fight a fire breathing dragon.

There were a few things that really stand out. One, thoughts about King David. When I left Jerusalem, and Haifa, and when I went into Jordan, I found myself thinking about King David, and why he could not build the temple. He had blood on his hands, so his son, Solomon built the temple. David could not. This thought depressed me. King David was a hero, and a great man, but still there were things there that had a dark side. Catch 22’s. Unwinnable decisions. Defend your people and establish their nation, and become a killer, or refuse to kill and watch everyone around you die.

I was looking at the Jordanian border guards today, and thinking that they just looked like normal people, like you and me. But if war broke out, they would still fight and die. And their blood would be on our hands. The bad would be mixed in with the good, but some of the good ones would still die.

There are so many levels to that statement – that David could not build the temple because of the blood on his hands. It applies to so many things. I know there are major assholes among the Arabs and Muslims at large. I saw one in Bethlehem who I know was Fatah or Islamic Jihad or one of those other asshole groups. He glared at me, and then walked straight towards me like he was going to walk into me. He had a chip on his shoulder you could see a mile away. And the look on his face of a man who has killed. In the military, you can usually tell who has killed and who has not, because they get a look. And this guy was just a kid, wearing a PA police uniform, outside the church in Bethlehem. But he really stood out. There was another older cop with him who was watching. He actually looked scared. And he had this helpless look. I think that bothered me more. The fuckhead just pissed me off, and I didn’t move for him. And when the asshole walked past, the old cop looked relieved.

Today in Jordan, the first Jordanian I saw gave me shit about the snake tattooed on my arm. It gave me a sense of satisfaction, actually, because the whole reason I got that tattoo was to piss Arabs off. It was meant for the Iraqis, in Desert Storm, but this was close enough. I got it to piss them off in the war, so it would buy me a few extra seconds to shoot them. And also, so that if I died, I would know I had the satisfaction of still pissing them off as or after I died. When the first Jordanian border guard I met saw the tattoo, he goes “what is this?” with a disgusted look on his face. The other guard with him says “it is a snake” and smiled as if apologizing for the other guy. He was very nice, and the other guy shut up.

On the way out, another border guard dressed in black saw a British woman who was with our party and she was just wearing shorts and a tight t-shirt. First he looked disgusted, motioned at her clothes, and said something in Arabic in a disgusted tone of voice. Then, when she did not seem to notice, he started to look her up and down with a perverted look on his face. You could tell he was just trying to make her uneasy, and that he thought she was lesser because she was not covered from head to toe like all the other women in Jordan were. The other guard tried to keep her attention so she would not notice the first one, and seemed embarrassed. I don’t know if she saw or not, but if she did she pretended she did not.

I guess my point is that with each of the assholes was a decent one. And overall, I saw more that were decent or that at least put up a good act pretending to be decent than assholes.

And it makes me wonder about blood on the hands again. It is something that people have absolutely no choice about sometimes, but it can be so tragic, because the good get mixed in with the bad. And even when you surgically remove only the bad ones, you have still killed. So there is blood on your hands, and you are not worthy of certain things.

There is something in that, like a word on the tip of my tongue I cannot quite get out. I cannot figure out what it is yet.

The other thing I am thinking about is the difference between the Arab countries and Israel. They were overall very nice in the Arab areas I went to, but they still had their police everywhere, controlling them. Every corner, every stop our tour went to – police. In Israel you see them in the background, but they don’t seem to be watching, waiting. They did in the Arab areas. And they seemed to be watching their own people more than us, as if they didn’t want them to get ideas.

Which takes me to a major difference between Islam and Judaism and Christianity. Islam has compassion and forgiving in it, but this is not the main focus. It is in the background, behind obedience. Obedience and fealty is the core of Islam. The very word “Islam” translates to “submit”. The other two religions are more tolerant. They share. They try to get along. They do not make forcing their people to follow them their main emphasis. They are nice to get you to do what they want, not violent.

At Petra, there were stables where they kept the horses at the head of the trail. As I walked up to it on the way out, I saw a horse throw one of the Bedouins off. All the Bedouins around started throwing rocks at the horse, hard, and really pissing it off. It didn’t calm down, or do what they wanted, but they just kept throwing more rocks at it. It just got madder and madder and madder. That isn’t the way to make people or animals do what you want them to do. But it seems to be ingrained into the mindset of the Muslim on many levels. The religious level, the political level, even when it comes to just dealing with a pissed off animal. Don’t offer it a carrot. Beat it and break its spirit. That is just wrong, and it does not make people’s spirits break. It just pisses them off, and makes them take it out in other ways, like at the West or at the Jews.

I don’t know. I guess that is all that is on my mind now. I got really depressed when I left Jerusalem and Haifa. I hope I don’t get depressed again on the plane. I guess you can’t have the highs without the lows. I have a lot to digest, so I need to get back to work and earn some more money anyway. I have learned a lot. Confirmed many suspicions, remembered many things I forgot, and added new things on top of it all. It was definitely a good trip.

Pentagon: Chinese Ships Harassed Unarmed Navy Craft in International Waters
The Pentagon charged that five Chinese ships harassed an unarmed U.S. Navy craft in international waters as the Obama administration protested the action to the Chinese government Monday.
AP
Monday, March 09, 2009

powered by BaynoteWASHINGTON — Chinese ships surrounded and harassed a Navy mapping ship in international waters off China, at one point coming within 25 feet of the American boat and strewing debris in its path, the Defense Department said Monday. The Obama administration said it would continue naval operations in the South China Sea, most of which China considers its territory, and protested to China about what it called reckless behavior that endangered lives.

At one point during the incident Sunday the unarmed USNS Impeccable turned fire hoses on an approaching Chinese ship in self defense, the Pentagon said. At another point a Chinese ship played chicken with the Americans, stopping dead in front of the Impeccable as it tried to sail away, forcing the civilian mariners to slam on the brakes.

….

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D96QRQ780&show_article=1

NKorea puts troops on alert, warns of war danger
Mar 9 08:06 PM US/Eastern
By JEAN H. LEE
North Korea Offers Warning Over Satellite Launch

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) – North Korea put its troops on alert and cut the last hot line to Seoul on Monday as the American and South Korean militaries began joint maneuvers. The communist regime warned that even the slightest provocation could trigger war.

The North stressed that provocation would include any attempt to interfere with its impending launch of a satellite into orbit. U.S. and Japanese officials fear the launch could be a cover for a test of a long-range attack missile and have suggested they might move to intercept the rocket.

“Shooting our satellite for peaceful purposes will precisely mean a war,” North Korea’s military threatened in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency. Any interception attempt will draw “a just, retaliatory strike,” it said.

The North has been on a steady retreat from reconciliation since President Lee Myung-bak took office in the South a year ago. After Lee said the North must continue dismantling its nuclear program if it wants aid, Pyongyang cut ties, suspended joint projects and stepped up its belligerence rhetoric.

…

If you died on the battlefield,
I will remember you.
If you suffered and were alone on some strange and distant field,
I will remember you.
If you sacrificed long ago, so that I and others might live free,
I will remember you.
If you feel that no one remembers what you believed in,
I will remember you.
If you found yourself wounded and afraid, feeling that your efforts were in vain,
I will remember you.
In all that I do, I will represent your struggle, so that others might look upon it,
and remember.