April 2007 death toll of US soldiers in Iraq cross 100

[manahil]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18393279/

Congratulations.

[manahil]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18393279/

Congratulations.

[Eeyore]

You are one sad sick puppy

[SICKOFILLEGALS]

of course we should send the CRIMINAL ILLEGAL ALIENS to fight and we'll see HOW QUICKLY they get the hell out of my country.

[Guby]

Just in case you don't know sickofillegals, they have...and they have earned, in some cases, their legal status.

[librada]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by SICKOFILLEGALS:
of course we should send the CRIMINAL ILLEGAL ALIENS to fight and we'll see HOW QUICKLY they get the hell out of my country. </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

Yes, indeed, this poster and the OP's twisted ideals are too intellectually bankrupt and too un-American!

[Malinsky]

The pay is tempting, but the mission is tough "” helping to stop illegal immigrants from crossing a long, rugged and remote border. But the border in question isn't between the United States and Mexico or Canada. It's in Iraq.

At a time when federal officials are stressing the need to beef up U.S. border security, the State Department has hired a firm to recruit veteran law officers who will serve as ˜mentors' and train Iraqis to guard their borders. "Our Border Patrol agents are going to be saying, ˜Goodbye, Arizona. Goodbye, Texas. Hello, Iraq," said Mark Krikorian. "It would be a real loss to lose top, experienced agents and send them to Iraq," he said. "You can see that as one more example of Iraq's security taking priority over America's." A State Department spokeswoman said DynCorp also recruited about 500 officers who are training police in Afghanistan.

Texas Democratic Rep. Solomon Ortiz, whose district abuts the Mexican border, said the "strength of the Border Patrol is dwindling" because 24 more agents from the McAllen, Texas, sector, which takes in several border counties, were deployed with the National Guard for the Iraq war. Congress recently held field hearings in Texas and other states to examine how the porous border impacts national security. Local law enforcement officials were invited to share their experiences. All expressed frustration with the lack of resources and attention being paid to the U.S. border.

A new congressional analysis shows the Iraq war is now costing taxpayers almost $2 billion a week "” nearly twice as much as in the first year of the conflict three years ago and 20 percent more than last year "” as the Pentagon spends more on establishing regional bases to support the extended deployment and scrambles to fix or replace equipment damaged in combat. The war will soon cost more than $500 billion. A study by Columbia University economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001, and Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes concludes that the total costs of the Iraq war could top the $2 trillion mark. For 2007, the United States military budget was raised to a total of US$ 532.8 Billion. This does not include many military-related items that are outside of the Defense Department budget, such as nuclear weapons research, maintenance and production (which is in the Department of Energy budget), Veterans Affairs or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (which are largely funded through extra-budgetary supplements, e.g. $120Bi in 2007). In 2003 the United States spent approximately 47% of the world's total military spending of US$910.6 billion. Estimated receipts for fiscal year 2007 are $2.4 trillion. The President's budget for 2007 totals $2.8 trillion.

"The Border Patrol remains our first line of defense against the entry into the country of terrorists, drug smugglers, gangs, criminal aliens and others seeking to break our laws," said Rep. John Hostettler, R-Indiana, chairman of the Judiciary Committee immigration, border security and claims subcommittee. He added that he was disappointed by Bush's Border Patrol funding proposal. The lawmakers also said they were disappointed with Bush's spending plan for 2006, which would provide $37 million to hire 210 Border Patrol agents. The intelligence reorganization bill Bush signed last year called for hiring 2,000 more agents a year over five years "” nearly doubling the size of the Border Patrol.

The U.S. State Department says the United States is willing to accept 25,000 Iraqi refugees in 2007. Ellen Sauerbrey, assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, said the 25,000 would be part of a contingent of 70,000 refugees worldwide that the State Department can traditionally offer to resettle in the United States, subject to Congressional approval. The United States has been criticized for accepting a small number of refugees since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. The United States has taken in 466 Iraqi refugees since then. About 50,000 Iraqis leave their country every month. U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimates as many as 2 million Iraqis have left their country since the war began and another 1.7 million have moved within Iraq as a result of increased sectarian violence.

The UN High Commission for Refugees reports that Christians comprise 44% of Iraqi refugees, although only 4% of the overall population is Christian. They were tolerated under the secular regime of Saddam Hussein, who even made one of them, Tariq Aziz, his deputy. But as the war has radicalised Islamic sensibilities, Christians have seen their total numbers slump from 1.2 million before the US-led invasion of March 2003 to about 600,000 today. An exodus to the neighbouring countries of Syria, Jordan and Turkey has left behind closed parishes, seminaries and convents. As a small minority without a militia of their own, Iraqi Christians have been persecuted by both Shi'a and Sunni Muslim militias, and also by criminal gangs. "It was bad in Iraq under the old regime," says James Isho, whose family fled Baghdad two years ago after the church next door to their house in the Dora district was bombed. "Now it's even worse." The recent beheading of a Syriac Orthodox priest in Mosul, the crucifixion of a Christian teenager in Basra, the frequent kidnappings for ransom of Christians including four priests ... the rape of Christian women and teenage girls, and the bombings of churches are all indicators that the situation has reached a crisis point.

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/ira...s/2007.05.html

[Malinsky]

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have fled their homeland are likely to seek refugee status in the United States, humanitarian groups said, putting intense pressure on the Bush administration to reexamine a policy that authorizes only 500 Iraqis to be resettled here next year. Arthur E. "Gene" Dewey, who was President Bush's assistant secretary of state for refugee affairs until last year, said that "for political reasons the administration will discourage" the resettlement of Iraqi refugees in the United States "because of the psychological message it would send, that it is a losing cause."

But Dewey said a tipping point has been reached that is bound to change US policy because so many refugees are convinced that they will not be able to return to Iraq. "I think there will increasingly be a moral obligation on the part of the United States" to allow resettlement by Iraqis here, Dewey said. "That is the price for intervention. Similar to Vietnam, that obligation is just going to have to be fulfilled." The US government has allowed about 900,000 Vietnamese to resettle here since the end of the Vietnam War.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/...ees/index.html

[Malinsky]

In 2005, more people from Muslim countries became legal permanent United States residents "” nearly 96,000 "” than in any year in the previous two decades. The greatest number of admissions came from Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Morocco, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

http://www.migrationinformation.org/...ta/country.cfm

Matthew Bigg, Reuters, Feb. 25, 2007

Islam is growing fast among African Americans, who are undeterred by increased scrutiny of Muslims in the United States since the September 11 attacks, according to imams and experts. "It is one of the fastest-growing religions in America," said Lawrence Mamiya, professor of religion at Vassar College, speaking of Islam among black Americans. He said there were up to 2 million black U.S. Muslims but acknowledged there are no precise figures.

Black Americans typically attend mosques separate from Muslims from immigrant backgrounds despite sharing common beliefs, according to Aminah McCloud, religious studies professor at DePaul University in Chicago. Many blacks converted during the civil rights era, when Malcolm X helped popularize the Nation of Islam, attracting boxer Muhammad Ali among others. Islam still attracts prominent blacks such as rapper Scarface, a recent convert. Mark King, who wears his hair in dreadlocks, converted after visiting Africa for the first time and in Gambia read the Koran and realized its teaching chimed with his own beliefs, not least in fighting injustice.

"For young African Americans, there is some attraction to learning about traditions that have been associated with resistance to European imperialism," said King, who has adopted the name Bilal Mansa since his conversion.

[Malinsky]

Several dozen of the estimated 2 million Iraqis who have fled to neighboring countries since the U.S. invasion will probably begin arriving in Utah some time next fall, according to local refugee resettlement workers. The exact number of Iraqi refugees and the exact month of their arrival are still uncertain, says Aden Batar, director of immigration and resettlement at Catholic Community Services in Salt Lake City. "All the information we have is to prepare," he says.

For three years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the UNHCR assumed that Iraq would stabilize and people would be able to return home, but in 2006 "spiraling violence led to increasing displacement," according to the UNHCR report. The Bush administration, which originally had planned to admit 500 Iraqis this year, increased that number in February to 7,000. The impact of 2 million displaced Iraqis on small countries such as Syria, says Patrick Poulin, resettlement director of the International Rescue Committee in Salt Lake City, "is similar to the U.S. taking in about 37 million of you-name-the-population in that same amount of time."

Between 1995 and 2005, according to Nakamura, 335 Iraqi refugees were resettled in Utah, including Kurds, as well as Iraqis displaced during the Gulf War. Although the new refugees will likely include both Sunnis and Shiites, Utah Iraqi Nadeem Ahmed says, "It doesn't matter which sect they are. We will welcome them no matter who they are."