In Honor and Respect . . .

In Honor and Respect, in memory of the past and dedication to the future those who came before us in the pursuit of peace.
I had heard talk in some of my old circles about this, but this is the first time I've actually found public documentation of the National Vigilance Park and the Aerial Reconnaissance Memorial near the NRO in Maryland.
I had a brief email conversation with the grandson of one of the crew members who gave his life in the shoot down of the C-130 mentioned in the article above. He is in the Air Force , Intelligence following the family tradition.

I know there are some of my readers, that no matter how sincere I am about the following statement, will not believe it.
The military motto I grew up with was the one that was just outside the gate where my father worked "Peace is our Profession".
There were colleagues of mine in the Air Force who in their hearts felt we were preparing for war, and we were.
But more importantly we were keeping the peace by being prepared and gathering intelligence that made the job of fighting the diplomatic and economic war possible.
Newly released former Soviet intelligence documents indicate that they had penetrated our intelligence community to a very high level and knew what our abilities and intentions were.
Those same records indicate they could not bring themselves to believe what they found, that America's stance was purely defensive.
That is the same mentality we saw from our side in the run up to Iraq.
The 'facts' only supported a first strike invasion if you chose to pick the most worrisome reports and put them above the general information that indicated the opposite.
This is the core of a post I've been wanting to make for months and the realities of life in the meat world, and threats from the cyber world have gotten in the way.
What I worked so hard to do right, what my honest and thorough colleagues work so hard to do right was perverted for a paranoid single focus agenda.
What is the real intent of that agenda? Security of the United States, Oil, fighting Terrorism, spreading Democracy, a family fight between the Hussein's and the Bush's?
Honestly, I don't care.
What was done to justify it, by tampering with the intel., by misreporting to the world a 'reality' that in it's own way was every bit as fanciful as 'Baghdad Bob's' reports damaged the greatest of America's causes - our ability to convince the world of our rightness and sincerity concerning global peace.
There may or may not be a mushroom cloud in America's future (the odds are still high that there is), the immediate threat of it wasn't from Iraq and still remains despite all the treasure in human lives and dollars thrown into a battle that should have been done and over with, if we had done the right thing and brought the world with us by being honest.