Watch for the Florida School Shooting to be Blamed on the Russian Probe

Get ready for the GOP and the limited-information Trump supporters to condemn the Robert Mueller investigation and the FBI for ignoring their duty to protect Americans. They will claim the FBI and its agents were too blindsided trying to pin a “collusion” badge on Trump - and in doing so they missed a chance to stop a real crime.

A report has been released that shows the FBI was warned about Nikolaus Cruz in January, but they did nothing about it. 

On January 5^th, over a month before Wednesday’s shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida, the bureau received a warning from someone close to the teenager that they were concerned about Cruz and that he might carry out an attack on the school. The tipster, identified only as an adult who knew the gunman, contacted the FBI public tip line and told “about Cruz’s gun ownership, his desire to kill people, his erratic behavior, and even disturbing social media posts.”

Red flags should have gone up and a warning klaxon begun blaring but the call center never passed on any information, according to a federal law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The bureau knew the identity of the tipster and the tip involved a threat to life, meaning it should have been passed on. The tipster did not describe an attack plan by Cruz with a time and place, but it did provide specific information on him and warning signs that any law enforcement official would have acted on.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, hoping to win back Trump’s trust and loyalty, said he is ordering deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein to review the bureau’s handling of the matter. “It is now clear that the warning signs were there and tips to the FBI were missed,” Sessions said in a statement. “We see the tragic consequences of those failures.”

There’s the set up for - “if the FBI hadn’t been distracted by the probe into Russian collusion, they would have easily connected the dots.” This will play right in to Trump’s hands that if the FBI had not thrown all their agents and staff at the Russian investigation, which everyone knows is just fake news, made up, a witch hunt, a scheme by Democrats to cover up their loss in the 2016 election, and a waste of taxpayers’ money, they would have been able to nab Cruz before he gunned down 17 students and wounded 14 others on Valentine’s Day.

FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement “We are still investigating the facts. I am committed to getting to the bottom of what happened in this particular matter, as well as reviewing our processes for responding to information that we receive from the public.

But again, the lapse will be blamed on so much of the FBI’s attention diverted to a useless probe into Russian hacking, Russian collusion, those innocent meetings with Russian agents- the Russian ambassador-Russian Bank CEOs-and Russian lawyers by members of Trump’s campaign. When it comes to all the obvious Russian collusion links, Trump and his supporters just say "Move along. Nothing to see here."

It will not be surprising if Trump, his GOP sycophants, or the far-right fringe call for Rod Rosenstein and Christopher Wray (maybe even Jeff Sessions) to step down in light of this FBI failure. Then there will most likely be a demand to end the Russian investigation because Americans are being slaughtered due to FBI negligence from looking into all those false leads about Russians meddling in our 2016 election. It will be much easier in the future to also point to FBI neglect the next time ANY tragedy happens that might have been stopped if only those law enforcement agents had been available to spot the warning signs.

This is how democracy’s head is held under water until it drowns.

The F-52 Fighter - Trump's Stealth Jet

          Trump Sells Norway a Pig-in-a-Poke

It took some time to research, almost a week, to find Trump’s F-52 fighter jet that he claims the U.S. sold to the Norwegians. I consulted two friends I know who work in defense industries for our nation’s military, and one who is in the air force, and all three of them assured me the aircraft does "exist" (and they used air quotes when they said it)...in the mind of a feeble, poorly-educated, draft-dodging clown who attained the highest office in the land thanks to the aid of Russia. It apparently has replaced almost all F-16 Fighting Falcons and about a quarter of the F-22 Raptors in our arsenal. Training is currently being carried out at Elgin Air Force Base near Fort Walton Beach in the Florida Panhandle.

A three-quarter view of the F-52 on a taxiway

          I was told in a tongue-in-cheek manner that the F-52 is referred to as the “Cheshire Cat.” Needless to say, specs on the machine are classified but it definitely is a stealth aircraft… SO stealth, no one’s seen it, not even the Norwegians who Trump seems to think were gullible enough to buy a fleet of them from the U.S. That same rumor-mill states that the check for the F-52s was made out to a "well-known Amerikan" and issued through Deutsche Bank.

          I was advised where I might be able to take some pictures of the F-52 Cheshire Cat, from an unobtrusive place near Cobb’s Overrun at the southeastern end of the runway at Eglin, so here are some that I snapped last week…Notice how light wraps around them so well that they are almost impossible to see…The first picture is a comparison shot of the F-52 to a standard truck…

…here are four of them being readied for flight… and the first one preparing to take off… 

…a selection of them flying overhead, in a finger-four formation, and doing a low-level pass just offshore…

For the record, Norway did buy F-35 aircraft, but everyone from Prime Minister Solberg down to airman third class Per Arne Værnes at Bodø Main Air Station says that is all they bought. Trump’s announcement about the Norwegians purchasing F-52 Cheshire Cats is met with understandable derision.

When I asked Google Home to show me a picture of Trump’s F-52, this is what it found, after checking with Siri and Alexa first.

Trumpism - A Blight on America

Germany is a nation in which I have been interested since I was old enough to find it on a map. Because the U.S. had been involved in combating them twice in less than a half a century I was curious about the Germans. What drove them? How was the pitch for war made palpable less than 20 years after the Versailles Treaty was signed? Why were they willing to endanger another generation of Germans? My curiosity even made my xenophobic father heap scorn on me as being a “Kraut in my mind.” He ridiculed my research and interest because he felt I was ignoring our British/Scot/Irish roots and claimed I just wanted to “be German” or “be a Nazi.” I wondered what he was so upset about. I wasn’t making excuses or gushing about them; I just wanted to find out how the Germans were drawn into war so quickly and easily in the 20^th century. That meant I needed to study them.

My curiosity was stimulated because both of my grandfathers fought in World War One against German forces, and one of my uncles in World War Two. My interest was known to other family members. I went to a party at a relative’s house in the mid-1970s, and while there he introduced me to a woman named Geezy whose husband had been a Luftwaffe anti-aircraft gunner throughout the war. My uncle wanted me to talk with her partly because she grew up in Germany and lived in Berlin during World War Two, but mainly because of her stance. Geezy stated in no uncertain terms she loved Adolf Hitler and still thought he was a great leader. This was 30 years after the end of the war. I was stunned by her admission and probed hoping to find some rationale. She was unapologetic about his crimes against other countries and even against his own people. She didn’t care. If Hitler said it needed to be done, then it was the right thing to do. She was never a member of the Nazi party but she supported the Nazis 100%...even to that day. She said she would still vote for and support Hitler, despite all the revelations about what he did. She was proud of him.

Remembering her blind adulation stills seems eerie. But more disturbingly, it sounds just like today’s Trump supporters. It doesn’t matter what Trump does…they support him unconditionally. How do you reason with that kind of fanatic? Trump bragged he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose voters. He is saying they will support a cold-blooded murderer with no reservations. Trump also boasted that he loved “poorly educated” voters. He wasn't just talking about people who only had a limited education. He meant people who were deliberately ignorant; people who didn’t want to think things through, people that just took marching orders, people who didn’t read or question anything. These are the people we should be very concerned about because they are Trump’s sycophants, his supporters, his loyal base. They look upon Trump as a messiah. How are they any different than Hitler’s SS?

Like the SS, they throw out Nazi salutes to intimidate others. At Trump’s urging, they beat up protesters. Now they are even emboldened to march in nighttime torch-lit parades as though this is Nuremberg or Munich in 1938. It’s frightening because these Trump supporters are living among us like a fifth column by the millions. They believe it is Trump, or nothing else. This Trumpism is a danger to American democracy and its survival.

Germans have been addressing the Nazi Germany image for over 70 years but they will continue with that struggle for the foreseeable future. We in the United States are about to join Germany in our own long, difficult quest to improve our image and try to make amends for what Trumpism is doing to our country and to the world. Fifty to a hundred years from now, we will still be trying to shake off our own “Nazi-like” period. It will be much shorter than the twelve years Hitler inflicted on Germany, but the damage to the world will be the same. It will be a time in our nation’s history known as Trump’s America from 2016 to 2018. I’m no seer stating the end will be in 2018. It’s just that there are so many things roaring right at Trump at this point (undeniable Russian collusion, money-laundering, obstruction of justice, serial sexual assault, violation of the Emoluments Clause, violation of the oath of office…etc.) that I have no doubt one of them will most likely get him out of the White House shortly. Pence, Kelly, Mattis, McMaster, DeVos, Mnuchin, Tillerson, Conway, Miller, Huckleberry Sanders, Rick Perry, Scott Pruitt, Wilbur Ross, Trump’s kids, his son-in-law, and all the other enablers should be dragged out with him and left with broken bones, deep gashes, grievous injuries, missing teeth and hair and tossed in a bloody pile at the base of the Washington Monument. But we still have a ways to go to get there. I am concerned about what will happen to us before Trump is forced out of office. Trump unabashedly pits Americans against each other, claims white supremacists and Nazi sympathizers are good people, signed a tax bill to transfer the nation’s wealth to himself and his ultra-rich buddies, threatens nuclear war, attacks the free press, and lies even when the truth sounds better. His enablers in the Republican Party and his evangelical base cheer him on and urge him to keep it up.

Comparing the U.S. under Trump to Germany under Hitler seems outlandish but almost daily we are introduced to a new Trump outrage that makes us look more and more like a budding totalitarian regime. The world looked on in concern and then horror when Hitler turned Germany into a fascist state and finally launched a war. The world is now watching the U.S. do the same thing under Trump.

No one knows who originally made this quote, but it’s appropriate; for the citizens of Nazi Germany - to the U.S. in 2018…”We’re all in the same game; just different levels. Dealing with the same hell, just different devils.”

Putin and Trump - World-Class Liars

Trump – “There is no collusion. Absolutely none. I have nothing to do with Russia.”

Putin - "Thank you, President Trump. Information obtained from the CIA was sufficient to search for and arrest of criminals.”

          Today, it is revealed by White House press manipulator Sarah Huckabee Sanders that on Sunday Russian President Putin phoned Trump to thank him for a tip from the CIA that thwarted a terrorist attack being planned at Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg. A tip from the CIA? And Trump had a hand in providing it?

Countries share intelligence occasionally, but this call was highly unusual since presidents rarely, if ever, thank one another for something from the other's spy agency. According to the White House press release, which was offered only after the Kremlin had mentioned it in their own TASS dispatch, “The Federal Security Service said Friday that seven members of a terror cell had been detained for their involvement in the plot, and that "a significant amount of explosives," weapons and "extremist literature" were confiscated.

          TASS also reported that when caught, the perpetrators even obliged by confessing to the whole terrorist scheme on camera. It was almost as if it was STAGED!!!

For the fifth time this year, this information was released by the RUSSIANS…not by the White House. Not until the Kremlin made the phone call known did our own president acknowledge he had been colluding with…I mean, in contact with, Putin. So we’re just now finding out OUR intelligence agency is working with the RUSSIAN intelligence agency and American citizens have deliberately been kept in the dark. Yet both governments now want to openly brag about it, so it’s not like they’re trying to keep it a secret so they can thwart future terrorist attacks. Why is Trump telegraphing this information? He said so many times on the campaign trail that he wasn’t going to let our enemies know what the U.S. is doing. (What he seems to mean is he doesn’t want U.S. citizens to know what he’s doing.) As if it has always been done this way, Trump is pointing out how our intelligence service is helping the Russians.

This then begs the question of why didn’t our CIA do the same for the Pakistanis who supposedly are our allies when a terrorist bomber struck at a Christian church in Quetta last Sunday killing 9 people? Why didn’t our intelligence services provide any help to Nigeria in recent weeks when Boko Haram killed hundreds of people in separate attacks across that country since mid-November? Closer to home, why didn’t that vaunted intelligence stop Akayed Ullah the New York City subway bomber on December 12th? On top of all that, as recently as last month, Trump said he didn’t trust our intelligence agencies, and less than a year ago he was comparing them to the Nazis. Why was their untrustworthy intelligence good enough now to pass on to the Russians?

Does anyone believe this nonsense? What evidence do we have that the CIA provided the information? There is nothing to show it sent anything or contacted the FSB at all. Neither Trump nor Putin has provided proof of cooperation between the two agencies. We just have to take their word for it. But things that are asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Putin called to thank Trump for the CIA tip, after Thursday's call congratulating him on how strong our economy is. Why would the Russians congratulate the U.S. on a booming economy? How does that help Russia?

          This is just the latest pack of lies from two world-class liars. It was invented (by Putin or Trump, or both) to gloss over something entirely different. Both leaders agreed that this serves as an example of the positive things that can occur when the two countries work together. Here’s the bizarre part…you notice that “when the two countries work together,” the Trump administration never works with Brazil, Thailand, Iran, Denmark, China, Sri Lanka, or any other country in that manner. It is always…ALWAYS…the Russians - and only the Russians. Why?

          Do you believe Trump when he says there’s no collusion?

Something Caught in your Throat? Trump's Recent Weird Speech

On December 6^th 2017, Trump gave a speech about moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in Israel. If you were watching you most likely heard something odd in the last minute where he slurred through much of the remainder of that speech. It sounded as if, if he had dentures, they had come loose and were bumping around in his mouth, or that his tongue wouldn’t cooperate. The next day, in response, the White House announced that Trump would have a physical “early next year.”

Spoiler Alert: That physical exam will be a smoke screen. It will be to cover up what has happened. The people protecting Trump are not going to allow anyone to know what he really suffered or what is actually going on. Any results that are eventually made public will be false.

It could simply be that Trump is finally choking on his own bullshit.

He has been unfit for office since before the election that was flipped to him by the Russians, but this escalates the danger to our nation by having a man mentally unfit for office compounded by being physically unfit for office.

Trump’s physician, Dr. Harold Bornstein, or as he is referred to by late-night comedians “Dr. Feelgood”, may have contrived with Trump to cover up serious health concerns when he admitted last year that he wrote the letter declaring Trump would be the “healthiest president in history” in just five minutes while a limo sent by the candidate waited outside his Manhattan office. That four paragraph letter is the only medical information that’s been released about and by Trump and it really says nothing at all. It is composed of assertions and grandiose expressions about how astonishingly healthy Trump is but it is nothing close to a medical record. Intriguingly, Bornstein may have been giving us an oblique warning when he later said “the Oval Office has been occupied by presidents with dementia or tumors or even men who were "paranoid" or "psychotic." Was he acknowledging something that implicated Trump’s deteriorating health?

Bornstein’s letter was a bungled attempt to make Trump appear to be Superman but Trump’s diet alone speaks volumes about how he takes care of himself. He frequently eats sodium-heavy, high-fat-content, high-cholesterol-laden, low nutrition fast food like McDonald’s hamburgers, fries, and filet-o-fish sandwiches, KFC’s heavily-breaded chicken pieces, cheese and pepperoni pizzas and large chocolate milkshakes for lunch and sometimes even dinner. When he eats steaks they are so well-done they are almost charred – hidden under a thick layer of ketchup, occasionally accompanied by mashed potatoes smothered in gravy or a salad swimming in Roquefort dressing. When everyone else is served one scoop of ice cream at the White House, Trump has demanded and gets two scoops, plus large pieces of chocolate cake whenever he wants. He rarely eats vegetables and throughout the day he snacks on Vienna Fingers, potato chips, Oreos, and slurps down numerous cans of Diet Coke. He doesn’t exercise, and, as anyone who follows his Twitter account can verify, he gets very little sleep.

He maintains that his golf game is his exercise, and he does play A LOT of golf…more than PGA pros play. But he rides in a golf cart everywhere on the course, even right across the greens. He walks only from the cart to the ball and back. Picture after candid picture of him golfing shows a large belly and an expansive waistline. (Only William Howard Taft was a more...rotund...president.) No one knows for certain how overweight he is because he won’t release his medical records. Nutritionists, dieticians, and doctors who have studied the pictures say he is at least 50 lbs overweight. They have no ax to grind. They are simply making an observation about that person’s body mass in the photographs. Trump does not take his health seriously. So something like a stroke is almost expected given Trump’s callous regard for nutrition and an aversion to physical activity.

Notice that it takes two hands to get the small bottle up to his mouth

The White House issued an explanation for Trump’s slurred speech - and the made-up story was further advanced by their consummate liar, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders - that Trump was just having a problem with a dry throat. So why would Trump need a medical exam? My grandfather suffered a stroke when he was in his 70s and Trump’s speech pattern is exactly what my grandfather’s speech sounded like after his stroke. Grandfather also had dentures but he never sounded like that from loose dentures. From the beginning, Grandfather’s stroke noticeably affected his speech and it only got worse until he died. If Trump actually had a dry throat, why didn’t he just take a swig of water as he has done previously (even though he made fun of Marco Rubio for doing the exact same thing on camera?)

Suffering a stroke is nothing to be ashamed of, but since Trump has been lying to us about showing us his tax returns before election day, about how he now doubts that it’s his voice on the Access Hollywood tape (even though there were nine people on the bus with him at the time who all attest that yes that is Trump), and because he has lied over and over about how he has had nothing to do with Russia, even though he signed a letter of intent in October 2015 to build a Trump Tower in Moscow WHILE HE WAS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT, there is no reason to believe the White House’s excuse (probably dictated by Trump) that he just had a dry throat.

Trump is either finally starting to choke on his own lies or most likely suffered a mild stroke and has demanded everyone around him lie or keep quiet about it.

I hope his cabinet is brushing up on the 25^th Amendment.

"If we use big words like 'responding to Presidential disabilities' he won't know what we're talking about."

THE POOR, FORGOTTEN RICH WILL FINALLY GET SOME TAX RELIEF

I will go on the record right now to state that I am rich. No, I am not anywhere near being in the 1%. My wealth did not come from an accumulation of money and property. My wife and I live very comfortably but there is not a chance we'd be confused with any of the small number of Americans who have financial assets in excess of seven figures.

I am rich beyond the dreams of avarice because I have three of the best children in the world; all college educated, all successful in their careers, all still wanting, and looking forward to, spending time with my wife and me at any time. I have three wonderful, well-adjusted, very intelligent grandchildren. All three grandkids go wild with happiness when my wife and I visit their homes, or when they come to see us. I am their gymnasium. They love when my wife reads and sings to them - and they love everything that comes out of her kitchen. They make the two of us feel richer than Bill Gates and Warren Buffett combined. Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway), I have a wonderful wife who I have been married to for 38 ½ years. I live in a modern, desirable southeastern US city with nice weather, close to the ocean. I recently retired from a highly successful career in broadcasting. I am an award-winning author and perform with a local band. So I am quite content.

          But I have never pursued money. I saw my father engage in that as I was growing up, but for all his pursuit, he never seemed to be happy about it. He was grouchy, distant, self-centered, devious…but never happy. Money accumulation only gave him a dour look as he sought a way to get more.

          I took a cue from that and decided whatever he did I wasn’t going to do…so I never chased the almighty dollar. I have had a successful career and by any measure I have done well, contributed to my savings account along the way, lived frugally, and invested in my wife’s and my retirement. But I did not try to rake in as much cash as I possibly could. I was far more interested in spending time with my family, watching the kids grow, teaching them, being with them, being the best father and husband that I could. I turned down dozens of lucrative opportunities to make substantial additions to our bank account…because of how I saw my father’s accumulations did nothing for his well-being, but generally it was because what those opportunities required of me…far too many nights, weekends, even months away from my family. My family was, is, and always will be, tremendously more important than money. But I apparently got it all wrong.

          The GOP is going to punish me for NOT pursuing the almighty dollar to make myself a millionaire - by making sure my taxes will go up while providing an enormous wealth redistribution to the very well-off, uber-wealthy, and filthy rich. People making over a million dollars a year will get a massive tax cut from the Republican tax plan by taking that money away from people like me to give to someone who’s net worth is ten to a hundred times what mine is.

The poor will just waste that money, anyway.

          

              Why do I deserve to have my taxes raised and my financial wealth diminished? Because, as Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa explained in a November 29^th interview with NPR’s Robert Siegel, part of the reason for repealing, say, the estate tax is “I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”

So my tax burden will have to go up substantially because I'm not throwing my money at the stock market, plus, to make up the difference from the government's loss of Estate Tax revenue. I am not deserving of a huge tax cut because Grassley has imagined I spent most of my "pennies" on a house, college funds for my kids, day-to-day living expenses, utility bills and the like...which Grassley equates with booze, women and going to the movies. As my wife, children and friends will all attest, I rarely drink any alcohol, the only women I’ve spent money on the past 40 years are my wife and daughter, and when we go to the movies, we almost always go to the dollar theater, if we don’t just wait for the edited version to air for free on TV. So I don’t know where Grassley got his information. He is implying I’d be a millionaire now and could look forward to getting some of that GOP wealth transfer from poor and middle-class people to fatten my own bank account if I had just pursued a hell of a lot more money the past 50 years.

              

          Put simply, the GOP tax plan has been written to favor asset-based incomes, passive business investments and inherited wealth (like Trump’s, so Trump is lying when he says this tax plan is going to hurt him), and it penalizes those foolish enough to actually work for a paycheck. Hey, if your income is obtained from your stock portfolio or you were born into a rich family, you’re going to love this plan. Otherwise, tough sh*t.

Grassley let the cat out of the bag in that same interview. Siegel asked him “…you agree that before you begin to do that [paying down the $20 Trillion National Debt], this bill would increase deficits and the debt by at least $1.5 trillion...unless you really do take away middle-income tax cuts, $2 trillion, right? Are those numbers about right?” Grassley’s response? “Yeah, if you look at it on paper the way the Congressional Budget Office does, that is right.”

He went on to claim that since Trump SAYS the economy is going gangbusters and IF we can boost our economic growth, up from 2 to around 3%, then the $1.5 trillion additional debt will be made up. 

Not one economist thinks that is realistic. They say that is something Grassley "made up."

         Except for a few years doing factory work and then teaching for a short duration, Grassley has spent his career in Congress where he voted in favor of almost every pay raise Senators and Representatives could give themselves, helped to run up the National Debt (while blaming it exclusively on the Democrats), gave the military Carte Blanche for whatever it wanted, and fleeced American taxpayers. He is fleecing us again…only bigger, badder and bolder than ever before. But by the time the worst of the wealth transfer…uh, I mean the fair and equitable tax policy...is implemented, Chuck Grassley will be well into his own retirement. So he won’t need to make any pretense that those “tax cuts” in the GOP bill were aimed at the middle class.

               Grassley claims the massive tax cuts (like eliminating the Estate Tax which only affects .2% [that's point two percent] of Americans) is really just a question of “basic fairness.” Yes, but fairness to whom? It damn sure isn't fair to people like me who are not millionaires.

Afghan Hero - Lt. Sayed Basam Pacha

This is what a hero looks like.

Afghanistan’s image has suffered considerably over the years, but especially since the Soviet Union invaded in 1979 and then when the U.S. followed suit in 2001. Since the Soviet occupation, news reports have consistently pictured a country in chaos, where life was cheap and religious extremism made it barely inhabitable. But it still produces heroes.

The latest is police Lieutenant Sayed Basam Pacha. And he will be sorely missed, not just by his family, but by the entire nation of Afghanistan. On Thursday, November 16^th Lieutenant Sayed Pacha along with the 2^nd Company of Police District 4, the unit he commanded, was guarding the security gate to the hotel in the Khairkhana area of Kabul where regional and national dignitaries were meeting. A man walked up wearing a heavy coat and Pacha apparently suspected he was a suicide bomber. When the Lieutenant called on him to stop, the man began running and without hesitation, Pacha took several quick steps, threw his arms around the man in a bear hug…and was killed along with his 7 police companions and 6 nearby civilians when the man detonated the suicide vest under his coat. 18 others were wounded.

No one will ever know what Pacha’s last thoughts were, but he knew his duty was to protect and serve. He did this without flinching in the face of certain death. The powerful blast destroyed nearby vehicles and blew out windows in buildings hundreds of yards away. But by all accounts, the death toll would have been much higher without Pacha’s body blunting the effect of the bomb blast.

Pacha’s father, Police Commander Gen. Sayed Nizam Agha, when reached by phone said: “My son sacrificed himself to save other people.” He wept as he recounted his son’s story. “He had two bachelor degrees, one in political science and another one at the police academy,” the father proudly said. “He studied five years in Turkey. He came back from Turkey a year and a half ago. He was 25 years old and was single.”

The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack but they did not count on the bravery and devotion to duty of Lt. Sayed that blunted what would have been a much more devasting blast with numerous additional victims. 

        There will never be enough men and women in this world like Lieutenant Sayed Basam Pacha. His bravery and valor are in too short supply. He is a true hero and should be honored and remembered down through the halls of time. Afghanistan is fortunate to have called him a son.