Remember the Intrepid

US Navy Ships Named USS Somers

2018-09-12T14:50:00.001-07:00

US Navy Ships named USS SOMERS after Richard Somers

As one of the first midshipmen in the US Navy, serving under Commodore John Barry aboard the frigate USS United States, and dying in one of the most daring raids against the Barbary Pirates in Tripoli, Richard Somers has had six U.S. warships named after him, each with its own history.

1- Schooner USS Somers (1812)

A schooner similar to the first USS Somers that saw action against the British during the War of 1812

The first USS Somers was a schooner that fought on Lake Erie and Huron during the War of 1812, and harassed the English ships until it was captured by the British in 1814.

There is not much information available about this first USS Somers, but I will try to make up for that as soon as I can. Somers’ family built Schooners at Mays Landing, and one of the last things he did before leaving for Tripoli was to launch a schooner – the Gourd Blossom.

Small and swift, the schooner was the perfect ship to fight the Barbary Pirates on their own seas – as Lt. Sterrett displayed when his schooner the Enterprise, soundly defeated the pirate ship Tripoli, and Stephen Decatur’s schooner that captured the pirate ship that became a prize and rechristened USS Intrepid. Richard Somers sailed the schooner Nautilus to join the fleet.

US Navy Ships named after Sterret, Decatur, Nautilus, Intrepid and Somers have distinguished themselves over the years since then.

Many of the young officers who served during the Barbary Wars were ships’ Captains by the War of 1812. Some of them chipped in and paid for the construction of the Elaborate Italian Marble Tripoli Monument that includes the names of the Navy officers who were killed during the Barbary Wars, including that of Richard Somers. That monument, originally stationed on the Capitol grounds, was damaged when the British captured Washington during the War of 1812, and was later moved to the Navy Academy at Annapolis. Some of those veterans of the Barbary Wars distinguished themselves in the War of 1812, especially in action on the Great Lakes, including Captain Lawrence, of Burlington, New Jersey, whose battle cry “Don’t give up the ship!” is still recalled by school teachers today.

2 – Brig USS Somers. The second USS Somers (1842) was a brig that entered service during President John Tyler’s administration. It is most famous for being the only US Navy ship to experience a mutiny.

Length: 100′ - Construction started: April 16, 1842- Launched: May 12, 1842

The U.S.S. Somers (brig) was an experimental school ship for naval apprentices. It sailed from New York on September 13, 1842 with Alexander Slidell Mackenzie in command. The vessel’s course took it first to the west coast of Africa and from there to the West Indies before returning to New York. On November 26, while near St. Thomas, Lieutenant Guert Gansevoort reported to Mackenzie that he had learned of a plot to murder the officers and most of the crew and turn the Somers into a pirate ship. According to Gansevoort’s information, Acting Midshipman Philip Spencer, the son of the Secretary of War, was the ringleader of the conspiracy. After a brief drum, and based on dubious evidence, Mackenzie hanged Spencer, Boatswain’s Mate Samuel Cromwell, and Seaman Elijah Small at the main yardarms on the recommendation of the officers of the Somers who had determined that the three men were guilty of mutiny.

The vessel returned to New York on December 14 and two weeks later the Navy convened a court of inquiry. On January 19, 1843, the court adjourned, exonerating Mackenzie, but Secretary of War John C. Spencer wanted the commander tried in civil court. Instead, Secretary of the Navy Abel P. Upshur prepared charges and specifications against Mackenzie for a court martial. The proceedings began on February 1 and ended on April 1, and Mackenzie was acquitted. At the time, the verdict was controversial, and to this day there is debate over whether the commander acted properly or was guilty of murder.

The incident led directly to the abandoning the practice of training midshipmen at sea and the establishment of the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, where the Tripoli Monument, with Somers’ name engraved, is now located.

A Currier and Ives engraving of this USS Somers, with the sailors hanging from the yardarm.

Somers was in the Gulf of Mexico off Vera Cruz at the opening of the Mexican-American War in the spring of 1846; and, except for runs to Pensacola, Florida, for logistics, remained in that area on blockade duty until the winter. On the evening of 26 November, the brig, commanded by Lt. Raphael Semmes (later the celebrated commanding officer of the Confederate commerce raider CSS Alabama), was blockading Vera Cruz when Mexican schooner Criolla slipped into that port. Somers launched a boat party which boarded and captured the schooner. However, a calm wind prevented the Americans from getting their prize out to sea so they set fire to the vessel and returned through gunfire from the shore to Somers, bringing back seven prisoners. Unfortunately, Criolla proved to be a US spy ship operating for Commodore David Conner.

On 8 December 1846, while chasing a blockade runner off Vera Cruz, Somers capsized and foundered in a sudden squall. Thirty-six of her 80 crew were lost. Eight survivors were rescued by HMS Endymion. Eight more swam to shore and were taken prisoner. English and French vessels rescued the other survivors. On 3 March 1847, Congress authorized gold and silver medals to the officers and men of French, British, and Spanish ships-of-war who aided in the rescue.

Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick – whose first cousin, Lt. Guert Gansevoort, was an officer aboard the brig at the time of the Somers Affair – may have been influenced by the notorious events involving the Somers mutineers. Melville may have used elements of the story in his novella Billy Budd.

The incident is detailed in the novel Voyage to the First of December by Henry Carlisle, written from the viewpoint of the naval surgeon on duty (from his old journals).

The story of the Somers Affair and the subsequent trial is dramatized in the penultimate episode of the sixth season of the television series JAG. The presentation takes place as a dream by Lt. Col. Sarah MacKenzie, while she prepares to give a lecture at the United States Naval Academy, which came into existence as a result of the Somers Affair. The regular cast portrayed the people involved. Trevor Goddard played the role of Mackenzie, and Catherine Bell (in a play on the identical surname of her usual role in JAG) played Mrs. Mackenzie.

In 1986, an expedition led by George Belcher, an art dealer and explorer from San Francisco, California, discovered the wreck, and in 1987 archaeologists James Delgado and Mitchell Marken confirmed the identification of the wreck. In 1990, Delgado, along with Pilar Luna Erreguerena, co-directed a joint Mexican-US expedition, which involved archaeologists and divers from the US National Park Service, the Armada de Mexico, and the Institute Nacional de Antropología e Historia. The project determined that unknown people had looted the wreck sometime after the 1987 expedition. The wreck remains as a site protected by legislation.

The most notable legacy of the Somers Affair is the US Naval Academy which was founded as a direct result of the affair. Appalled that a midshipman would consider mutiny, senior Naval officials ordered the creation of the academy so that midshipmen could receive a formal and supervised education in Naval seamanship and related matters.

USS SOMERS Torpedo Boat 22/TB-22 / Coastal Torpedo Boat #9 - 1897 - 1920

The third USS Somers (Torpedo Boat No. 22/TB-22/Coast Torpedo Boat No. 9), a steel torpedo boat built as a private speculation by Friedrich Schichau, Elbing, Germany, was launched in 1897 as yard No. 450; purchased for the United States Navy on 25 March 1898; commissioned on 28 March 1898, Lieutenant John J. Knapp in command; and named Somers the next day.

Purchased through Schichau's London representative as the U.S. prepared for a possible war against Spain, Somers sailed for England on 30 March, manned by a German contract crew. On 5 April, she arrived at Weymouth, whence she was to be escorted across the Atlantic by the gunboat Topeka. However, the British crew contracted for the voyage thought Somers was unsafe and refused to take her out to sea. A second attempt to sail also failed, and the torpedo boat was ordered laid up at Falmouth until the conclusion of the Spanish–American War.

Somers arrived at New York, on board SS Manhattan, on 2 May 1899 and remained at the New York Navy Yard until 8 October 1900, when she got underway for League Island, Pa. Subsequently decommissioned there, she was reassigned to the Reserve Torpedo Flotilla at the Norfolk Navy Yard, where she was based from 1901-1909. On 26 June 1909, she was loaned to the Maryland Naval Militia and made periodic training cruises from Baltimore until returned to the Navy in 1914.

Scheduled for transfer to the Illinois Naval Militia, Somers was recommissioned on 17 August 1914 for the passage to Cairo, Ill, where she was decommissioned and transferred to the state of Illinois on 13 October. Later renamed and redesignated Coast Torpedo Boat No. 9 to allow the name Somers to be given to destroyer number 301, she served as a training ship until returned to Navy custody after the end of World War I. She was commissioned for the passage back to the east coast and returned to Philadelphia where she was decommissioned on 22 March 1919. Her name was struck from the Naval Vessel Register on 7 October 1919, and her hulk was sold for scrapping on 19 July 1920 to the U.S. Rail and Salvage Company, Newburgh, N.Y.

1920 – 1930 – USS Somers DD-301

The fourth USS Somers (DD-301) was laid down at Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation and Union Iron Works in San Francisco on July 4, 1918 and launched on 28 December 1918, during World War I. A Clemson-Class destroyer, H. G. Gearing, Jr., in command, it was engaged in peacetime operations with the Pacific Fleet from 1920 until she was scrapped under the London Naval Treaty in 1930. She was the fourth ship of the United States Navy named for Richard Somers.

The Somers remained in the north for summer exercises with the Battle Fleet and, on 25 July and 26 July, carried staff officers of President Warren G. Harding from Seattle, Washington to Vancouver, British Columbia, during the president's Alaskan trip. Harding died, apparently of food poison, aboard a train while returning from Alaska.

On 27 August, she departed Puget Sound with her squadron for San Francisco and San Diego; but in a fog on 8 September, mistakes in navigation caused Somers and eight other ships of the squadron to run aground at Point Honda, in what is known as the Honda Point Disaster. Somers escaped disaster by conducting an emergency turn and, although she grazed a rock, suffered only moderate damage to her bow.

When the fog lifted the next morning, Somers discovered ships that ran aground on an offshore rock. Together with a passing fishing vessel, Bueno Amor de Roma, the destroyer rescued survivors.

On 10 April 1930, Somers was decommissioned and struck from the Navy list on 18 November 1930, scrapped at Mare Island in 1930 and 1931, and her materials were sold on 19 March 1931.

1937 – 1945 – USS Somers DD-381 – the lead ship of the Somers-class destroyer

The fifth USS Somers (DD-381) was a destroyer commissioned in the United States Navy from 1937 to 1945.

She was the lead ship of the Somers-class of destroyers, named for Richard Somers.

Built by the Federal Shipbuilding and Dry-dock Company in Keamy, N.J., it was laid down on June 27, 1935 and launched on March 13, 1937, co-sponsored by Miss Marine and Miss Suzanne Somers. With CDR James E. Maher in command, the Somers transported a consignment of gold from the Bank of England to New York. On 6 November 1941, she and the cruiser USS Omaha captured the German freighter Odenwald which was carrying 3800 tons of scarce rubber while disguised as the American merchantman Willmoto. A legal case was started claiming that the crews of the two American ships had salvage rights because the Odenwald crew's attempt to scuttle the ship was the equivalent of abandoning her.

The court case, settled in 1947 ruled the members of the boarding party and the prize crew was entitled to $3,000 apiece while all the other crewmen in Omaha and Somers were entitled to two months’ pay and allowances. This was the last prize money awarded by the US Navy.

During World War II, this The Somers was active in the South Atlantic, the North Atlantic, and the Mediterranean Theater of Operations.

In November 1942 Somers, with USS Milwaukee (CL-5) and USS Cincinnati (CL-6), intercepted another German blockade runner, the Anneliese Essbergr, near Brazil.

In January 1943 Somers and USS Memphis (CL-13) moved to Bathurst, Gambia in West Africa to support the Casablanca Conference between President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and the Free French.

At the end of the month Somers relocated to Dakar, Senegal and assisted in escorting the Free French warships Richelieuvand Montcalm to the United States. By March Somers was based in Trinidad on patrols to Brazil as before. On New Years Day 1944 Somers intercepted the German blockade runner Westerland, which scuttled itself. In May Somers escorted a convoy to England as part of the buildup for the Normandy invasion.

Somers next participated in the invasion of Normandy as a convoy escort. Then in August, she participated in the Southern France invasion, providing naval gunfire support as well as serving in the anti-submarine screen. On 15 August 1944, four hours before H-Hour, D-Day, along the French Riviera, Somers encountered and sank the German corvette UJ6081 and the sloop SG21 at the Battle of Port Cross.

Following this action, she moved inshore to give gunfire support to the invasion. For two days she bombarded enemy strong points off the coast near Toulon with 5 inch (127 mm) shells and then exchanged fire with enemy shore batteries east of Marseilles. Somers sustained some damage during this action.

For the next month, the destroyer operated in the Mediterranean Sea, visiting ports on the southern coast of France, Ajaccio, Corsica, and Oran, Algeria. She steamed out of Oran on 28 September and arrived in New York on 8 October. Somers was overhauled at the Brooklyn Navy Yard until 8 November, and then moved to Casco Bay, Maine, for training. On 23 November, she joined the screen of a Britain bound convoy for the first of four transatlantic voyages which closed Somers' combat service. She returned to the United States on 12 May 1945 at the end of her last voyage to the United Kingdom. For the remainder of the war, Somers operated along the eastern seaboard and, in July, made one summer cruise to the Caribbean to train midshipmen.

On 4 August 1945, she put into Charleston, South Carolina, for overhaul and remained until 11 September. Instead of returning to active duty, Somers reported to the Commandant, 6th Naval District, for decommissioning and disposal. She decommissioned at Charleston on 28 October 1945 and was retained there until removed by her purchaser, Boston Metals of Baltimore, Md., on 16 May 1947. Somers was struck from the Navy list on 28 January 1947.

Somers earned two battle stars during World War II. "The Last "Prize" Awards in the U.S. Navy?" (#205, 20 July 2008). Oldenwald was taken to Puerto Rico. An admiralty court ruled that since the ship was illegally claiming American registration, there were sufficient grounds for confiscation. At that point, some sea lawyers got into the act. Observing that the attempt to scuttle the ship was the equivalent of abandoning her, they claimed that the crews of the two American ships had salvage rights, to the tune of $3 million. This led to a protracted court case, which was not settled until 1947. At that time it was ruled that the members of the boarding party and the prize crew were entitled to $3,000 apiece, the equivalent today of over $25,000 according to the Consumer Price Index, but easily nearly twice that on the basis of the prevailing minimum wage, while all the other crewmen in Omaha and Somers were entitled to two months’ pay and allowances at their then current rate.

1959 – 1966 – USS Somers DD-947 – the fifth ship named after Richard Somers, a Forest Sherman-class destroyer.

The sixth USS Somers (DDG-34, ex-DD-947) was a Forrest Sherman-class destroyer. Her keel was laid down at the Bath Iron Works on 4 March 1958; she was launched on 30 May, and commissioned on 3 April 1959.

The sixth Somers was laid down on 4 March 1957 by the Bath Iron Works Corp., at Bath, Maine; launched on 30 May 1958; sponsored by Mrs. Charles E. Wilson; and commissioned on 3 April 1959, Comdr. Edward J. Cummings, Jr., in command.

On 1 June 1959, the destroyer sailed from Boston, Mass., to Newport, R.I., before departing the United States five days later for her maiden voyage which took her - via Argentina, Newfoundland - to the ports of northern Europe. On her itinerary were Copenhagen, Denmark; Stockholm, Sweden; Portsmouth, England; and Kiel, Germany, where she represented the Navy during the "Kiel Week" festivities. Somers took leave of Europe at Portsmouth, England, and-after stopping briefly at Bermuda and training for five days out of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba-transited the Panama Canal on 19 July. She arrived at her home port, San Diego, Calif., on 27 July and conducted shakedown training along the California coast for the next six weeks. She underwent final acceptance trials on 17 September; then, completed just over a month of overhaul from 1 October until 8 November.

Over the next six and one-half years, Somers alternated between operations out of San Diego and deployments to the 7th Fleet in the Far East. In all, she deployed to the western Pacific four times during this period, remaining on the west coast in 1962 and 1964.

Her first three tours in the Far East were relatively uneventful, peacetime assignments, consisting of 7th Fleet operations and exercises with units of the navies of the SEATO allies of the United States. During her second and third deployments, in 1961 and 1963, Somers steamed to Australia to participate in the celebrations commemorating 19th and 21st anniversaries of the Battle of the Coral Sea. During her fourth tour of duty with the 7th Fleet, the destroyer saw her first wartime operations as American involvement in the Vietnam War escalated. She plied the waters of the Tonkin Gulf, plane guarding for USS Coral Sea, USS Hancock, and USS Ranger as their aircraft pounded enemy supply lines in North Vietnam.

On 30 July 1965, Somers got underway from Yokosuka, Japan, to return to the United States. She arrived in San Diego on 12 August and, after a month of leave and upkeep; she resumed normal operations along the west coast. She continued to be so engaged until 11 April 1966 when she entered San Francisco Naval Shipyard to begin conversion to a guided missile destroyer. On that day, she was decommissioned at Hunters Point.

From then until February 1968, Somers was in the shipyard having 90% of her superstructure replaced, installing the AN/SPS-48A 3D air search radar, receiving the Tartar surface-to-air missile system and the ASROC antisubmarine rocket system. In addition, her engineering equipment was completely overhauled, and she received a lot of additional electronic gear. On 10 February 1968, Somers was recommissioned at Hunters Point as the Navy's newest guided-missile destroyer, DDG-34.

DDG-34 1968-1982

The sixth USS Somers also became the seventh such ship after she was converted into a guided missile destroyer.

Her conversion was completed on 16 May 1968, and she departed Hunters Point the next day for her new home port, Long Beach, Calif. For the rest of 1968 and most of 1969, the guided-missile destroyer ranged the west coast from Mexico to the state of Washington, conducting trials and exercises.

On 18 November 1969, she got underway to deploy again to the western Pacific. She stopped over in Hawaii from 24 to 28 November and loaded ammunition at the Oahu Naval Ammunition Depot. Continuing westward, she paused at Midway on 1 December to refuel and at Guam on the 8th. She made Subic Bay in the Philippines on the 11th. During this deployment, Somers returned to the Gulf of Tonkin alternately plane guarding Hancock and serving on the gun line. During late March and early April, she joined units of the Australian and New Zealand navies in the SEATO exercise, "Sea Rover." After that, she returned to plane guard duties, this time for USS Constellation. Two days after joining the carrier, however, Somers was detached to return to Subic Bay. She arrived on 19 April and remained until the 24th, when she got underway for the United States.

Somers arrived at Long Beach on 8 May 1970. After an availability period and an extended leave and upkeep period, the guided-missile destroyer embarked 35 Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps midshipmen for five weeks training during PACMIDTRARON 70. The cruise commenced on 22 June and was concluded on 6 August at Long Beach. She resumed operations out of her homeport until 13 November when she got underway for another deployment to the western Pacific. Somers was assigned to the 7th Fleet from December 1970 until 4 May 1971. During that time, she plane guarded the carriers on six occasions, rendered naval gunfire support on three, and once stood watch on the northern search and rescue station. In between line periods, she visited Keelung, Taiwan; Hong Kong; Singapore; and Penang, Malaysia, in addition to putting in periodically at the naval station at Subic Bay.

USS Somers was in the official waters of the Republic of Vietnam from December 27, 1970 to January 9, 1971; January 23, 1971 to February 2, 1971; February 7, 1971 to March 3, 1971; March 9, 1971, to March 27, 1971; April 3, 1971 to April 11, 1971; April 25, 1971 to May 5, 1971; May 1, 1972 to may 7, 1972; May 10, 1972 to June 8, 1972; June 22, 1972 to July 1, 1972; July 4, 1972 to July 31, 1972; and from October 1, 1972 to October 13, 1972.

She cleared the Gulf of Tonkin on 4 May, headed back to the United States, and made Long Beach on the 23d. Somers resumed operations out of Long Beach until 9 July when she began a month of pre-overhaul preparations. On 9 August, the guided-missile destroyer entered Long Beach Naval Shipyard to commence regular overhaul. The overhaul lasted until 3 December and, following that, she went into a period of restricted availability which carried her through 31 December. Somers completed her restricted availability on 3 January 1972 and began trials, tests, and exercises which lasted through 31 March. After nine days of preparations, she headed west on 10 April to rejoin the 7th Fleet.

Sailing via Pearl Harbor and Guam, Somers made Subic Bay on 29 April. After a voyage to Singapore and back, she joined the carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin on 9 May. Her tour of duty in the Far East lasted until late October. She cruised with the aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin five times during this deployment, rendered naval gunfire support three times, and stood duty on the south Talos station and PIRAZ station once each. Between line periods, she normally put into Subic Bay, but managed to visit Sasebo, Japan, and Hong Kong. Somers returned to Long Beach on 9 November 1972.

Two periods of operations from her home port separated by two months of restricted availability at Long Beach took up the first nine months of 1973 for Somers. On 9 October, she got underway to deploy to the western Pacific. On 15 October 1973, SOMERS arrived at her new homeport, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, en route to her eighth Western Pacific deployment. On this deployment, she made Subic Bay on 5 November. She remained on duty with the 7th Fleet until mid-May 1974, when she reentered Pearl Harbor.

SOMERS deployed in November 1978 for her tenth Western Pacific deployment. Upon her return from deployment, she entered the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard to undergo a scheduled overhaul (ROH). SOMERS remained in the shipyard for fifty-one weeks and returned to sea on 4 August 1980.

The months following her return to sea were devoted to Engineering, Operations and Weapons System shakedown, tests and ultimate certifications which demonstrated her worthiness to return to Fleet Service.

In early 1981, SOMERS joined Battle Group Charlie and participated in READIEX 5-81 in preparation for the Battle Group s deployment. SOMERS was also a participant in the July 1981 FLEETEX 1-81, the largest U.S. Navy exercise in history.

On 3 November 1981, she deployed with Battle Group Delta headed by USS CONSTELLATION (CV-64). During her eleventh and final deployment, SOMERS operated primarily in the Indian Ocean and made port calls in Guam, the Philippines, Diego Garcia, Bunbury Australia, Maldive Islands and Singapore. After successfully participating in READIEX 2-82 in May 1982, she returned home arriving in Pearl Harbor on 16 May 1982. After returning from this deployment, she was preparing for more operations, when preparations were cut short by the notice that she was to be decommissioned. Somers was decommissioned on November 19, 1982.

During her service, USS SOMERS earned two Marjorie Sterrett Battleship awards, a meritorious Unit Commendation, three Battle Efficiency E awards and presently wears departmental excellence awards.for Supply, Gunnery, Missiles, ASW, CIC, Communications, Electronic Warfare and Damage Control.

SOMERS was relocated to the Inactive Ship Facility at Pearl Harbor until approximately 1988. From there, she was sold to the U.S. Maritime Administration. She was in use at Port Hueneme, California for many years as an experimental ship.

On 20 May 1998, Somers was towed from Port Hueneme for the last time. On 21 July 1998, two United States Air Force B-52 Stratofortresses from the 20th Bomb Squadron fired missiles at Somers – adrift in the Pacific Ocean about 30 nautical miles (34.5 miles; 56 km) northwest of Kauai. Hawaii – as part of the Rim of the Pacific 1998 exercise. Each B-52 crew launched one AGM-142 Have Nap missile, and both missiles hit Somers. On 22 July 1998, an explosive ordnance disposal team rappelled from a helicopter to Somers and sank her with explosive charges; this was shown in a video issued by the RIMPAC 98 public relations officer. Her final resting place is off the coast of Kauai, at 22°21′N 160°58′W. She rests at a depth of 2800 fathoms (16,800 feet; 5,121 meters).

The Somers was decommissioned 11 April 1966, and converted at San Francisco Naval Shipyard. On 15 March 1967 she was reclassified as a guided missile destroyer, and was re-commissioned 10 February 1968. She was decommissioned on 19 November 1982 and on 26 April 1988, she was stricken from the Naval Vessel Register. On 22 July 1998, she was sunk as target near Hawaii.

The last active USS SOMERS was decommissioned after more than 23 years of service on November 19, 1982. She was stricken from the Navy list on April 26, 1988, and on July 22, 1998, the SOMERS was finally disposed of as a target north of Kauai, HI, at: 022° 21' North, 160° 58' West.

The next USS Somers should be commissioned as soon as possible, and the members of the Association of USS Somers Crewmembers should have an important role to play in making that happen.

USS SOMERS Plaque

2018-09-06T08:48:00.001-07:00

On September 4, 2018, two hundred and fourteen years to the day Richard Somers died in the explosion of the USS Intrepid in Tripoli Harbor while fighting Barbary Pirates, the USS Somers Crewmembers Association dedicated a USS Somers Plaque at the US Naval Yard in Washington D.C.

Rear Admiral Frank Thorpe IV, President and Chief Executive Officer of the U.S. Navy Memorial addressed the attendees, along with Master of Ceremonies Retired Commander Mike Newell, a former Communications and Navigation Officer and later Supply Officer for the USS Somers (DDG34).

"It was an extraordinary event," said Bob Plante, administrator of the association, "certainly a time that will be remembered by all attendees."

The plaque depicts the four USS Somers of modern times that served during World War II and Vietnam - DD 301-1920-1930, DD-381 1937-1945, DD-947 1959-1966, DDG-34 1968-1982.

There were two nineteenth century sailing ships named USS Somers, and the Crewmembers Association is working hard to get the Navy to name a new ship after Richard Somers, of Somers Point, NJ, one of the first midshipmen in the US Navy. Somers never returned from Tripoli, where he perished in the explosion of the USS Intrepid in Tripoli Harbor on September 4, 1804. His remains are believed to be entombed in a crypt in Old Protestant Cemetery at Tripoli Harbor, despite repeated requests for his repatriation by the Somers family, the citizens of Somers Point, the New Jersey State Legislature, the VFW, American Legion, AM-Vets. The USS Somers Crewmembers Association have added their voice to the choir calling for the repatriation of Somers and the men of the Intrepid.

Congress had previously inserted a requirement for their repatriation in a Defense Authorization Act, but it was removed and replaced with an order for a study of the feasibility of repatriation by Senator John McCain. Ironically, the 2019 Defense Authorization Act is named in John McCain's honor and he passed away a few days before the dedication of the USS Somers Plaque.

When McCain was asked why he blocked the repatriation of Somers and the men of the Intrepid he said that he didn't know the reason, he was only following the orders of the Admirals and Generals and top brass who have opposed repatriation, for their own reasons.

It has been suggested that now that McCain is gone, the repatriation could happen, and that remains a possibility.

Navy Vets Honor USS Somers

2018-09-01T07:28:00.000-07:00

NAVY VETS HONOR USS SOMERS WITH PLAQUE AT NAVY YARD

Master Commandant Richard Somers

Two hundred and fourteen years to the day Richard Somers died in Tripoli harbor while fighting Barbary Pirates, he is remembered by U.S. Navy veterans who are dedicating a plaque to honor the ships named after him.

The USS Somers Crewmember Association was formed on April 26, 2010 when 20 former shipmates of the USS Somers (DD947) met in Oklahoma for their first formal reunion.

Now numbering over 300 on their roster from three modern era ships named after Richard Somers, one of the first midshipman of the US Navy.

There are 11 from the USS Somers (DD381) that saw action in World War II, 125 from USS Somers (DD947) and 197 from USS Somers (DG34).

At this year's annual reunion in June in New Orleans, they set a number of goals, the first being the purchase of a commerative plaque that will be dedicated at the US Navy Yard on September 4, the 214th anniversary of Somers' death in the explosion of the USS Intrepid in Tripoli harbor.

According to Bob Plante, the association's administrator, "Our second goal is to get the Secretary of the Navy to name another U.S. Naval Vessel 'Somers.'"

"We hope to be successful in having a seventh USS Somers and an active duty crew to carry on the Somers tradition of excellence."

"This can only help the continuing efforts of repatriating our namesake and the heroes of the Intrepid."

For more information contact Bob Plante somersdd947@gmail.com.

William Kelly

billkelly3@gmail.com

America's Libya and ISIS Policy

2016-07-06T15:06:00.000-07:00

America's Libya and ISIS Policy

The Tripoli and the Enterprise

By William E. Kelly, Jr.

America's Libya and ISIS policy, the subject of much confusion and debate in Washington, was set over 200 years ago when the radical Islamist and Basha of Tripoli Yusuf Karamanli was the first to declare war against the United States by chopping down the American flag pole outside the residence of the American ambassador.

Rather than pay him tribute to stop pirating American merchant ships, Americans took up the slogan "Millions for defense but not one cent for tribute," and President Madison said, "If we are to fight them now we better be prepared to fight them forever."

Using the same tactics they use today - pirating ships, enslaving women, beheading Christians infidels and imposing Shara law wherever they conquer, the Barbary pirates were the ISIS terrorists of their day.

They were the ones to pick a fight with us and we responded by sending over a fleet of warships, the schooner Enterprise the first to arrive in Mediterranean waters, under the command of Lt. Andrew Sterett.

It didn't take long for the Enterprise to encounter the latine rigged pirate ship Tripoli, a captured American merchant ship in tow, its crew having been killed and thrown overboard.

The Enterprise carried the baton of what would become the Sixth Fleet, and had orders to intercept pirates, and that she did, with a well trained crew and tenacious skipper, the Enterprise raked the Tripoli with multiple broadsides, and the Tripoli's treacherous captain feigned surrender twice before pushing his first officer overboard. Sterett didn't take the Tripoli as a prize because Congress had yet to declare war, and left the pirates one sail to return home and tell the basha what America's policy was. The captain of the Tripoli was striped naked and placed backwards on a donkey and paraded through the streets of Tripoli.

The Enterprise was then transferred to Lt. Stephen Decatur, who captured the pirate ship Moscato, renamed the USS Intrepid, and used in daring raids against the pirates.

On the downside, the frigate USS Philadelphia ran aground chasing a pirate ship outside the Tripoli harbor, its guns facing into the sand and sky, so it's captain William Bainbridge surrendered without a fight, its 300 officers and men held for ransom.

Renaming the Philadelphia "Gift of Allah," the basha offered to free any of the American sailors who would convert to Islam, take muslim wives and teach them how to sail the square rigged frigat, and five of them did.

Decatur then used the Intrepid to sink the Philadelphia and Richard Somers died in the explosion of the Intrepid in Tripoli harbor, both early special ops missions that would today be undertaken by Navy Seals.

Shortly thereafter Sgt. Presley O'Bannon and eight US Marines lead an army of Arabs and Greek Christians across the desert to attack and take the coastal city of Derna, the first time the stars and stripes would fly above a captured foreign city. But before they could march on Tripoli, the basha sued for peace.

The Libyan city of Derna is now a hotbed of radical extremists and was the first Libyan city to fall to ISIS and have Islamist Shara law installed, enslaving women and beheading infidels.

The aircraft carriers Intrepid and Enterprise were named after the original ships, and Sterrett, Decatur, Somers and Bainbridge have all had ships named after them.

It was from the fantail of the USS Bainbridge that three US Navy SEALs simultaneously shot and killed three north African pirates who were holding the captain of an American ship hostage, continuing American policy in the finest traditions of Sterett, Decatur and Somers.

The first cruse missile fired by American forces during the NATO intervention in the Libyan revolution against Gadafi was fired from the USS Steritt.

American ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, before he was killed by radical Islamists, saw his entrance into Libya aboard a cargo supply ship as a continuation of the Barbary Wars of 200 years ago.

More recently an American navy vessel broke down in Islamic Iranian waters and was captured, its ill-trained crew humiliated.

Will American policy towards Islamic extremists in Libya and elsewhere be one of broken down, untrained surrender and humiliation or will it be a continuation of the spirit and determination of Sterett, Decatur and Somers?

And the first continuation of this policy should be to bring home Richard Somers and the men of the Intrepid from Tripoli, where today they are surrounded by the same radical Islamists who they died fighting and would desecrate their Graves and remains if they only knew they were there for the taking. On the Shores of Tripoli.

The Intrepid Story from an Arab Perspective

2016-03-23T15:51:00.001-07:00

- This is an English Translation of the Arabic text of the Libyan book “Secrets of Old Protestant Cemetery” – marked as the grave site of men from the USS Intrepid, that exploded in Tripoli Harbor in September 1804. Many thanks to Asmae, a Moroccan widow of an American serviceman, who is enamored with the story and thinks it should be made into a movie.

Editors Note: this is a work in progress and subject to corrections and revisions. - BK

BEGIN TRANSLATION:: Secrets of Old Protestant Cemetery - Tripoli

A lot of sources speak about the political crisis between the United States and Tripoli leaders since the diplomatic relations between them has ceased on 05/14/1801, on the era of Yousef, the fifth president of Karmadian dynasty in Libya and the third president of United States Thomas Jefferson.

One of these crises seasons was on 10/31/1803 when the Libyan Marine surrounded the entire American Naval Unit and captured the captain of the ship, the officers, and the crew members without causing any harm to any member of the unit. That was the capture of Philadelphia, the biggest American catastrophe after Pearl Harbor of the World War Two.

On 12/23/1803 and as a massive retaliation, the American Naval succeeded to capture one of the Lybian ships, Mastico, using the Enterprise, one of the American schooners. The Mastico was under the command of captain Mustapha who was the first one that jumped on Philadelphia upon its capture by The Libyans. After captain Mustapha and his crew members were captured by the Americans, the Mastico became one of the American Naval Corp that Brigadier Edward Preble named the Intrepid.

Its name was small then but nobody would believe that Preble didn't only participate to protect the reputation of the American Navy but their entire history and honor.

However, it was no way to save Philadelphia from its capture in Tripoli. Instead the commander of the American Unit sent an order to burn the ship down when it settled down in the port of Tripoli.

The reason why the Enterprise (Sic Intreid) was chosen for this mission is because of its friendly looking design. When the Enterprise (Sic Intreid) enters the port of Tripoli at night everybody would think that it just a friendly commercial ship that was trying to lay in the port for commercial reasons.

That was on 02/16/1804 under the command of Captain Stephen Decatur. The mission was a success that only one man was lightly wounded. As a result of this victory Decatur was immediately promoted to a naval commander and he was only 25 years old. This even made Tripoli witnessing the promotion of the youngest commander in the hall American Naval Corp.

After six months and half of trying to surround the city of Tripoli didn't succeeded, Preble the captain of the American Navy Troops went for his plan to destroy the rest of the Libyan Naval ships and one or more of its ports in one strike. He decided to send a marine bomb to the port to destroy it.

The truth is that wasn't his idea, it was the idea of a man who used to live in the Red Castle in Tripoli and close to its main port. His name was Brigadier William Bainbridge. He was the prisoner of Tripoli governor. The governor kept Bainbridge in an abandoned American Embassy building that was close to the port. That's how he got his best chance to see some details that were never mentioned in the American Navy maps.

He also earned the trust of Nicolasi Nissen, the ambassador of Denmark, and he used this trust to escape a number of secret letters to the American Navy Units that surrounded the port. The letters were common and innocents letters that were written with common ink but underlined with secrets letters that were written with Lemon juice and you can only read them if you light matches underneath the paper.

One of those letters was sent to captain Preble, in person, advising the need of sending a fighter ship to the port. And the volunteer unit that would sale in the ship had to flee in small boat just before they set the explosion. The truth is Preble tried this type of strategy of strikes in the past. That was when a group of volunteers under the leadership of Stephen Decatur sneaked to the port then to Philadelphia and burned it down. As a result it been discovered that The Interbred (the ship that was used for this mission) was the perfect ship for the mission because it matches the Libyans ships and makes them believe that it was one of theirs, especially at night time.

After the burning of Philadelphia the Intrepid was used as the first American Naval hospital that is settled on the water.

After Preble’s decision, Nautilus captain of the schooner, and lieutenant colonel Richard Somers turned the Naval hospital to a floating bomb. As soon as they got their orders they started to prepare for this mission that took a few days with the help of Master Henry Wadsworth and master sergeant Joseph Israel.

They put 100 Barrels continued approximately 700 kilograms of explosives in the cabin storage. On the top of this deadly load they place 100 of 9 and13 inch guns loaded and provided with filament and are ready to work. Then they extended a tub from the front storage to the rear cabin that it also was allied with explosives that suppose to burn for 15 minutes; enough for the crew to get away from the ship.

Israel and Wadsworth picked the fastest boat in the naval unit to use it to come back after they deliver the ship of hell to its destination into the port. The crew was supposed to light the flame and start the burning from the back of the ship that would burn the gunpowder line that would connect the fire with the front compartment in 15 minutes when everybody should get away from the ship.

When Nautilus men knew that their captain was in charge of the mission they ask to accompany him but he only picked four men, Thomas Topline, James Harris, William Keith, and James Simms. In the other hand, Henry Wadsworth choose six of his men, William Harrison, Robert Clark, Hugh McCormick, Jacob Williams, Peter Penner and Isaak Downes.

End of Part I – Part II of relevant chapters currently being translated. Many thanks to Asmae for her patient diligence – BK

US Special Forces Left Behind in Tripoli

2016-01-08T14:43:00.004-08:00

US SPECIAL FORCES LEFT BEHIND IN TRIPOLI

Thirteen U.S. special forces sailors left behind in Tripoli are surrounded and threatened by radical Islamic terroritss - but the U.S. military refuses to bring them home.

The three officers and ten men of the U.S.S. Intrepid died in 1804 fighting the same radical Islamists we fight today, then known as Barbary pirates. They captured ships and held their crews for ransome, enslaved and killed Christians and imposed Sharia law where ever they laid claim to the territory, that now includes Tripoli.

One of the ideals that defines the differences between us and radical Islamists is the veneration of the dead and making monuments of the graves of our saints and heroes. That's something the radical Islamists don’t do - and don’t allow anyone else to do either. The Islamists don’t believe in honoring their dead, only Allah and his prophet Mohammid.

As U.S. Navy personnel who died on one of the first special ops missions of the U.S. military, these men should be afforded the same rights and honors as the Americans who die fighting on foreign soil today. And our clearly stated policy of leaving no one behind should be enforced across the board and not selectively to those who died most recently.

Instead of repatriating these men when they could, the military used the graves of the American heroes a means of dealing with the Gadhafi government. So the cemetery was restored and the graves and crypts refurbished. A history of the cemetery was written and the State Department requested the United Nations add the cemetery to the list of World Heritage sites ostensibly protected by the UN. But that hasn’t been the case with other World Heritage sites under control of the radical islamists, including the twin Buddas in Afghanistan, the ancient Sufi archivs in Timbukto, mosques in Iraq and Syira and other World Heritage sites that have been totally destroyed by ISIS. You can imagine what they would do to desecrate the clearly marked graves of US sailors and destroy whatever remains are entombed, as they did with the revered Sufi saints in nearby mosques.

Rather than just bring them home the DOD spent twice as much money on a study of the feasibility of repatriating them and decided it wasn’t worth it.

The DOD POW/MP office, riddled with scandal, refused to bring the remains of the men of the Intrepid home when they had the opportunity, despite the repeated requests of the families of two off the officers and the support of the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Am-Vets and the New Jersey State Legislature.

As soon as the security situation permits the remains of these men should be retrieved and returned home and reburied with full military honors in a secure place where people can visit and learn the lessons of history and take inspiration from the gallant actions of these brave men.

Now it is just a matter of who will get there first, the radical islmasits who will undoubtedly videotape their desecreation and destruction of the graves, or Americans who save Captain Somers and the remains of his brave crew?

Richard Somers Mural Fund

2015-02-25T10:37:00.001-08:00

Fundraiser for Richard Somers Mural in Somers Point

http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/communities/northfield_linwood_somers-point/fundraiser-planned-for-somers-mural/article_b9ff6948-d389-5416-9822-fefd406f9acc.html

Art of 'His' Story fundraiser

The Somers Point Arts Commission and The Somers Point Historical Society are hosting a fundraising event "The Art of "His"story," from 2 to 4 p.m.on Sunday March 8 at Sandi Pointe Coastal Bistro, 908 Shore Road.

The Art of "His"story honors the life of Master Commandant Richard Somers, USN, a native of Somers Point and one of the first naval heroes of the United States.

The event presents the plans for a public mural that will be painted on the Somers Point Library, Atlantic County Branch at the corner of Shore Road and New Jersey Avenue. The mural will overlook the Richard Somers Memorial Park and the bronze bust of Master Commandant Richard Somers.

The event will include a wine tasting presented by Passion Vines Wine and Spirit Company, a silent auction, introduce the mural artist, and unveil the design for the mural.

Tickets are $35 and are available by sending a check to Somers Point Arts Commission, Somers Point City Hall, One W. New Jersey Ave., Somers Point, NJ, 08244; mural fundraiser on the memo line. Reservations will be held at the door.

For more information call 609-653-4991 or email katharleth@hotmail.com.

Two Hundred Years Apart - Joined in Death in Tripoli

2015-02-24T07:40:00.001-08:00

Two Hundred Years Apart - Joined in Death in Tripoli -

William E. Kelly

Tripoli Harbor

Two Hundred Years Apart

Richard Somers, Henry Wadsworth and Joseph Israel are separated by two centuries from Fernando L. Ribas-Dominicci, Paul F, Lorence and David Berry, but they share a similar fate – dying on the shores of Tripoli while opposing Islamic tyranny.

They should all have their names engraved in the Tripoli Monument at Annapolis, they should all be eligible for the Medal of Honor and all of their remains should be recovered and buried with full military honors alongside their fellow veterans in a protected cemetery, but that won’t happen as long as the top brass in the military have their way.

Somers, Wadsworth and Israel died fighting the Basha of Tripoli Yousef Karamanli, an Islamic tyrant and pirate, but their remains were left behind in Tripoli as prescribed by law and they are not elegible for the Medal of Honor because they fought and died in a war that preceded such traditions.

Ribas and Lorance were shot down in 1980 over Libya during Operation El Dorado Canyon, air attack on Gadhafi’s home, and while Ribas’ remains were recovered, the search for the remains of Lorance continues.

Berry, a former US Marine, was killed by Islamic State suicide terrorists at the Corinthian Hotel, an attack by an affiliate of the Islamic State was said to be in retaliation for the death of Abu Anas al-Libi, who was picked up off a Libyan street by US special forces and he died while awaiting trial in New York City for the attack on a US embassy. His remains were returned to his family in Libya, just as the remains of Berry were returned to the United States.

Anas al-Libi received a hero’s welcome in Libya, similar to that of the convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbasset al-Megrahi when he was freed from a Scottish prison.

Abdelbasset al-Magrahi with Saif Gadhafi at the former Wheelus Air Force Base, Tripoli

Berry’s body was returned home to his family and he was buried with full military honors in a ceremony similar to the one Chris Kyle received and as portrayed in the film American Sniper.

The remains of another young Navy officer from Philadelphia James Caldwell were never recovered and were last seen being mauled by dogs on the Tripoli beach, while the remains of Somers, Wadsworth, Israel and ten men of the USS Intrepid were recovered and buried on the high ground near the old castle fort by prisoners from the captured frigate USS Philadelphia.

And there they remain. Over time other Christians who had the misfortune to die in the predominately Muslim city and society, were buried alongside them and in 1830 the British built a wall around what became known as Old Protestant’s Cemetery.

Inside the Cemetery

According to the most recent research including deep background from the Libyan’s own published history “Secrets of Old Protestant Cemetery,” the remains of the officers and all of the men are within the walls of the cemetery, some likely within the above ground crypts that have been identified and clearly labeled as those of the men of the USS Intrepid.

Secrets was researched and published at the same time as the Gadhafi government’s renovation of the cemetery and the U.S. State Department’s nomination of the cemetery to the United Nation as a World Heritage Site.

The UN however, cannot protect its World Heritage sites, as dozens of them have been damaged or completely destroyed in recent times by the same radical Islamists who ransacked Timbuktu.

The twin Buda statues that stood tall in Afghanistan for centuries were the first to fall to the Taliban, stirring outrage around the world, but failing to stop the Ben – from destroying the ancient Islamic archives at Timbuktu, where they imposed strict Islamic law for a few months, long enough to dislodge the remains of Muslim saints and holy men from their tombs, as these radical extremists believe in a strict orthodox version of Islam that doesn’t permit the veneration of the dead. And they don’t allow anyone else to venerate them either.

Turkey recently invaded Syria in order to save the remains of the grandfather of the founder of the Ottoman Empire, relics that were being guarded by soldiers besieged by Islamic State terrorists who wanted to destroy the shrine, relics and historic remains in the name of idolatry.

Soon after the Arab Spring and Libyan revolution radical extremists filmed themselves desecrating the graves of British soldiers at Tobruk, and dug up the remains of Islamic Sufi saints from their graves beneath the floors of mosques in Tripoli.

After Lorence’s and Ribas-Dominici were shot down while bombing Gadhafi’s Tripoli home in 1986, Ribas-Dominici’s remains were returned after the intercession of the Pope, but the remains of Lorence, like those of Caldwell, were never recovered.

When Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed in Benghazi with his associates, their remains were returned home and received at the airport by the Secretary of State and president.

When David Barry was killed by Islamic State suicide killers, his body was returned home, but the remains of Somers, Wadsworth, Israel and the men of the Intrepid remain left behind within the walls of the old cemetery, now besieged by radical Islamists.

As explained by Chris Dickon in his book “The Foreign Burial of American War Dead” (McFarland, 2012), the Tripoli remains have not been recovered because the law doesn’t require the government and the military to treat all veterans equally, and only requires those who died in combat abroad since World War I to be returned home - if their family requests.

President Obama recently awarded a Medal of Honor to a Civil War officer who distinguished himself in the battle at Gettysburg, but despite the efforts of Somers Point Mayor Jack Glasser and others, only those who served since the Civil War are deemed eligible for the Medal of Honor.

The military refused to repatriate the men of the Intrepid because, as their 2012 report affirms, they don’t have to.

The men who fought and died in the Barbary Wars against the same Islamic enemy deserve the respect, rights and honors received by those who are at the front lines today -

Now is the time for Congress to act on this discrepancy

Therefore Be It Resolved: Under the Powers granted to Congress – the US government and the US military shall treat all veterans with equal status and respect without regard to when they served – and give special consideration in awarding the Congressional Medal of Honor to the officers of the USS Intrepid – Lieuts, Richard Somers, Henry Wadsworth and Joseph Israel for their leadership and inspiration in the continuing war against Islamic tyranny.

The Navy Responds to Repatriation

2015-02-05T07:08:00.003-08:00

Department of Defense

Office of the Assistant Secretary

(Manpower and Reserve Affairs)

1000 Navy Pentagon

Washington DC 20350-1000

Jan 20 2015

Mr. William Kelly

20 Columbine Ave.

Browns Mills, NJ 08015

Dear Mr. Kelly,

Thank you for your recent letter to the Secretary of Defense requesting the repatriation of remains associated with the USS Intrepid from the American Cemetery in Tripoli. I am responding on behalf of the Secretary of Defense.

The position of the Department of Defense continues to be that the repatriation of remains would go against the Navy’s custom and tradition honoring the final resting place of those lost in downed ships and aircraft. Additionally, there are many scientific, historical and social realities that would make the repatriation of Intrepid remains very difficult, perhaps impossible, some of which are noted in the 2012 study you cited in your letter.

While we are unable to support the repatriation of remains in this case, we do have a vested interest in maintaining the grave site as an honorable and hallowed place. In 2010, we engaged the Libyan Minister of Antiquities and Archeology, and subsequently a project commenced to renovate and restore the grave site to its proper form. Given the current turmoil being experienced in Libya, it would not be prudent to engage on this issue at this time. However, when the situation stabilizes an assessment of the cemetery’s condition will need to occur.

I sincerely appreciate your commitment to honoring our nation’s Veterans....

Sincerely

Signed

Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy

(Military Manpower and Personnel)

Richard Somers - Key Date Illustrated Chronology

2015-01-31T16:42:00.002-08:00

Richard Somers - Key Date Chronology - Illustrated with graphics, photos and profiles

Off Tripoli Harbor

Somers Mansion - Somers Point home of John Somers - father of Capt. Somers and grandfather of Master Commandant Richard Somers, USN, who left Somers Point to fight Tripoli pirates and has yet to return

1778 September – Richard Somers born in Somers Point, NJ.

The house and tavern at Bethel and Shore Roads in Somers Point where Richard Somers was born. It still stands but was renovated into commercial offices. An historic marker marks the spot.

1778 October 15 - Battle of Chestnut Neck included Col. Richard Somers, father of Master Commandant Richard Somers.
1783 March. Algerian Barbary coast pirates seize two American merchant ships.
1784 October 11 Morocco pirate corsairs seize American brig Betsey.
1785 June Henry Wadsworth born in Falmouth, Mass., now Portland, Maine, next door neighbor to Captain Edward Preble.
1785 Feb Algerian pirates seize two U.S. vessels, demand tribute; Pres. Jefferson deploys gunboats to the Mediterranean. “Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute.”
1785 US opens diplomatic relations with Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli.
1789 April 30 George Washington sworn in as President.
1793 December 16 President Washington notifies Congress that Barbary pirates were again seizing ships, consults with John Barry and Philadelphia shipbuilder Joshua Humphreys about building a fleet of warships.
1793 15 year old Richard Somers, first mate on family schooner in West Indies, takes command upon the death of the captain and returns ship safely home.
1794 Navy Act of 1794.
1794 March 19 John Barry requests command of the proposed fleet.
1794 March 27 an act of Congress orders building six new frigates.

George Washington, John Barry and young Midshipman - possibly Richard Somers, who obtained a ring with a lock of Washington's hair.

1794 June 14 Washington orders John Barry “to form and train a class of midshipmen who would then be commissioned as Ensigns, and form the nucleus of a new American navy.” Barry commissioned first Captain, United States Navy.

Stephen Decatur, Jr. - Sunk the captured U.S.S. Philadelphia and led the Second Barbary War

1794 Richard Somers attends private Philadelphia Free Academy with schoolmates Charles Stewart, Stephen Decatur, Jr., Richard Rush, and James Caldwell.
1794 September Captain John Barry supervises the construction of USS United States.
1794 October 22 Richard Somers' father Capt. Richard Somers, Sr. dies.
1795 December 21 US treaty with Morocco, Algiers “automatically under the clause in the Navy bill,” halts work on the six frigates.
1796 Jan. Sec of War McHenry reports that all six frigates could still be completed.
1796 April Congress approves the completion of three ships at Philadelphia, Boston and Baltimore, the United States, the Constitution and the Constellation.

The construction of a frigate took years of planning, design and construction

1796 September 19 Estimate for outfitting the frigate United States with 305 officers and men, fifty-four marines, for one month $7, 285.

Ketch USS Intrepid

1796 Gheretti/Mastico, a French built Ketch launched (later to become USS Intrepid).
1797 February 3 Richard’s mother Sophia dies.
1797 February 22 Washington, on his birthday, issues Commission No. 1 in the American Navy to John Barry, backdated to 1794. .
1797 March 4 John Adams becomes president.
1797 June 7 Treaty of Tripoli Approved by Senate.
1797 June 10 Treaty of Tripoli Signed by President Adams
1797 June 17 Notice of Treaty of Tripoli published in Pennsylvania Gazette.
1797 June 23 President Adams message to Congress re: Algiers/Barbary States.
1797 July 10 the USS United States is launched, John Barry Captain.
1797 350 applications for 59 commissions in new U.S. Navy.
1798 January 26 US counsel Richard O’Brian arrives in Algiers.
1798 March 9 Charles Stewart commissioned Lieutenant.
1798 April 30 Congress establishes Department of Navy
1798 April 30 Midshipman warrants issued to Richard Somers and Steven Decatur.
1798 May 7 President John Adams appears in Philadelphia at rally.
1798 May 8 Richard Somers takes oath of allegiance.
1798 May James R. Caldwell appointed Midshipman.
1798 May 30 Richard Somers returns to Egg Harbor to get his affairs in order.
1798 June 8 Sloop Delaware (20 guns) under Commodore Stephen Decatur, Sr., takes a French prize, Le Croyable off Egg Harbor, N.J.

1798 July 7 USS Untied States gets underway under Capt. John Barry with Decatur, Jr., Charles Stewart and Somers as Midshipmen, head for the West Indies.
1798 Nov 4 Congress agreed to pay a yearly tribute to Tripoli.
1799 January 20 Richard Somers commissioned Lieutenant.
1799 June 2 Richard Somers writes will.
1799 June 22 Richard’s brother Constant dies in Russia in boating accident.
1799 Schooner Nautilus built as merchant vessel on Maryland’s East Shore.

Master Commandant Richard Somers USN

1800

1800 Nov. James Caldwell promoted to lieutenant, serves on USS United States.
1801 Somers appointed first lieutenant Boston (28 gun) 250 man sloop sent to the Mediterranean.
1801 James Caldwell assigned to the USS Constellation.
1801 Treaty of Tripoli violated by Yousuf Karamanli, pasha of Tripoli.
1801 January 21 Boston off Tripoli. Somers gets first view of Tripoli Harbor.
1801 May 14, After learning that Pres. Jefferson refused to pay a renewed tribute of $225,000 the Pasha of Tripoli declared war on the US by cutting down the US flagstaff in front of the US Consulate.
1801 May 22 Captain Richard Dale takes command of Mediterranean Squadron.
1801 June – US Consul William Eaton contacts Hamad Karamanli, deposed pasha of Tripoli, and older brother of Yousuf and encourages him to return to Tripoli.

The Tripoli vs the USS Enterprise

1801 July USS Enterprise under Lt. Andrew Sterrett defeats pirate ship Tripoli.

Tripoli destroyed by USS Enterprise

1802 Congress orders the construction of four schooners, the Siren, the Argus, Nautilus and Vixen with Somers given command of the Nautilus.
1802 February 6 Congress recognizes Tripoli has declared war against USA.
1803 April 11 Richard Somers launches schooner Goard Blossom at Mays Landing.
1803 May 13 Richard Somers ordered to oversee the refurbishing of schooner Nautilus.

Captain Edward Preble

1803 May 21 Captain Edward Preble given command of the Mediterranean squadron, with flagship frigate USS Constitution (44 guns).
1803 June 24 Somers’ schooner Nautilus ordered to join the Mediterranean squadron.
1803 September 13 Commodore John Barry dies.
1803 September 14 Somers and Nautilus reach Gibraltar.
1803 Preble obtains understanding in Tangier from the emperor of Morocco.

1803 Oct 31 frigate USS Philadelphia, Captain Bainbridge in command, runs aground off Tripoli, surrenders with full complement of crew, 300 men.

1803 Nov 7 the Argus, with Stephen Decatur, joins Nautilus and Constitution.

1803 Dec 23, Lt. Stephen Decatur, commanding the schooner Enterprise, captures a Barbary pirate ketch, which is entered into the US Navy logs as the USS Intrepid.

The Intrepid escapes after setting the Philadelphia afire

1804 February 16 Decatur leads mission aboard Intrepid into Tripoli Harbor and successfully scuttles the captured frigate USS Philadelphia.
1804 June 2 USS Constitution, Enterprise, and Intrepid, a floating hospital, anchor off Syracuse. Siren, Agrus, Vixen and Scourage (also a pirate prize) blockade Tripoli.
1804 July Mediterranean squadron heads for Tripoli, lead by Preble’s flagship, the Constitution, four brigs, the Argus, Siren, Vixen and Scourge, two schooners, Nautilus (Somers) and Enterprise (Decatur) and eight gunboats (156 guns in all). 1804 July 25 Battle of Tripoli begins.

1804 August 3 Somers and Decatur lead flotillas of gunboats against Tripoli fleet, win decisively, though Decatur’s younger brother James Decatur is killed; Caldwell distinguishes himself in boat action; three enemy gunboats captured.

1804 August 7 Attack made against Tripoli fleet; Caldwell killed in Gunboat #9.
1804 Sept 3 Attack made against Tripoli fleet.

The USS Intrepid at Tripoli Harbor

1804 Sept 4 Intrepid explodes in Tripoli harbor killing Somers, Wadsworth and ten volunteer sailors, whose remains wash ashore and are recovered.
1804 Sept 5 Intrepid crew buried in two nearby graves, by Dr. Cowdery and other American prisoners, “one cable’s length” (720 feet) from the walls of the old castle for Captain Bainbridge of the USS Philadelphia and the Dey

The Tripoli Monument at Annapolis was the first U.S. war memorial paid for by the offices and men who served with those officers who were killed in action - and lists the names of those officers.

1805 Lt. David Porter takes up collection for Tripoli Monument, which includes the names of all the officers killed in the first Barbary War.

U.S. Counsel William Eaton

U.S. Counsel to Egypt William Eaton - warrior- diplomat - convinced Hamid Karamanli to try to win back his power in Tripoli from his renegade pirate brother.

1805

U.S. Counsel William Eaton, Lt. Presley O'Bannon and eight USMC and their motley army march across the desert and capture Derna, raising the U.S. Stars & Stripes above captured foreign territory for the first time.

Tobias Lear, former personal secretary to President Washington, signed treaty with Yousef Karamanli that paid $60,000 ransom for the 300 prisoners of the captured frigate U.S. Philadelphia, despite U.S. policy not to pay tributes or ransom for prisoners or hostages. Lear later committed suicide.

US Marine Corps Dress Sword

Despite being sold out by U.S. diplomat Tobias Lear - Hamid Karamanli thanked Lt. O'Bannon for fighting for him and gave him his Mammaluk sword, now the dress sword of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

1807 Feb Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is born and named after Lt. Henry Wadsworth
1812 British take Washington. The Tripoli monument is damaged, repaired and relocated to the grounds of the US Capitol.
1830 Wife of British Counsel to Tripoli dies and is buried near existing graves, believed to be American sailors, and a wall is built around the cemetery.

Midshipman hung for mutiny aboard the USS Somers - Inspired "Billy Bud" and the establishment of the Naval Academy at Annapolis to train midshipman.

1842 Alleged mutiny aboard USS Somers II, a training vessel, results in hanging of Midshipmen, and the end of training officers at sea.

1845 US Naval Academy established by Navy Secretary George Bancroft and the Tripoli Monument is relocated there.

James Finimore Cooper

1850 James F. Cooper writes biography of Richard Somers suggesting that someday the captain of an American cruiser should return with his remains so that he can be reburied in his native land among his friends and loved ones.

1900

John Paul Jones
\

John Paul Jones in 1905 when repatriated from under a Paris street and reburied at Annapolis

1905 President Theodore Roosevelt orders the repatriation of the remains of Captain John Paul Jones from a Paris crypt and reburied in the chapel at the Naval Academy.

Mussolini at Old Castle Fort

1911 Italians begin occupation of Libya. Take over port and create the Plaza/Square.
1930 Italian Army road work crew reportedly uncovers the remains of five men from the original grave site and they are reburied at Old Protestant Cemetery.
1938 President Franklin Roosevelt orders a search for the location of the graves of the men of the Intrepid in Tripoli. Mustafa Burchis, a Libyan working for the Italians at the port of Tripoli investigates and learns some of the men of the Intrepid are buried at Old Protestant Cemetery.
1940 World War II. Burgis’ report is lost at the American Embassy in Rome. Libya becomes battleground

Nazi General Erwin Rommel maps out desert warfare strategy at Tripoli Harbor

U.S. General Patton - many of his troops are buried in a US protected military cemetery in Tunisia

1945-1969 - Wheelus Air Force Base - Tripoli

Wheelus Air Force Base in Tripoli

1948 - Muastafa Burchis informs the new US Consul Orray Taft, Jr. of his research and the members of the State Dept, US Navy, British embassy and local Libyans hold memorial ceremony and place historic markers at the Old Protestant Cemetery in 1949.

1949

Commanders of the USS Spokane, Orray Taft, Jr. and Tripoli Mayor Yousef Karamanli, namesake and direct relative of the pirate Basha who was the first to declare war against the United States

Here lies an American Sailor Who Gave His Life in the Explosion of the United States Ship INTREPID in Tripoli Harbor September 4, 1804

1950-1956 Two reports are published in the US Naval Proceedings journal based on Burgis
1955 USMC study determines that no Marines are among the Intrepid victims.
1950-1969 The Officer Wife’s Club of Wheelus Air Force base maintains the cemetery.

The Old Protestant Cemetery before Renovations

1977 Two women from New Jersey discover the displaced graves at the cemetery, overgrown with weeds, and write about it in American Legion Magazine.
1980 Rep. William Hughes (D. 2NJ) introduces legislation in Congress to reserve graves for the men of the Intrepid at Arlington in anticipation of their repatriation.
1988 Pres. Ronald Reagan orders the US military to bomb Tripoli in retaliation for terrorist attacks. Two US Navy pilots are shot down, and the remains of one recovered.
1991 Chris Stevens posted to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia with US State Dept.

2000

2002 Members of the Somers family and Somers Point, N.J. civic leaders petition US government and the Gadhafi Charities Foundation for repatriation. US State Dept. says there is no diplomatic relations with Libya.
2004 Gadhafi renounces terrorism, gives up Weapons of Mass Destruction and the US reestablishes formal diplomatic relations with Libya.
2004 Libyans reportedly excavate the original grave site and discover “bones and buttons.”
2004 US Dept. of State opens liaison office in Tripoli.
2004 Libyan guards tell US regional security officer Dan Mehan about American graves at cemetery, overgrown with weeds and in disrepair.
2006 March LTC Robert “Kyle” Carnahan arrives in Tripoli as defense attaché and meets with Dr. Giuma Anag, director of Antiquities.

2006 May Memorial Day ceremonies held at cemetery graves.
2007 Chris Stevens begins serving as Deputy Chief of US Mission to Libya at Tripoli (2 years)

Grave flags sent to American Embassy in Tripoli fly by Somers Point residents fly over grave crypts

2007 May Memorial Day ceremonies held at cemetery graves.
2008 “Secrets of the Old Protestant Cemetery” book is published in Arabic in Libya.

2009 Gadhaif celebrates the 40th anniversary of coup with a parade at Green Square.
2009 Sept 5 Sec of State Condi Rice visits Gadhafi on the 105th anniversary of the burial of the men of the Intrepid but doesn’t visit graves.

2010 March US Ambassador Cretz placed flags at cemetery graves.
2010 March Chief of Naval Operations Adml. Gary Roughead determines that the Old Protestant Cemetery is to be the final resting place for those men of the USS Intrepid, but does not mention the original unmarked mass grave site outside the old castle walls.

2010 April - 20 shipmates from USS Somers (DD947) meet in Oklahoma and establish the USS Somers Crew members Association.

2010 September – Tripoli flag from U.S. Embassy is raised in Somers Point, NJ

Tripoli Cemetery Renovated

2011- February 17 Revolution in Libya begins, which Gadhafi violent suppresses.
2011 March UN & NATO prevents Gadhafi’s military from attacking Benghazi.
2011 April 5 Chris Stevens arrives in Benghazi as US Representative to the rebels

Chipp Reid, Rep. Frank LoBiondo, Greg Sykora, Sally Hastings, Walt Gregory, Mayor Jack Glasser, Dennis Somers, Bill Kelly, Michael Caputo and Rep. Michael Rogers

2011 April 15 Delegation from Somers Point meets with Rep. Frank LoBiondo (R. NJ), Mike Rogers (R. Mich) and the American Legion in Washington DC.

2011 April Rep. Michael Rogers introduces House Resolution 1497 to repatriate the remains of the men of the Intrepid from Tripoli, co-sponsored by LoBiondo.

Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers - Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee

New Jersey Rep. Frank LoBiondo

2011 May 26 Rep. Rogers attaches the Rogers/LoBiondo repatriation resolution to the 2012 Defense Authorization Act (DAA) as an amendment, which passes the House.

2011 August Green Square is liberated and renamed Martyrs Square.

Old Protestant Cemetery at Tripoli Harbor

2011 September – American Legion video released.
2011 Nov. Sen. Dean Heller (R. Nev.) introduces complimentary Senate bill.
2011 Dec. Sen. John McCain (R. Arizona), ranking Republican on the Sen. Armed Services Com. (SASC) removes Repatriation Amendment before DAA is approved.
2011 Dec. 6 SASC and HASC Conference irons out differences in the DAA and ten US Senators sign letter requesting the Repatriation Amendment be reinserted in the DAA. 2011

2011 Dec. 17 Sec. Defense Leon Panetta visits Tripoli and graves and leaves coin.

2011 Dec. 31 President Signs Defense Authorization Act that includes a provision requiring the Navy to “evaluate the feasibility” of repatriating the remains of the men of the Intrepid from Tripoli and report back with recommendations in September 2012.

2012 – AMVETES commander supports repatriation.

2012 Christopher Stevens appointed US Ambassador to Libya. Media excluded from ceremony.
2012 Feb. 4 Intrepid Project meets at Somers Point Historical Society to consider options.

2012 February – Greg Sykora does radio interview on the story thus far.

2012 March – Secrets of Old Protestants Cemetery is published

2012 May US Ambassador Chris Stevens leads Embassy delegation for Memorial Day ceremony at Intrepid graves at Old Protestant Cemetery.

US Ambassador Chris Stevens at the graves of the American sailors of the Intrepid at Tripoli Cemetery

2012 May – LHA 7 – USS Tripoli laid out.

USS Intrepid Sea Air Land Museum also has theTV Starship Enterprise

2012 June Intrepid and Enterprise together again. Namesakes of Barbary Ships meet in NYC

2012 September Film farce "Innocence of Muslims" incites anti-American protests.

2012 September 9 – Richard Somers Day celebrated in Somers Point

2012 September 11 Ambassador Stevens and three Americans killed in attack on US mission at Benghazi.

2012 September 12 US intelligence agencies determine attack led by al Qaeda linked militia

2012 September 12 40,000 Libyans protest the attack against Americans and storm militia HQ.

2012 September 18 UN Ambassador says Benghazi attack spontaneous response to film.

2012 October Navy/DOD Report on Intrepid remains recommends they not be repatriated.

2012 October Tripoli Project issues rebuttal and meets with Armed Services Committee in DC

2012 November Benghazi becomes an election issue during debates.

2012 December Tim McGrath’s bio of John Barry includes Richard Somers

2013 January Secretary of State Hilary Clinton testifies before Congress about Benghazi.

2013 January Former Sen. John Kerry nominated for Secretary of State

2013 March – Deborah K. Jones named new U.S. Ambassador to Libya – based in Malta

2013 September - Somers Monument dedicated in Somers Point

2013 July – Press of Atlantic City: Somers Point hoping for deal soon on repatriation
2012 January Islamic militants retreat from Timbucktu after imposing Islamic law for six months, destroy historic manuscripts, books, mausoleums and graves of Sufi Saints.

2013 Somers Point and Somers family initiate another private backchannel negotiation.

2014 Bust of Richard Somers is placed at Veterans Park next to library.

2014 “Happy in Tripoli” video goes viral.

2014 Islamic militias take Tripoli Airport (former Wheelus AFB) and Tripoli

2014 Elected and recognized Libyan congress moves to Tobruk to escape militias.

2014 City of Derna – liberated by US Marines from pirates in 1805, declared an Islamic State

2015 Philadelphia Inquirer: New calls for the emergency repatriation of remains of all Americans from Libya.

2015 Somers Point Arts Commission has Richard Somers historic murals painted on Library walls adjacent to Somers bust.

2018 June - USS Somers Crew member Association 300 strong, meet for their annual reunion in New Orleans and commit themselves to mounting a plaque at the US Navy Yard Memorial in Washington D.C. and getting a new ship named USS Somers - the seventh.
2018 August - Sen. John McCann dies.

2018 - 4 September - USS Somers Crew members dedicate plaque at Navy Yard and ask the Secretary of the Navy to name a new ship after Somers.

The Old Castle Fort at Tripoli Harbor today

The padlocked green door to the Old Protestant Cemetery in Tripoli

Dear Ashton Carter - Secretary of Defense Designate

2015-01-17T18:51:00.002-08:00

Ashton Carter

Secretary of Defense Designate

1000 Defense Pentagon

Washington, D.C. 20301-1000

January 2015

Dear Secretary Carter,

As you know the biggest threat to our national security today is radical Islamists - not a new enemy as we have been fighting them for over two hundred years and should engage them in the same way as our forefathers did against their Barbary Pirates forefathers.

Since you are a native Philadelphian you should be aware of the historic roles Richard Somers, Stephen Decatur, Charles Stewart and James Caldwell played in the establishment of the United States Navy and the defeat of the Barbary Pirates - radical Islamists of the same religious sect we are fighting today.

When President Washington directed the first flag officer Captain John Barry to recruit a class of midshipman to train as the first officers of a new nation’s navy, Barry chose Somers, Decatur, Stewart and Caldwell, all of whom attended the Philadelphia Free school (now Episcopal Academy) and went on to distinguish themselves in the Barbary Wars; their names are inscribed on the Tripoli Monument at Annapolis, which was meant to be their grave stone, and U.S. Navy warships are named after them.

John Paul Jones is buried in the academy chapel nearby, having been repatriated after being found entombed in an unmarked crypt under a Paris street. First Captain John Barry is buried in the cemetery behind Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where Somers, Decatur, Stewart and Caldwell used to fistfight after school, experience that came in handy when they fought hand-to-hand combat with the Tripoli pirates.

Unfortunately Caldwell was killed during an attack on Tripoli harbor and American prisoners from the captured frigate Philadelphia watched his body mauled by dogs on the beach. While Decatur won fame for using the captured pirate ship Intrepid to recapture and sink the Philadelphia, in one of the first covert operations that today would be performed by Navy SEALS, Somers perished in the explosion of the Intrepid when he sailed the fireship back into Tripoli harbor.

The bodies of Somers, his first officer Lt. Henry Wadsworth, second officer Lt. Joseph Israel and ten men were recovered by American prisoners and buried near the beach where their remains are believed to be in clearly marked crypts in a small walled cemetery near the harbor.

Just as President Teddy Roosevelt ordered the recovery and repatriation of the remains of John Paul Jones from Paris, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the recovery of the remains of the officers and men of the Intrepid from Tripoli, but events intervened.

New research indicates the cemetery was never meant to be a permanent resting place for anyone, only a temporary one, and more than half of the remains in the cemetery have been removed, just as the remains of hundreds of Americans from Wheelus Air Force base were recovered from the Italian cemetery in Tripoli, the remains of the American Naval heroes should be recovered and repatriated home as soon as the security situation permits.

We may not be able to persuade radical Islamists to like Americans, embrace democracy, educate their women and respect the dead, but we can keep them from desecrating and destroying the remains of American naval heroes by doing the right thing- repatriate them safely home so, as James F. Cooper put it, they can be properly buried with full military honors and their friends, family and shipmates can pay their respects.

Your predecessor Charles Hagel revamped the POW/MP-JPAC office after it was revealed that they conducted fake repatriation ceremonies for public relations. Now you don’t have to fake them, you can have a real one when the remains of the U.S. Navy heroes from Tripoli are brought home. Hagel said, “I’ve directed the POW/MP/JPAC department to develop proposals for expanding public-private partnerships in identifying our missing…to leverage the capabilities and the efforts of organizations outside of government that do responsible work to account for our missing.”

Well this is one such proposal that should be acted on as soon as possible and only you have the authority to order the emergency repatriation of the remains of these men.

When the convicted Lockerbie bomber was released from a Scottish prison he received a heroes’ welcome and the men of the Intrepid deserve at least as much, and a repatriation ceremony on the deck of the USS Intrepid in New York could show the world that we still fight tyranny for the same things these men died fighting for – liberty, justice, democracy and the veneration of our honored dead.

Thank you for your time and attention on this matter,

William E. Kelly, Jr.

Browns Mills, New Jersey

Enclosed is a copy of Chris Dickon’s book: The Foreign Burial of American War Dead – A History (McFarland, 20011), a more detailed background of these people and events, relevant excerpts are posted here: http://RemembertheIntrepid.blogspot.com

The Foreign Burial of American War Dead - John Paul Jones and Richard Somers

2015-01-17T14:21:00.002-08:00

The Foreign Burial of American War Dead – A History (McFarland, 2011) By Chris Dickon

The Door to the Tripoli Cemetery

“(We) buried them as decently as in our circumstances we could.” – Andrew Sherburne

The Old Castle Fort at Tripoli Harbor - Built by Christian Chrusader Knights over Roman Ruins

The Repatriation of John Paul Jones and Richard Somers

By the end of his life, the American naval hero John Paul Jones had become a man without a country. More than a century later, Pres. Theodore Roosevelt would demand a change in that status and open up a bizarre passage in the history of America’s relationship to its military dead…Jones had died in self-imposed exile in Paris but, on the Sunday before his death, Jones had been visited by the American minister to France, the Hon. Gouverneur Morris, about the troubled relations between the United States and the Barbary powers of the Mediterranean.

Morris told Jones that he would soon receive a commission to enter into negotiations with the dey of Algiers for the release of American Christians taken as slaves by Mediterranean pirates and that a suitable military force would be placed at his disposal to back up the negotiations. The commission, however, arrived a few days after Jones’ death.

Indeed, the Muslim pirates of the Mediterranean were among the most vexing problems for the post-Revolutionary America. If an American ship was taken it might be converted to a pirate vessel and its sailors damned to hard lives of perpetual slavery. Christian sailors were especially prized because there would be no scruples about the treatment of infidels. Those who died were buried in Christian burying grounds beneath coastal sands and a few feet above the point of high tide.

In its first years, America chose to accept the cost of doing business rather than fight back. Treaties were negotiated and sums were paid, but they proved to be ultimately unreliable. Over the years, Thomas Jefferson had come to the conclusion that those who took American ships and enslaved American citizens should be punished rather than paid and respect for America’s sovereignty among nations was a paramount requirement. In 1794, Congress directed the building of six frigates designed primarily to fight the pirates, the founding force of the modern U.S. navy.

The Philadelphia had been built by her namesake city and commissioned in 1800. She would eventually cross paths with a Lt. Richard Somers, who was from a merchant seafaring family not far away in Somers Point, New Jersey. Born in 1778, Somers had taken to the sea as a boy as if by instinct. He learned to sail on Great Egg Bay and formed a friendship in boarding school with Stephen Decatur, Jr., both of them destined to become U.S. Naval heroes of a special rank.

In 1801, the ongoing saga of the United States and the pirates evolved into the First Barbary or Tripolitan, War. On the occasion of the inauguration of Pres. Thomas Jefferson, the pasha of Tripoli, Yusuf Karamanli, demanded a tribute of $225,000. Jefferson refused, and the pasha declared war in May of that year by bringing down the flag that flew above the U.S. consulate. Algiers and Tunis soon joined the battle and were met by U.S. Commodore Edwin Preble, commanding a fleet of frigates, schooners and assorted other fighting craft.

USS Enterprise v Tripoli

The first American shots in the war were fired from the USS Enterprise against the corsair Tripoli on August 1, 1801. Richard Somers was on the nearby USS Boston at the time and described the encounter in a letter to Stephen Decatur, excerpted in part:

While running for Malta, on the 1^st of August, the ENTERPRISE came across a polacca-rigged ship such as the Barbary Corsairs usually have, with an American brig in tow. It had evidently been captured and her people sent adrift. [Capt. Andrew] Sterrett, who commands the ENTERPRISE, as soon as he found the position of affairs, cleared for action, ran out his guns, and opened with a brisk fire on the Tripolitan. He got into a raking position, and his broadside had a terrific effect upon the pirate. But – mark the next – three times were the Tripolitan colors hauled down, and then hoisted again as soon as the fire of the ENTERPRISE ceased. After the third time, Sterrett played his broadside on the pirate with the determination to sink him for such treachery, but the Tripolitan rais, or captain, appeared in the waist of the ship, bending his body in token of submission, and actually threw his ensign overboard….Now I must tell you a piece of news almost too good to be true. I hear the Government is building four beautiful small schooners, to carry sixteen guns, for use in the Tripolitan war, which is to be pushed actively; and that you, my dear Decatur, will command one of these vessels and I another! I can write nothing more exhilarating after this; so I am, as always, your faithful friend, Richard Somers

The Enterprise would eventually come under the command of Decatur, Somers would be successful in a number of Mediterranean encounters (aboard the USS Nautilus) that would lead to the command assignments that would lead to his heroic death.

In 1803, an effective blockade was enforced against the coastal cities, and their harbors were put under attack. In the course of one of those skirmishes, the USS Philadelphia ran aground and was captured on a reef in Tripoli harbor. Her captain [William Bainbridge] and 300 man crew were taken prisoner, most to the rough cells and dungeons of the Old Castle Fort. Equally bad, in the eyes of the US Navy, was that the Philadelphia was taken as prize and preparations were begun to convert her into a Tripolitan warship to be named Gift of Allah.

The actions that prevented the USS Philadelphia from becoming the Gift of Allah would bring together American military heroism, intelligence, might and cunning in an action far from the country’s shores for one of the first time in its history. It was the kind of operation that would be copies in similar situations against similar enemies over the following centuries. And it would lead to the first known burial abroad of named American military members lost in combat.

Key to the success of the mission was a ketch that had served in Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign before capture by the British and eventual appropriation into the Tripolitian navy. She was under that flag when Stephen Decatur and the Enterprise found her on a course to Constantinople with a cargo of female slaves. She was easily taken prize and soon renamed the USS Intrepid. It was a fortuitous capture on Decatur’s part because the plan emerged to save the Philadelphia from her captors required the participation of a small Tripolitan sailing ship in an audacious charade.

Commodore Preble had determined that the Philadelphia could not be recaptured and had to be destroyed. The inclination of his young officers was to blast it out of the water with their own battleships, but Preble had a more subtle plan and he gave Decatur the assignment to carry it out. Once commissioned as the USS Intrepid, the little ship was refitted to take on the appearance of a small coastal trader of no military importance. Decatur and his crew took on the clothes and demeanor of worn Muslim sailors, and approached the Philadelphia on the night of February 16, 1804. Hailing the U.S. frigate’s Muslim crew, they claimed to be Maltan ketch made anchorless by recent storms and in need of shelter of a larger ship to ride out the hours until morning.

The USS Philadelphia burning in Tripoli Harbor as Decatur and his men escape in the USS Intrepid

As the Tripolitans finally determined that they would be allowed to do so, the crew of the Intrepid mustered its incendiary cargo and began its operation. As the frigate sent out a boat with fasting line, the Intrepid sent out its own boat toward the frigate. By the time the ruse was discovered by Turkish forces holding the frigate, it was too late. The Intrepid and the Philadelphia were linked, and, with little residence, the Americans were fully on board within ten minutes. Each man set fire to a designated part of the Philadelphia and she was fully engulfed in less than half an hour. Without a casualty, the Intrepid sailed away as the American frigate presented a spectacular show of fireworks in the Tripoli harbor, each of her cannons exploding when overheated by the fire. Tides and winds turned the burning ship so that some of the cannons aimed themselves at the city, which was already in turmoil because of the brazen attack.

The USS Intrepid at Tripoli harbor

By the late summer of 1804, Commodore Preble was implementing what might, in another day, be called guerrilla tactics against the Tripolitans. In August he summoned the Intrepid back for mission that would turn her into a floating incendiary to be sailed into the midst of the enemy’s navy and exploded. Lt. Somers volunteered to command the mission, which was to use two fast rowing boats and crews to remove Somers and his crew before detonation….

The exact cause of the premature explosion of the Intrepid would never be agreed upon. Commodore Preble took the view that she had been boarded by Tripolitan sailors, prompting the crew to blow up the ship so that her valuable munitions would not fall into enemy hands, thus sacrificing their own lives. Captain William Bainbridge of the Philadelphia would find their bodies the following day. Though a prisoner, he was allowed enough freedom to manage the situation in which the Americans found themselves…The Philadelphia surgeon was able to make better identification of the 13 bodies eventually recovered, and they were buried in Tripolitan earth outside the Old Castle Fort on the harbor. The U.S. Congress expressed its sympathy for the families of those lost, and the war came to an end. A treaty and final ransom of $60,000 was paid to retrieve the Philadelphia crew in 1805.

Lt. Richard Somers and the crew of the USS Intrepid would become the first named Americans killed in combat and buried abroad. If their graves were marked upon burial, those markings soon disappeared, in part because Christian symbols were not welcome in a Muslim nation. They would be forgotten until 1930s, then forgotten again until the following century when a small town in New Jersey began to pose provocative questions about equality in the way America remembers it was dead.

John Paul Jones – From Under a Paris Street

The first attempt to return John Paul Jones to his adopted country had taken place over six years starting in 1845. It was a confident plan undertaken by Civil War colonel John Sherburne, by now an author and Jones biographer, and presented to secretary of the navy William Graham. The author would simply travel to Paris, obtain the body, return with it on an American frigate and see to its interment in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington.

Gangs of workers labored night and day. Iron rods were pushed between shafts to detect the lead coffins that could not be seen, one of which was believed to contain John Paul Jones. It wasn’t until two weeks after the work had begun that the first lead coffin was found broken open, the body within dismembered at the neck. It proved not to be that of Jones. It was another month before a second lead coffin was found, and another week until a third revealed itself, but without a label to identify its occupant. It was opened after a ventilation shaft had been dug to take off the odor that would result.

Porter described what was found: “The body was covered with a winding-sheet and firmly packed with hay and straw. A rough measurement indicated the height of Paul Jones….The face presented quite a natural appearance,…comparing the other features and recognizing the peculiar characteristics of the broad forehead, contour of brow, appearance of hair, high cheek-bones, prominently arched eye orbits, and other points of resemblance, we instinctively exclaimed, ‘Paul Jones’: and all those who were gathered about the coffin removed their hats, feeling that they were standing in the presence of the illustrious dead, the object of a long search.”

As distinguished scientists and anthropologists preformed an examination of the corpse,…the final judgment of science, seemingly confirmed by a comparison to the head dimensions of a life-sized bust of the admiral by Jean-Antoine Houdon, was that this was, indeed, the body of John Paul Jones. Importantly, the autopsy itself was seen as a milestone in the history of forensics. After one hundred thirteen years preserved in alcohol, the body was supple and strong. It could be determined that Jones had died of “dropsy” (edema born of congestive heart failure), and that he had suffered other disorders that could have been specific to the places in which it was known that Jones had traveled. The admiral was known to have suffered no wounds, and the body had none. Identification confirmed, john Paul Jones was taken to the American Church of the Holy Trinity on April 20, 1905, where his coffin rested beneath a draped American flag to await its return to a grateful nation.

Doubts were immediately raised in the minds of some that the body found could actually be that of a man buried more than a century previously….On June 30, the cruiser USS Brooklyn, which had distinguished herself in the Spanish-American War and was now performing the first experiments in seagoing telegraphy, led a small fleet of U.S. warships into the harbor at Cherbourg to formally retrieve Jones from France. Twenty-one gun salutes were exchanged all around between the forces of the two nations.

On July 6, all of ceremonial Paris was in full dress and people were in the streets in the hundreds of thousands as military personnel, dignitaries and diplomats of America and France came together around the coffin at the American church on l’Avenue de l’Alama in the afternoon.

The body was formally given by General Porter to the United States through an assistant secretary of state and passed on to the care of the U.S. Navy for transit home on the USS Brooklyn. “This day America claims her illustrious dead,” he said of the event, “to testify that his name is not a dead memory, but a living reality, to quicken our sense of appreciation, and to give assurances that the transfer of his remains to the land upon whose arms he shed so much luster is not lacking in distinction by reason of the long delay.”

John Paul Jones was reburied in the chapel at Annapolis - the U.S. Naval Academy near the Tripoli Monument - which is inscribed with the names of Somers, Caldwell, Decatur and other officers

It would be almost a year before John Paul Jones would be formally put to rest in his adopted country. As his coffin sat in limbo, a war of words began among the cities and cemeteries of the nation over which was most deserving of his mortal presence. The State Department argued that he should be buried at Arlington, the navy that he should rest in the National Sailor’s Cemetery in Annapolis. New York, Philadelphia and Fredericksburg, Virginia, made claims, the latter two because he had lived in those cities at one time….But in the end it was Teddy Roosevelt who chose Annapolis, though not for burial in the common cemetery.

Roosevelt’s instinct about the usefulness of the return of John Paul Jones to his desire for a stronger navy was voiced full force in a speech to ten thousand citizens and sailors of two countries at the naval academy on April 24, 1906. He presented the admiral as the exemplar of resolve and courage in the face of overwhelming odds. He bitterly lamented those times in American history when the country was not prepared to meet its enemies, particularly in the War of 1812.

John Paul Jones

“This nation was guilty of such short-sightedness, of such folly, of such lack of preparation, that it was forced supinely to submit to the insult and was impotent to avenge it,” he said, followed by a command that each military individual and organization be fully prepared for all outcomes. Courage was not enough he warned: “Remember that no courage can atone for lack of that preparedness which makes the courage valuable.”

The Spanish-American War had given firm footing and method to the idea that American dead should be returned home. The dramatic return of John Paul Jones over distance and time set the example of how far a nation would go to complete that task.

The Intrepid Heroes in Tripoli

“I thought of myself as the discovered of a hidden secret, a secret of heroic death,” wrote Mustapha Burchis of his frame of mind in May 1938. “I dreamed that the American government would take me to America, and I would be a great man. America was a dream to me, a dream of wealth and freedom, and now I had my big chance of having it come true.”

From an old Moslem Family, Burchis had fought against the Italian colonization of Libya as a young man, and been put to work as a prisoner in the harbor at Tripoli. In better years, he rose to become harbormaster of the port and marshal of all who were employed by the Italian government through the Tripoli Port Authorities. He had no formal education, but he was smart and fluent in Arabic and Italian.

In 1938, his dream of America was brought to life by the curiosity of the naval historian and American Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In March of that year, for a reason that was not immediately apparent, Roosevelt ordered the State Department to cable the American embassy in Rome. “Any reasonable means available” were to be used to find the graves of the first named Americans to be buried abroad in combat, Richard Somers and his crew of the USS Intrepid, left behind in Tripoli after the failed attempt to blow up the warships of the harbor in 1804, Mustapha Burchis was deemed the best man available and was offered the job.

“I discussed the problems with my family, relatives and friends. They all thought that I was crazy, and asked the same questions, ‘How can you find the graves of people who died and were buried in 1805?’ [Sic]. ‘Yes, how?’ I asked myself, and I had no answer. However, against everyone’s advice I decided to take a chance and try.” His wife however, perhaps in her own dreams of America, supported him fully.

Over nearly 135 years, the story of the Intrepid and its men had disappeared into the tides and sands of Libyan history. Burchis knew nothing about the subject, but he was dogged. His research started in the libraries and went into the private collection of princes and pashas, municipal records, the memories of stories heard by wise old Bedouins, and then to the records of the dead held by the Christian churches of the city.

“During this time,” wrote Burchis, “the brothers told me about Christianity and its greatness and way of life, trying to convert me to their religion. It was the first time I had heard about the infidel’s religion. I admired it and saw how near it was to ours because we also believe in one God and a moral life. The differences, I thought, were not important and I remained a good Moslem.”

His research continued in Italian and Arabic newspaper and into the remembrances of stories heard in Egypt by a well-traveled sheik that American sailors might be buried in the English Cemetery on the eastern shore of the harbor.

The British consulate could offer no help, but the suggestion was made that the answers might be learned from the historians of Benghazi, three hundred miles to the east. It would be an expensive journey and his wife sold her jewels to finance the trip, which only took him to more old stories.

Back in Tripoli, he was led to the elders of the Jewish community who had heard stories of bodies buried on the beaches of the eastern shore. Birchus determined that he would find his answers in the traditional gathering places for socializing and the telling of old stories. A hundred-year-old man told him that may American sailors were killed and were buried where they lay on the eastern shore of the harbor. He gave him introduction into the elder Jewish community where the currency of friendship was the telling of fortunes and old stories, from which emerged more old men telling their fathers’ stories.

Birchus was finally led to the conclusion that the bodies were indeed buried in the Old British Cemetery. He learned that the cemetery had been started in 1830 with the burial of the wife of the British consul of the time, it being chosen because of the belief that there were already five Christian burials there from the beginning of the century. With the woman’s burial, the cemetery was walled off, to be maintained as a Protestant cemetery and was sometimes indeed, called the Protestant Cemetery.

Mustapha Birchus wrote the report of his findings in 1939, but by then time had passed him by. World War II had started and Libya would become one of its most dramatic battlegrounds. Italy and America were enemies. Embassies were abandoned and records were destroyed, among them Birchus’ answer to the question originally asked by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who could no longer concern himself with the fates of five sailors from a very distant past.

As if the ongoing march of history could not be stopped by war, the Tripolitan harbor master Mustapha Burchis found himself having drinks with friends in a local café on June 6, 1948, the fourth anniversary of D-day. By his account, he picked up a local newspaper and read that the Americans would soon be opening a consulate in his city. “Here is a chance again,” he thought. “This time I will deal directly with the representative of the United States Government.” He had not been able to put aside all of the work he had done, at the indirect direction of Franklin Roosevelt, in finding the burial places of the five American sailors killed in the explosion of the USS Intrepid in 1804.

On December 20 he sent a letter to the consul general telling of his investigation nearly a decade earlier: “I am at the disposal of the United States Government in order to let you know the fate of these heroic sailors.”

The letter was vetted through diplomatic channels and, in March 1949, he was invited to the consulate to put all of his work on the table. It was accepted as correct and hailed by the U.S. Navy as a new and dramatic discovery.

Immediately, naval commanders from all over the Mediterranean region traveled to Tripoli, where Burchis took them to the Old Protestant Cemetery on the outskirts of town and pointed out the five graves in the northeast corner. The USS Spokane was ordered to head to Tripoli for appropriate ceremonies. The Spokane had operated mainly out of Plymouth, England and Norfolk, Virginia, after the war, often in postwar ceremonies, including a “Full Dress” presence in recognition of the marriage of Princess Elizabeth of Great Britain and visits by the royalty of Greece and the Netherlands. As the ship approached Tripoli, its onboard newspaper, The Spoke, exclaimed upon the mission:

History awakens! The graves of five unknown American sailors have been found in Tripoli. The men are believed to have been crew members of the ketch INTREPID, which was responsible for the brazen burning of the PHILADELPHIA at Tripoli, February 16, 1804. Out of the past – out of the pages of history, the memory of these “American Plank owners” rise to be known to the world, through a memorial to be presented by the USS Spokane.

The ceremony on April 2, 1949 was full bore and full dress. A band of Scottish Camerons played martial music as they marched with a unit of the British Army, then in control of Tripoli, from the town to the cemetery. All sorts of admirals, captains, consuls and chaplains offered their thoughts and prayers. The mayor of Tripoli, a direct descendant of the same bashaw who had frustrated Thomas Jefferson to the point of war, was in attendance with 50 other local dignitaries. A memorial plaque was put up, and individual plaques were placed at each grave.

The 1949 ceremony included the Mayor of Tripoli Josef Karamanli, a namesake and direct relative of the bashaw who was the first to declare war against the United States for failure to pay tribute to stop the piracy.

The event was deemed “a worthy tribute to the courageous sailors of the Navy of yesterday from the sailors of the Navy today.” But as time would pass, a discovery of the graves of the Intrepid sailors would be made at least once again, leading only to frustration on the part of a small town in New Jersey.

Somers Point, New Jersey

Somers Mansion, Somers Point, New Jersey - Home of Lt. Richard Somers' Grandfather

In 2006, times were relatively good for the United States and Libya. Rapprochement was in the air with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, and it was time to renew the effort to retrieve and return the body of Richard Somers, if no one else, from the 1804 burials at the edge of Tripoli harbor.

Thus, on September 4, 2006, a group assembled at Somers Mansion in Somers Point, New Jersey to honor Richard on the 202^nd anniversary of his death. They felt the breezes of nearby Great Egg Harbor Bay on the Atlantic coast and heard the resolve (of a number of people including) writer and activist William Kelly. Kelly had grown up in nearby Camden. Among his causes was the seeking of expanded government transparency in the achieving and investigation of tragic events like the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001.

In the matter of Richard Somers, he was resolute: “It is quite remarkable that we are standing in the yard of the home of Richard Somers’ grandfather, where Somers grew up as a boy, from where we can see the bay where he learned to sail, and from where he left to fight pirates, yet to return. And someday soon he will be laid to rest nearby….The efforts to repatriate Richard Somers have thus far taken over 200 years, so it’s not an easy task. Besides the desires of the extended Somers family and the efforts of the citizens of Somers Point, I think it is now time for the American military veterans to get involved and educate people about this issue and try to convince the political administration and the U.S. military that Richard Somers and the crew of the first USS Intrepid can not and will not be the only exception to our long standing policy of never leaving anyone behind enemy lines. We don’t have to convince the Libyans to return the remains of our men, we have to convince our own administration and our own military that now is the time to repatriate these heroes.”

By that time, the New Jersey legislature had declared September 4 Richard Somers day in the state and passed a resolution in 2004 asking the U.S. State Department to “open negotiations with Libyan leaders for the repatriation of Richard Somers and his crew before the anniversary of their deaths. Along with Bill Kelly, the effort was shared in Somers Point by Mayor Jack Glasser, the president of the Historical Society Sally Hastings and the U.S. representative Frank LoBiondo of New Jersey’s Second District.

A diplomatic opening with Libya on the matter had not occurred, but Kelly was still optimistic. He recalled that the country’s first popular naval historian, James Finimore Cooper, had prophesied Somers’ return as he described the burial place of the officers of the USS Intrepid in 1842: “Here, then, lies the remains of Somers, and his two gallant friends (Lts. Henry Wadsworth and Joseph Israel), and it might be well to instruct the commander of some national cruiser to search for their bones, that they might be finally incorporated with the dust of their native land. Their identity would at once be established by the number of skeletons, and the friends of the deceased might find a melancholy consolation in being permitted to drop a tear over the spot which they would finally be entombed."

Bust of Somers at Somers, New York

That place of final entombment was already marked out….in Somers Point, New Jersey. It remained only for him to be disinterred from Libya and brought home. Others of those still buried there had their own American advocates in other places, but the focus of Somers Point, New Jersey was full bore on its native son.

The U.S. embassy in Libya had received grave flags from the group in New Jersey and placed them on the graves of five unnamed sailors of the Intrepid at the Protestant Cemetery rediscovered by Mustapha Burchis in 1939. Those sailors, according to contemporary research by Kelly and his group, might have been easily found by Burchis if other records had been available to him at the time. It was Kelly’s belief that the bodies had actually been placed in the cemetery in the early 1930s, after they had been found by Italian road crews in the process of laying down a new street in Tripoli.

Kelly was able to open what he believed would be a helpful contact with the ruling family through the Gaddhafi International Charity and Development Foundation, which described itself as “an international non-governmental organization, [which] carries out developmental and humanitarian activities in the social, economic, cultural and human rights fields.”

In 2010, according to William Kelly, that relationship was yielding results in bringing Libya to the table. Also at the seating was the U.S. State Department, for which the small matter of American dead in 1804 might offer an opportunity to build more ambitious accords with the Libyans. A congressional research report on Libya dated December 3, 2007, placed contemporary relations in the context of the Barbary Wars. It told the story of the USS Intrepid in 1804 and reported that “efforts to repatriate the remains of U.S. personnel killed in these early 19^th century military engagements with Tripoli are ongoing.”

Another necessary seat at the table would have to be taken by the U.S. Navy, and in trying to gain its interest Kelly invoked the story of the dogged attempt by Teddy Roosevelt and Gen. Horace Porter to find and return the body of John Paul Jones form the soils of Paris. “I’m saying that if this is important enough, people will do it,” said Kelly.

In 2010, the attitude of the navy about Richard Somers seemed to be something more productive, but it was still noncommittal about repatriation. In a letter to Kelly from the chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Gary Roughhead, dated March 11, 2010, Roughhead told of his personal interest after a visit to Tripoli as a young man, matched with reports from a site visit by the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office in 2004.

“Honoring the final resting place of Sailors and Marines is a long standing naval tradition,” wrote Roughead. But he pointed out that there had been no documentation of the remains recovered after the explosion of the Intrepid and no usable record keeping of those bodies over the centuries. However, he continued, the navy, State Department and Libyan government had held 1949 ceremonies in honor of the Intrepid sailors at the Protestant Cemetery. Thus, the cemetery “has been officially recognized by the Department of the Navy as the final resting place for her crew. My staff is working with the Department of State and the American Embassy in Libya to ascertain the condition of the graves and what actions can be taken towards their long-term care.”

Repatriation was not mentioned, and William Kelly understood that to bring Richard Somers home, the navy and other organizations like DPMO and ABMC would have to contravene long-standing policies that supported return of the dead only from World War I forward – John Paul Jones being a notable exception.

A further complication was the lack of consensus among parties as to where Richard Somers was actually buried after two centuries of nonexistent record keeping and probable reburials. Though he represented the full Intrepid crew in the lore of Tripoli, no one believed that he was among the five unnamed dead in the Protestant Cemetery. The decades of investigation, research and attempts at reclamation in Somers Point, New Jersey, had resulted in a firm knowledge of the precise place. “Its 520 feet from the West Gate of the Old Castle Fort,” said Kelly, “and when we do an excavation of that site, we’ll find him right where he was originally buried.” Those officers and crew not in the Protestant Cemetery are buried nearby, in his view, under the grass of what is called Green Square.

“If he is to be retrieved,” said Kelly, “he will have an official repatriation ceremony. The captain of the [mothballed] USS Intrepid aircraft carrier in New York City said that they would like to have a ceremony, too.”

In 2011, the difficult history of Libya took another turn as revolution against repressive governments began to spread from Tunisia to neighboring countries. In February of that year, the so-called “Arab Spring” brought turmoil to Libya in the form of a civil war. By mid-year, just half the country was still held by the forces of Col. Muammar Gadaffi, including Tripoli. It seemed safe to presume that previously friendly arrangements with the Gaddafi government and family were in jeopardy, but the people of Somers Point, New Jersey remained optimistic that their effort would soon be back on track on the Libyan side of the equation, though still within the challenge of finding assistance from the U.S. Navy.

U.S. Ambassador to Libya Gene Cretz and U.S. Military Attache Brian Linvill

Photo Caption: In 2010, the Protestant Cemetery on Tripoli Bay was visited by American representatives, from left to right, military attaché Brian E. Linvill, U.S. Ambassador to Libya Gene Cretz and his wife, Annette Cretz. The American flags mark five unknown crew members of the USS Intrepid, killed as the ship tried to set fire to Tripoli Harbor in 1804.

Appendix I: American Sailors Buried in Tripoli, Libya, since 1804

Three American officers and seamen were buried in Tripoli, Libya, after the explosion of the USS Intrepid on September 4, 1804. They were members of a crew assembled from three navy ships and their names follow that of their ships:

USS Intrepid: Master Commandant Richard Somers, Lieutenant Henry Wadsworth, Midshipman Joseph Israel (14 years old)

USS Constitution: (all believed to have the rank of seaman): William Harrison, Robert Clark, Hugh McCormick, Peter Penner, Issac Downes, Jacob Williams;

USS Nautilas: (all believed to have the rank of seaman): James “Bos’n” Simms, Thomas Tompline, James Harris, William Keith.

It is believed that ten seamen were buried on the beach, and three officers were buried together on land above the beach. Known and possible reburials since 1804 have resulted in five unnamed Intrepid crew being buried in a Protestant cemetery near the beach and the belief that the crewman are buried at one location under what is now Green Park. Richard Somers and two other officers are believed to be buried in another location beneath Green Park, approximately 500 feet from the west gate of the Old Castle Fort.

UPDATE – William Kelly Notes:

The door to the cemetery
Will that padlock keep the terrorists out?

The idea that the five crypts at the cemetery identified as men of the Intrepid were interred there by an Italian work crew stems from letters between an Italian military soldier who participated in the road work and Linwood, New Jersey historian, the late Frank Kemp, whose book Nest of Rebel Pirates details the revolutionary war battle at Chestnut Neck, N.J. in which Lt. Richard Somers’ father Revolutionary War Privateer Captain Richard Somers participated. The Italian veteran soldier told Kemp that his work crew uncovered the remains of five men and placed them in the crypts in the cemetery. Because the three officers were originally buried apart from the ten seamen, these five remains were suspected to be from among the ten seamen, so the three offices and five men should remain buried in the original grave site “one cable’s length” from the old castle fort.

However, since Chris Dickon’s book was published further research has led to the publication of two more books, one by Libyans on their history of the Tripoli cemetery. This cemetery has been nominated by the US State Department to be listed as a UN protected World Heritage site. Unfortunately dozens of allegedly protected World Heritage sites have been recently destroyed by radical Islamists in Afghanistan, Timbuckto, Africa, Syria and Iraq so such listings do not protect the sites from the marauding terrorists.

Another new book Intrepid Sailors, by Chipp Reid focuses on the men of the Intrepid, and using new research and data including information from the Libyans, Reid has concluded that the small walled cemetery near the harbor was built around the graves of the officers and the men of the Intrepid and thus contains the remains of all 13.

Reid, a former US Marine and Iraq war veteran was with a group of citizens from Somers Point, N.J. who visited Washington D.C. in 2011 to enlist the support of the American Legion and lobby Congress to include the repatriation of the Intrepid sailors from Tripoli in the 2012 Defense Authorization bill. The Somers Point delegation, led by Mayor Jack Glasser and Sally Hastings, the president of the historical society enlisted the cooperation and support of Rep. Frank LoBiondo (R. N.J.) and Mike Rogers (R. Michigan) chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

U.S Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens at the graves of the Intrepid Sailors in Tripoli

Their efforts were thwarted at the last minute however by Sen. John McCain (R. Arizona), who pulled the resolution from the bill at the request of Admirals and other top brass in the Pentagon, but LoBiondo and Rogers managed to get the inclusion of a DOD study of the possibility of repatriation of the remains of the Tripoli heroes.

Although it would have cost less to just bring back the bones of these men, than the half-million dollars it was said to have cost, the report, as expected, concluded the Tripoli cemetery was and is the permanent and everlasting resting place for these men, even though the threat posted to them by radical Islamists was not mentioned or even considered.

While cooperation with the Gadhafi government made it possible, and the first American Ambassador to Libya supported the repatriation, suggesting that then Secretary of State Hilary Clinton visit Tripoli and return with the bones of the Intrepid men herself, events interviened.

At the urging of the US State Dept., the Libyan renovated the cemetery, preserving the graves of the American navy heroes, and Defense Secretary Penetta, while on an official visit to Tripoli, visited the graves and left a coin on one of the crypts.

Secretary of Defense Penetta places coin on the crypt of an Intrepid sailor in Tripoli

Mohamid Bousi

Shortly thereafter however, Mohamid Bousi, a Tunesian vending chart merchant, set himself afire and sparked the Arab Spring revolutions that quickly took down two North African dictators and threatened others, including Gadhafi.

The first Cruise missile fired in support of the NATO intervention in the 2012 Libyan revolution was fired from the USS John Barry – named after the first flag officer of the U.S. Navy who recruited Somers, Decatur, Stewart and Caldwell to be first officers.

When North African pirates captured an merchant oil ship and held the captain for ransom, three of the pirates were simultaneously shot by U.S. Navy SEAL snipers from the fantail of the USS Bainbridge – named after Captain William Bainbridge, skipper of the captured frigate U.S.S. Philadelphia. Bainbridge survived the court martial over his loss of the Philadelphia, and went on to greater glory.

Other U.S. Navy warships have been named in honor of the Tripoli heroes, including Stewart, Decatur and Caldwell, six have been named USS Somers, and a new one has been named the USS Tripoli, reflecting the honor and respect these men give the United States Navy and connecting their fight then with our fight today.

After McCain lost the presidential election to Obama, Chuck Hagel was appointed Secretary of Defense with the goal of withdrawing all American military personnel deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, which he did with honor. Hagel, the first combat veteran (Vietnam) to serve as a civilian Defense secretary, listened to the protests of the widows and families of Vietnam veterans who never returned and were listed as Missing In Action and Prisoners of War. They complained that the Pentagon’s POW-MP accounting office and the JPAC unit in Hawaii were not living up to their responsibilities.

The United States still can not account for thousands of missing Americans in Vietnam and Southeast Asia while the Australians quietly honored the return of the remains of the last of their unaccounted for soldiers from Vietnam.

Media reports and internal military investigations supported the families who complained and alleged for years that the POW/MP and JPAC detachments were years behind the times in failing to properly use DNA to identify remains and held fake repatriation ceremonies as a public relations ploy, Hagel revamped both departments, combined them into one and changed certain policies to include a unique partnership between the government, the military and responsible private citizens.

Now the graves of the American naval heroes in Triopli are threatened by the radical Islamists who control the city including the harbor and the cemetery where the men of the Intrepid are entombed in clearly marked above ground crypts.

Radical Islamists desecrate the graves of British veterans in Tobruk, Libya

These radical Islamists don't believe in veneration of the dead and won't let anyone else do it in areas they control, where they dig up the remains of Sufi and non-orthodox Islamist saints from under the floors of mosques.

From the floors of a Triipoli mosque Islamist grave robbers dug up and made off with the remains of revered Sufi Saints - and are now a threat to the graves of American naval heroes

The Foreign Burial of American War Dead
A History

Chris Dickon

Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-4612-4
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-7864-8501-7
65 photos, appendices, notes, bibliography, index
308pp. softcover (7 x 10) 2011

Normandy, Flanders Field and other overseas cemeteries of the American Battle Monument Commission (ABMC) are well known. However, lesser-known burial sites of American war dead exist all over the world—in Australia and across the Pacific Rim, in Canada and Mexico, Libya and Spain, most of Europe and as far north as the Russian Arctic. This is the history of American soldiers buried abroad since the American Revolution. It traces the evolution of American attitudes and practices about war dead and provides the names and locations of those still buried abroad in non–ABMC locations.

Writer Chris Dickon is an Emmy-winning former public broadcasting producer, reporter and writer. He has published several books on lesser-known aspects of American history. He lives in Portsmouth, Virginia.

"This work compiles names and locations of Americans who died in wars on foreign soil who are buried in locations which are outside of the system of the American Battle Monument Commission...the book traces the evolution of American attitudes and practices regarding its war dead"--Reference & Research Book News.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Foreign-Burial-American-Dead/dp/0786446129

http://www.mcfarlandbooks.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-4612-4

Chris Dickon is a writer and veteran television and radio producer/reporter/writer with most of his previous work in public broadcasting, and current effort in book and article writing and research. His documentaries, features, reporting and interviewing have been broadcast nationally on PBS stations and on National Public Radio, and internationally on the Voice of America. Awards for his broadcast work have come from Columbia University, Ohio State University, the University of Missouri, the Virginia Association of Broadcasters, and included an Emmy from the Capital Region Chapter of NATAS.

As an author of six books, he has brought the storytelling and graphic style of broadcast production to books that tell little known stories of American history. His most recent book, Americans at War in Foreign Forces, tells the story of the 75,000 plus Americans who fought in the two World Wars as members of Canadian, British, French and other foreign forces. It complements The Foreign Burial of American War Dead, which traces the history of American war dead still buried abroad since the Revolutionary War, and the evolution of American attitudes and practices about its war dead. A third book in the series will profile the World War I American poet Alan Seeger.'t believe in the veneration of the dead - and are grave robbers who have dug up and stolen the remains of Muslim saints and holy men buried in the floor of mosques and will desecrate and steal the remains of the American naval heroes as soon as they are able.

Now is the time to prepare a mission to retrieve the remains of these men as soon as the security situation in Tripoli permits.

Here Lies -

Remains of American Naval Heroes Threatened by Radical Islamist Graver-Robbers

2015-01-02T12:31:00.000-08:00

Remains of American Naval Heroes Threatened by Radical Islamist Grave-Robbers

Tripoli Gravestone: Here Lies An American Sailor Who Gave His Life In The Explosion of the United States Ship INTREPID in Tripoli Harbor September 4, 1804.

Secretary of Defense

Charles Hagel
Pentagon

Washington D.C.

December, 2014

Dear Secretary Charles Hagel

As you prepare to leave office your legacy will include the withdraw of US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, but you will also be remembered for responding to the complaints of the families of MIA/POWs and combining and revamping the process of repatriating the remains of Americans who died in combat abroad..

You also instituted a new policy of combined partnerships between the government, the military and private efforts by the families to repatriate the remains of Americans abroad, one of which is the oldest on record – the remains of the US Navy heroes from Tripoli.

As I mentioned in my open letter to you a few months ago [Remember the Intrepid: Dear Secretary Hagel], that may have escaped your attention, the danger is imminent and it is imperative that action be taken as soon as possible.

The friends and families of the officers of the first USS Intrepid (Lts. Somers, Wadsworth) have been seeking the repatriation of the remains of all of the men of the Intrepid since they perished in the explosion of the Intrepid in Tripoli harbor on September 4, 1804.

Entombed in well marked above ground crypts in a small walled cemetery near the harbor the remains of these men are easily accessible and can be easily retrieved and safely repatriated, if only the effort is made. This cemetery at the moment is under the control of radical Islamic militias, extremists who despise democracy, hate Western ideals, Christians, Jews and especially Americans, who they behead just for being American.

These radical Islamists are also grave robbers who destroy ancient relics and historic sites, including those ostensibly protected as UN World Heritage Sites, as the Tripoli cemetery has been nominated to be.

As grave robbers, these extremists believe in a strict orthodox version of Islam that does not include the veneration of the dead, so they dig up the bones and ancient relics of Islamic saints and holy men from the floors of mosques and destroy them.

So when they learn or discover the identity of the clearly marked graves of American Naval heroes at Tripoli they will surely and immediately desecrate and destroy them. This mission will cost less than the half million dollar 2012 study that didn’t even mention the threat posed to the graves by the radical Islamists.

The biggest threat to our national security today is also the biggest threat to the remains of the American Naval heroes, so a mission must be mounted to save them, a mission that will save the relics from destruction, save the graves from desecration, save the nation from embarrassment, enhance military moral, increase public patriotism and reaffirm the commitment these men made with their lives that we Americans will fight Islamic piracy, terrorism and tyranny, now as we did then.

Thank you for your time and interest in this matter,

William E. Kelly, Jr.

America's Everlasting Enemy

2014-09-11T14:40:00.001-07:00

America’s Everlasting Enemy

– William E. Kelly (billkelly3@gmail.com)

“We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever.” – John Adams

Arab dictators were pirating American merchant ships off Africa, holding their passengers and crews hostage and demanding ransom and tribute while armies of Islamic extremists were running rampage across Africa and the Middle East, killing infidels, destroying relics, graves and libraries and establishing Sharia law everywhere they conquered, beheading the men and selling women and children off as slaves.

Sound familiar? Well that was the situation at the turn of the 18^th century – over two hundred years ago, when the Barbary state tyrants of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Tripoli pirated American ships, demanded ransom and tribute, and sparked an American political debate over whether the ransom and tributes should be paid or whether a Navy should be formed and sent to fight them.

“Millions for defense but not one cent for tribute” was the battle cry, which led John Adams to say, “We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever.”

So Congress approved the funds for the construction of four frigates and the establishment of a Navy, which today, finds itself in ships named after the heroes of the Barbary Wars – the USS Barry, USS Bainbridge, USS Serrett have all been fighting pirates off Africa and radical Islamist armies running rampage over Afghanistan, Africa, Syria and Iraq.

John Barry, the first flag officer of the US Navy was charged by President Washington to train midshipman to be the first offices of the new navy and the first three - Richard Somers, Stephen Decatur and Charles Stew art went on to distinguish themselves in the Barbary wars and have warships named after them. Somers never returned home and is buried in Tripoli despite the efforts to have his remains repatriated.

The first American ship to engage the Islamic pirate over two hundred years ago, the schooner U.S.S. Enterprise was commanded by Lt. Sterret, who raked the pirate ship Tripoli with a number of broadsides before the Libyan pirate captain surrendered., but since the United States had yet to officially declare war, Sterret left the pirates with one sail so it could return to report what the Americans were capable of.

When the frigate U.S.S. Philadelphia, assigned to blockade Tripoli harbor, ran aground, Captain Bainbridge surrendered, and his 300 man crew became prisoners of the Basha of Tripoli, the tyrant Yousef Karamanli, who held the prisoners in the dungeons of the old castle fort, except the five sailors who agreed to convert to Islam.

As on Islamic text explained how The Prophet Mohammed treated those he conquered, “The Prophet agreed to save their lives as long as they repented their treachery and agreed to abide by the Muslim law, which they (Jews) refused to do. All of the men of the tribe were put to the sword. It was intended to underline the point the Prophet was trying to make: that the laws of Islam had superseded those from the ancient past. This incident had nothing to do with anti-Semitism and shortly afterwards, as if to prove the point, the Prophet married one of the Jewish widows.”

As an excuse for their barbarism, the Islamists quoted the bible (Deuteronomy 7:2): “When the Lord your God give them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them, and make no covenant with them, and show no mercy to them.” -

President John Adams said: “As the essential principle of the Islam faith is the subjugation of others by the sword, it is only by force that his false doctrines can be dispelled and his power annihilated.”

In the early 1800s, when Americans went to Tripoli to fight the Barbary Pirates, they did so for the same reasons we fight the radical Islamic terrorists today – for the things we believe in – liberty, freedom and democracy, concepts they reject.

And just as the American prisoners who were enslaved and held for ransom were given the opportunity to convert to Islam to earn their freedom, five of the 300 men of the captured frigate USS Philadelphia decided to defect.

Others who were killed in the Battles of Tripoli, including the men of the USS Intrepid, are buried today in clearly marked graves and above ground crypts in a small walled cemetery near the harbor.

Here lies an American sailor who gave his life in the explosion of the United States ship Intrepid in Tripoli Harbor September 4, 1804

The Grave of an "Amerique" at the cemetery at Tripoli Harbor now threatened by radical Islamists

The graves of the American Naval heroes in Tripoli are now in great peril as the cemetery where they are entombed is now under the control of radical Islamist militias who also control the airport (formerly Wheelus AFB) as well as the American embassy compound, and frequently engage in grave robbing as a tactic to promote their cause.

These fierce fighters are salafist jahidist who despise democracy, hate Americans and believe in an extreme orthodox form of Islam that prohibits the veneration of the dead and they don’t t allow others to do so. They impose a strict form of Shara law that governs everybody in lands where they control, and they now control the grave site of the American Naval heroes that should be repatriated home whenever the situation permits.

They follow the same brand of Islam that we know as the Taliban, the Al-Shabab, ISIS and the radical Islamists who now control Trpoli, as well as the Barbary Pirates America fought over 200 years ago.

Although Mohmar Gadhafi and the dictators of Tunisia and Egypt suppressed and imprisoned many of these religious warriors, the early successes of the Arab Spring revolutions freed them to try to take advantage of t he post revolutionary power vacuum to violently take control and impose a caphalate and sharah law.

One of the first things they did after Gadhafi was deposed was to desecrate the graves of Sufi Muslim saints, some centuries old, dig up their remains from below the floors of ancient Mosques, and run off with their bones and relics into the desert like they did with Gadhafi, never to be seen again.

They also desecrated the graves of American and British soldiers in a military cemetery in Tabrok, and will certainly destroy the graves of the American Naval heroes in Tripoli if they knew and recognized their significance.

We don’t need to get large numbers of people to petition or convince Congress, but only have to convince one person – Secretary of Defense Charles Hegel that the repatriation of the remains of these men can and should be done as soon as the security situation in Tripoli allows.

Fortunately Hegel is the first enlisted man who has seen combat in Vietnam to serve as Secretary of Defense, and he listened to the MOMs wives and widows of the POWMIAs from the Vietnam era, recognized the incompetence and inefficiency of the military POW/MP office/x and cleaned house, fired those who refused to utilize DNA testing, revamped their procedures and combined both agencies.

http://www.stripes.com/news/us/after-unflattering-reports-hagel-orders-shake-up-of-mia-accounting-agencies-1.268988

That same office refused to repatriate the remains of the Naval heroes in Tripoli and were the primary contributors to the 2012 study authorized by Congress that concluded the remains should not be repatriated and remain where they are, without even a mention of the threat imposed by the radical Islamic extremists.

Since those military offices and that report have now been totally discredited, it is imperative that their policy regarding the Tripoli remains be reversed, and can be by order of the Secretary, who has the authority to order the exhumation and repatriation of American military personal from abroad. -

It will be easier for us to convince on man who is already familiar with these issues, and can recognize the positive benefits of repatriation besides preventing the desecration and destruction of the graves of American heroes.

Graves of Centuries old Sufi Saints Robbed from Mosques in Tripoli

Chuck Hagel Secretary of Defense
1000 Defense Pentagon
Washington, DC 20301-1000

May 22, 2014

Dear Secretary Hagel,

Thank you for listening to the families of the MIA and POWs and reorganizing the POW-MP-JPAC offices, as their most glaring failure was the refusal to repatriate the remains of the men of the Intrepid from Tripoli, a mission that must still be completed.

The last official report (2012) fails to mention the serious threat to the remains by the grave robbing Salfists - the same radical extremists believed to be responsible for the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens and the recent wave of political assassinations, diplomatic kidnappings and grave desecrations.

The Benghazi headquarters of the Salfist Ansar Shariah militia, designated a terrorist organization by the US government, was recently attacked by a general who inflamed their passions and hatred for Americans, making the situation more critical now than ever before.

These orthodox Islamists don’t believe in the education of women, singing and dancing or the reverence of the dead, and try to impose their beliefs on everyone. They are of the same sect as the Taliban, who kill schoolgirls in Afghanistan, and those who desecrated the tombs of Islamic holy men in Derna. They are of the same religious beliefs as the Boco Horan, who kidnapped schoolgirls in Nigeria and they espouse the same fanatical beliefs as the Tripoli pirates we fought in the Barbary Wars.

One of the first things Chris Stevens did as ambassador was to visit the graves of the men of the Intrepid. When the US Navy conducted a ceremony at the graves in 1945, the Mayor of Tripoli was Yousef Karamanli, a namesake and descendent of the despot we fought two centuries ago. So it’s not difficult to understand why Chris Stevens sympathized with the Libyan people, supported their revolution, and was helping them establish a democratic nation when he was killed by the same radical extremists who now threaten the graves of the American military heroes who were left behind.

The Libyan Revolution ended at Tripoli’s Martyr’s Square where the only real martyrs are the Americans who perished on one of the first special op missions, a mission that continues today and won’t be completed until they are brought safely home.

A few years ago the State Department arranged for the emergency repatriation of nearly a hundred Americans from Wheelus Air Force base cemetery near Tripoli, but they left behind the remains of the men of the Intrepid, and the eminent danger posed by the grave robbing Salafists presents an emergency that requires the repatriation of their remains as soon as the situation their permits.

As the Secretary of Defense you have the power to order a Joint Service mission to recover the remains of these men so the POW/MP office can reclaim its honor, a real historic repatriation ceremony can be held and these men can be honored and buried safely at home with their shipmates.

Unlike at the Grave of the Unknowns, there are no armed guards protecting these men, and it will be to our everlasting shame if their graves are found to be empty and desecrated.

Thank you for your time and attention to this matter,

William E. Kelly, Jr.

US Ambassador Chris Stevens at the graves of the American Naval Heroes in Tripoli

Dear Secretary Hagel

2014-05-22T16:12:00.003-07:00

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel

1400 Defense Pentagon
Washington DC 20301-2600

May 22, 2014

Dear Secretary Hagel,

Thank you for listening to the families of the MIA and POWs and reorganizing the POW-MP-JPAC offices, as their most glaring failure was the refusal to repatriate the remains of the men of the Intrepid from Tripoli, a mission that must still be completed.

Unlike at the Grave of the Unknowns, there are no armed guards protecting these men, and it will be to our everlasting shame if their graves are found to be empty and desecrated.

Thank you for your time and attention to this matter,

William E. Kelly, Jr.

20 Columbine Ave.

Browns Mills, N.J. 08015

609 425-6297

The Real Enemy

2014-05-15T14:43:00.001-07:00

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Don’t Fear All Islamists, Fear Salafis

By ROBIN WRIGHT

Published: August 19, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/opinion/dont-fear-all-islamists-fear-salafis.html?_r=2

THIS spring, I traveled to the cradle of the Arab uprisings — a forlorn street corner in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, where a street vendor, drenched in paint thinner, struck a match in December 2010 that ignited the entire Middle East. “We have far more freedoms,” one peddler hawking fruit in the same square lamented, “but far fewer jobs.”

Another noted that Mohamed Bouazizi, the vendor who set himself on fire, did so not to vote in a democratic election but because harassment by local officials had cost him his livelihood.

As the peddlers vented, prayers ended at the whitewashed mosque across the street. Among the faithful were Salafis, ultraconservative Sunni Muslims vying to define the new order according to seventh-century religious traditions rather than earthly realities.

For years, many Salafis — “salaf” means predecessors — had avoided politics and embraced autocrats as long as they were Muslims. But over the past eight months, clusters of worshipers across the Middle East have morphed into powerful Salafi movements that are tapping into the disillusionment and disorder of transitions.

A new Salafi Crescent, radiating from the Persian Gulf sheikdoms into the Levant and North Africa, is one of the most underappreciated and disturbing byproducts of the Arab revolts. In varying degrees, these populist puritans are moving into the political space once occupied by jihadi militants, who are now less in vogue. Both are fundamentalists who favor a new order modeled on early Islam. Salafis are not necessarily fighters, however. Many disavow violence.

In Tunisia, Salafis started the Reform Front party in May and led protests, including in Sidi Bouzid. This summer, they’ve repeatedly attacked symbols of the new freedom of speech, ransacking an art gallery and blocking Sufi musicians and political comedians from performing. In Egypt, Salafis emerged last year from obscurity, hastily formed parties, and in January won 25 percent of the seats in parliament — second only to the 84-year-old Muslim Brotherhood. Salafis are a growing influence in Syria’s rebellion. And they have parties or factions in Algeria, Bahrain, Kuwait, Libya, Yemen and among Palestinians.

Salafis are only one slice of a rapidly evolving Islamist spectrum. The variety of Islamists in the early 21st century recalls socialism’s many shades in the 20th. Now, as then, some Islamists are more hazardous to Western interests and values than others. The Salafis are most averse to minority and women’s rights.

A common denominator among disparate Salafi groups is inspiration and support from Wahhabis, a puritanical strain of Sunni Islam from Saudi Arabia. Not all Saudis are Wahhabis. Not all Salafis are Wahhabis, either. But Wahhabis are basically all Salafis. And many Arabs, particularly outside the sparsely populated Gulf, suspect that Wahhabis are trying to seize the future by aiding and abetting the region’s newly politicized Salafis — as they did 30 years ago by funding the South Asian madrassas that produced Afghanistan’s Taliban.

Salafis go much further in restricting political and personal life than the larger and more modern Islamist parties that have won electoral pluralities in Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco since October. For most Arabs, the rallying cry is justice, both economic and political. For Salafis, it is also about a virtue that is inflexible and enforceable.

“You have two choices: heaven or hellfire,” Sheikh Muhammad el-Kurdi instructed me after his election to Egypt’s parliament as a member of Al Nour, a Salafi party. It favors gender segregation in schools and offices, he told me, so that men can concentrate. “It’s O.K. for you to be in the room,” he explained. “You are our guest, and we know why you’re here. But you are one woman and we are three men — and we all want to marry you.” Marriage may have been a euphemism.

Other more modern Islamists fear the Salafi factor. “The Salafis try to push us,” said Rachid al-Ghannouchi, founder of Ennahda, the ruling Islamist party in Tunisia. The two Islamist groups there are now rivals. “Salafis are against drafting a constitution. They think it is the Koran,” grumbled Merhézia Labidi, the vice chairwoman of Tunisia’s Constituent Assembly and a member of Ennahda.

Salafis are deepening the divide between Sunni and Shiite Muslims and challenging the “Shiite Crescent,” a term coined by Jordan’s King Abdullah in 2004, during the Iraq war, to describe an arc of influence from Shiite-dominated Iran to its allies in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Today, these rival crescents risk turning countries in transition into battlefields over the region’s future.

The Salafis represent a painful long-term conundrum for the West. Their goals are the most anti-Western of any Islamist parties. They are trying to push both secularists and other Islamists into the not-always-virtuous past.

American policy recently had its own awakening after 60 years of support for autocratic rulers. The United States opted to embrace people power and electoral change in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Yemen. Yet Washington still embraces authoritarian Gulf monarchies like Saudi Arabia, tolerating their vague promises of reform and even pledging the United States’ might to protect them.

Foreign policy should be nuanced, whether because of oil needs or to counter threats from Iran. But there is something dreadfully wrong with tying America’s future position in the region to the birthplace and bastion of Salafism and its warped vision of a new order.

Robin Wright, the author of “Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World,” is a fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

DOD Sec. Hegal Reorganizes POW-MP-DPM/JPAC

2014-05-12T17:17:00.001-07:00

DPMO/JPAC

http://www.stripes.com/news/us/after-unflattering-reports-hagel-orders-shake-up-of-mia-accounting-agencies-1.268988

After unflattering reports, Hagel orders shake-up of MIA accounting agencies

WASHINGTON — In the wake of numerous reports of misconduct and poor management practices by personnel charged with recovering and identifying the remains of missing servicemembers from past conflicts, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has ordered the Pentagon to come up with a plan to consolidate all Defense Department assets into a single, more accountable entity that will manage all personnel accounting resources, research and operations.

On Thursday, Hagel directed Michael Lumpkin, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, to deliver the plan to him within 30 days, Pentagon Press Secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby told reporters.

In a memo obtained by Stars and Stripes, Hagel said Lumpkin’s action plan should propose ways to:

Maximize the number of identifications.

Improve transparency for families.

Reduce duplicative functions.

Establish a system for centralized, complete, fully accessible personnel case files for missing personnel.

In the memo, Hagel suggested he is considering making wide-ranging changes in areas such as:

Civilian and military personnel policies.

Contracting and acquisition policies.

Statutory and regulatory authorities.

Facilities.

Budgets.

Procedures.

Oversight of laboratory operations.

“This is a top priority for the Department,” Hagel said.

The initiative follows embarrassing revelations and unflattering reports about Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command and the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office, the two agencies with primary responsibility for recovery and identification efforts.

In July, the Associated Press reported that a JPAC internal study of its operations concluded that DOD’s effort to account for the tens of thousands of Americans missing in action were so incompetent and mismanaged that it risks descending from “dysfunction to total failure.”

In October, the Pentagon acknowledged that JPAC had been holding phony remains arrival ceremoniesfor seven years.

In December, Stars and Stripes reported charges that JPAC and DPMO officials ignored leads, prematurely declared MIAs deceased and unrecoverable and argued against identifying unknown remains in government custody when evidence suggested they could be identified.

In January, Stars and Stripes obtained internal communications from JPACdocumenting allegations that JPAC’s Central Identification Laboratory personnel were involved in the desecration and mishandling of remains, failure to keep critical records, excavation of incorrect sites, and waste of taxpayer funds on duplicate efforts.

A Government Accountability Office audit released in July cited leadership failures and bureaucratic infighting as problems plaguing Pentagon recovery and identification efforts.

Kirby said the JPAC report and other reviews led Hagel to issue his directive.

“The reviews that we've seen of this mission tell us lots of things. One of them is, it's not being done as efficiently as possible from an organizational perspective,” he told reporters.

Hagel served in combat as an Army infantry squad leader during the Vietnam War. More than 1,600 Americans involved in that conflict remain unaccounted, according to DPMO.

“As a veteran himself, the secretary has an especially personal commitment to ensuring we account for and bring home as many of our missing and fallen service personnel as possible,” Kirby said.

harper.jon@stripes.com
Twitter: @JHarperStripes

http://www.defense.gov/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=5399

Department of Defense Press Briefing by Secretary Hagel in the Pentagon Briefing Room

Presenter: Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel
March 31, 2014

SECRETARY OF DEFENSE CHUCK HAGEL: Many of you know that I'm going to leave tomorrow morning for a ten-day trip to Asia Pacific. Some of you will be accompanying me on that trip. And I think you've seen the itinerary of where we're going. And some of the more important part of that -- of the trip and the focus starting with ASEAN defense ministers' meeting in Hawaii for two and a half days and then on to Japan and China and Mongolia.

It's to, again, reemphasize the rebalance strategic interests of our country, to reassure our allies, to, again, make very clear of our commitment to our allies in the Asia Pacific. This will be my fourth trip since becoming Secretary of Defense to Asia Pacific. The meeting in Hawaii and the full agenda of this trip, again, underscores the importance of this rebalance. And it's going to give us an opportunity to talk specifically about some of the issues that we're dealing with in the Asia Pacific, all of our partners, the security challenges, the issues that are of concern to peace, prosperity, the future of that region. And as you all know, we have been, the United States of America, a Pacific power for many years. We've looked forward to a continuation of building those relationships and those partnerships as we go forward.

Security and stability are key anchors for prosperity, for economic development and we rebalance to the Asia Pacific with all of those different responsibilities and dimensions as our focus. And it's pretty clear the tremendous progress that's been made in the Asia Pacific the last few years has been much the result of a secure area, an area that has worked through many of its differences peacefully. There are still issues. There are still questions.

But it's a region that has prospered because they have worked through many of these -- these differences.

And the ASEAN institution itself, that organization is a critically important part of that. So to have the 10 ASEAN defense ministers in Hawaii, on United States soil, is important. And I'm looking forward to that meeting with my ASEAN counterparts.

Let me now turn to another matter before taking your questions, and that is the finding and recovering and identifying the remains of America's missing from past conflicts. This effort is not just a top priority for the Department of Defense; it's our responsibility and our obligation.

In February, I directed the acting undersecretary of defense for policy, Mike Lumpkin, to provide me with recommendations on how to reorganize the Joint Prisoner of War, Missing in Action Accounting Command or otherwise known as JPAC, so that DOD could more effectively account for our missing personnel and ensure their families receive timely and accurate information.

Based on his recommendations, I've directed the department to undertake the following steps to reorganize this effort into a single, accountable organization that has complete oversight of personnel accounting resources, research and operations.

First, we will establish a new Defense agency that combines the Defense Prisoners of War, Missing Personnel Office, or otherwise known as DPMO, the JPAC office, and select functions of the U.S. Air Force's Life Scientists Equipment Laboratory. This agency will be overseen by the undersecretary of defense for policy.

By consolidating functions, we will resolve issues of duplication and inefficiency, and build a stronger, more transparent and more responsive organization.

All communications with family members of the missing from past conflicts will be managed and will be organized by this new agency.

Second, to streamline the identification process, an armed forces medical examiner, working for the new agency, will be single -- will be the single DOD identification authority. They will oversee the scientific operations of the central identification laboratory in Hawaii and other laboratories in Omaha and Dayton.

Third, to centralize budgetary resources for this important mission, we will work with Congress to realign its appropriations into a single budget.

Fourth, to improve the search, recovery and identification process, the department will implement a centralized database and case management system, containing all missing service members’ information.

Fifth, I've directed the department to develop proposals for expanding public/private partnerships in identifying our missing. The goal is to leverage the capabilities and the efforts of organizations outside of government that responsible work to account for our missing.

These steps will help improve the accounting mission, increase the number of identifications of our missing, provide greater transparency for their families, and expand our case file system to include all missing personnel.

We will continue to do everything we can to account for and bring as many of our missing and fallen service personnel as possible home here to the United States.

We've been listening to and consulting with veterans' service organizations about how to improve the department's MIA operations. And I appreciate, we all appreciate, their input and their support to ensure the full accounting of all of our country's missing service members. And we will continue to work closely together as we go forward.

I want to particularly thank Mike Lumpkin and his team for their efforts.

And I also want to thank the veterans' organizations who have been so important over so many years to this effort.

And in particularly – in particular, I want to thank Ann Mills Griffin of the National League of Families, for her many, many years of service and leadership on this project.

Ann came to see me last December. I've known Ann and worked with her for over 30 years on many projects. And she presented to me a five-page, single-spaced, well thought through, first, identification of the issues; a framing of the problems; and I thought some very, very solid recommendations on how we go forward.

So she deserves a lot of credit. Her organization deserves credit, as well as the institutions and veterans organizations that have been key to this effort for many years.

Thank you. I'd be glad to respond to questions.

Q: Mr. Secretary, on that -- on that last issue, how does all this address the basic demand of the families of the missing that you provide faster and more reliable accounting? And if I may throw in a second question, if you don't mind, could you confirm the reports that the Russians have begun pulling forces back from the border with Ukraine.

SEC. HAGEL: Well, on the first question, Bob, I think if you really break this down as to what we've done here, as to how it relates to the families, we're streamlining everything. We're streamlining the organization, the process and the resources. And what that means to families is, first, they will be communicated with clearly, directly, and it will be communications from one central location. That has not been the case.

They'll have a place where they can go to identify updates, questions, concerns. And it won't be a one-way street. It will be a two-way street. We'll communicate with them.

I think another reason the families will strongly support what we're doing is it helps us do the job. It helps us get the mission accomplished. We've got tens of thousands of missing all over the world. And it's a difficult -- it's a very difficult mission. And if we put together a better institution, organization, better management, better structure, better use of our resources, then I hope we'll be far more effective in being able to accomplish the mission of identifying these missing remains and getting these missing remains brought home to the families.

So, I'm much encouraged, and I again want to say how much we all appreciate the good work that's been done here. There's -- there's not a more poignant, emotional, important issue in our society today, and you all know this, than you take care of the people who gave their lives to this country, and you take care of their families. And that has been a critical component of who we are as Americans from -- from beginning -- from the beginning of this republic.

Your second question, I cannot confirm, Bob, one way or the other whether the Russians are pulling troops back from the Ukrainian-Russian border. As you know, President Obama made it very clear to President Putin in their conversation that that is going to be required, necessary in order for us to have any -- any further meaningful conversation about how we resolve and deescalate this crisis.

I think it was also made pretty clear by Secretary Kerry yesterday in his conversations with Minister Lavrov.

Q: If I could follow up on what Bob said. Is it your understanding that there was an agreement by the Russians to pull back those 40,000-plus troops in those conversations with the president or with Secretary Kerry?

SEC. HAGEL: No, I didn't say that. What I said was, what the president told President Putin and what Secretary Kerry told Minister Lavrov, as I told Minister Shoigu when Minister Shoigu and I spoke last week. Minister Shoigu, I think as we reported out, assured me that those troops were there for exercises. And he assured me they were not going to cross the border and I think Mr. Lavrov has said the same thing, as has President Putin.

But that said, there's still a tremendous buildup of Russian forces on that border.

Q: What do you mean by "tremendous buildup? Can you give us a sense of how many troops are...

SEC. HAGEL: Tens of thousands.

Q: Mr. Secretary, why do you think -- why do you think President Putin amassed those troops on the border? Do you think that there was really any intent to actually enter Ukraine with those forces? Or that he simply did that as a bargaining chip so that the rest of the world would forget the fact that they took over Crimea and think, well, as long as they're not going in the Ukraine, they can keep Crimea?

SEC. HAGEL: Well, you're not going to like the answer, but I don't know, Jim, what the -- his intentions were.

Barbara?

Q: Sir, could I ask you about North Korea?

The artillery firings that we saw by the North Koreans into the Western Sea earlier today plus the Nodong medium-range missile firings and their statements on a nuclear test, number one, do you worry or what evidence do you have we might be entering a new provocation cycle with North Korea?

And a very quick follow-up on a different subject, the Malaysian minister early today, his press conference talked about traveling to ASEAN and meeting with you and said that he would be asking you for additional capabilities or equipment to help search for the plane, but he wasn't specific and I was wondering if there's any -- you can think of any additional assistance that the U.S. might realistically, practically be able to give to that effort, but North Korea first.

SEC. HAGEL: On North Korea, I'm in touch with our commander there, the U.N. commander, briefing, Commander General Scaparrotti. He had a report about two hours ago this morning on briefing me on what was going on. I think you all have the latest. There has been artillery exchanges. As you know, the fishing vessel was released. So the provocation that the North Koreans have, once again, engaged in, is dangerous and it -- and it needs to stop.

As to the Malaysian acting transportation minister, defense minister, I've spoken with him twice in the last week. In both instances, when he's requested assistance, we have provided that assistance, some of the latest equipment being the pinger locator, which I think, as you know, has left Australian -- on an Australian ship headed toward this vast area, where we all think we may have identified something. But just a reminder, that area is the size of New Mexico. And this very sophisticated equipment that we have provided and we have provided, as far as I know, everything the Malaysian government has requested of us, is really reliant totally on defined search areas. It's got tremendous capability but we've -- we're going to have to narrow the search area.

I don't know what additional requests he will make of me. I certainly will listen carefully to whatever those are. I think the Australians, as you all know, now are in the lead on this and they've been doing a tremendous job. We're providing everything we can provide as are other countries. But the Australians have this now and are really doing quite a good job with it, too.

Thank you.

Q: On North Korea, North Korea foreign minister announced yesterday North Korea were going to look for nuclear tests soon. How did you respond toward this North Korea's putting statement?

SEC. HAGEL: Well, as I've said, the North Koreans have to stop these provocative actions. And we have been very clear on that. And obviously when I'm in China, that will be a subject that I will discuss with my counterpart in China.

Q: Mr. Secretary, Ukraine has asked that the United States for weapons and for other military supplies, as they feel vulnerable, in light of what's happened in recent weeks, can you bring us up to speed on how those deliberations are working through the U.S. government, whether there's any new thinking about what type of aid would be -- would be a good idea that -- to render?

SEC. HAGEL: Well, as you know, the Ukrainians have asked for different kinds of materiel and their requests for assistance. You also know that the MREs have now been delivered. The interagency is going through the last cuts of decision-making on what additional assistance the United States would provide. As you all know, Secretary Kerry is in Brussels today, will be there for NATO meetings the next two days. I suspect these are gonna be issues that our NATO partners and the United States will be discussing as well.

I'll come back to you...

Q: Mr. Secretary, General Breedlove was scheduled to testify in front of the Armed Services Committees this week, but he was recalled to Europe because of the Ukraine-Russia crisis.

In light of what's happening with North Korea, is there any thought being given to having General Scaparrotti stay there, rather than testify this week, as he's scheduled to do?

SEC. HAGEL: Well, certainly, the kind of world that we live in is not a prescribed week-long schedule kind of world. Depending on issues and challenges that occur, we have the flexibility of always adjusting our military commanders, depending on where they're required.

In General Breedlove's case, I think it was the smart thing to do to have him go back in light of his importance to NATO, especially with the NATO foreign ministers meeting the next two days. The supreme allied commander is going to be an integral part of that -- of that session over the next two days.

So we're flexible in depending on where we need our commanders, where the focus is the most important is the way we'll do it.

Jen?

Q: Mr. Secretary, I'd like to get your thoughts on this March 14th memo from your department about the banning of tobacco sales on military bases and in the Navy in particular.

You were in Vietnam. You know how cigarettes are often used by forces in combat. It's a morale issue.

Where do you stand on the issue of banning tobacco sales and possibly smoking on bases and ships?

SEC. HAGEL: Well, as you know, the Navy already has taken some action on this over the years.

I think you start with, like any of these issues, you look at the health of your force. I don't know if there's anybody in America who still thinks that tobacco's good for you. Maybe there are some.

The surgeon general 50 years ago made that statement pretty clear.

We don't allow smoking in any of our government buildings, restaurants, states and municipalities have pretty clear regulations on this.

I think in reviewing any options that we have as to whether we in the military through commissaries, PXs, sell or continue to sell tobacco is something we need to look at. And we are looking at it. And I think we owe it to -- our people.

The costs, health care costs, are astounding. Well over a billion dollars, just in the Department of Defense, on tobacco-related illness and health care.

Now, the dollars are one thing, but the health of your -- of your people, I don't know if you put a price tag on that.

So I think it does need to be looked at and reviewed.

Yes?

(CROSSTALK)

Q: In regards to Mexico, Mexico and U.S. military forces have developed recently a very close relationship, and they have achieved agreements to support each other in case of natural disasters or other common threats.

But recently, there have not been any meetings between both secretaries.

Do you plan to go to Mexico or the secretaries will come over here? And what is the current -- current level of cooperation? Is there any training -- training to Mexican troops, or are they participating in military exercise with the U.S.?

SEC. HAGEL: Well, first, I think you probably know that our secretary of homeland security, Secretary Johnson, was just recently in Mexico and met with all the senior leaders, including the president.

I will be going to Mexico. I'm not sure we were going to announce that today, but -- (Laughter.) -- I get nervous when Kirby gets too close to me here, and I -- tells me not to say something.

But I will be going to Mexico. Mexico is a very important partner, and we'll continue to strengthen that relationship.

Thank you very much. I'll see you on -- some of you on the plane.

Read the Approved Personnnel Accounting Reorganization Fact Sheet.

As family members with loved ones still unaccounted-for from past wars prepare for changes in how the US Government will speed up recoveries, there is a likelihood that more emphasis will be placed on exhumations of service members’ remains interred in America’s 24 burial grounds on foreign soil and presumably in Hawaii. Most are located in Europe and have been a major attraction by American visitors for decades.

The U.S. military’s recent pivot to Asia Pacific generated an urgency for recoveries/identifications of MIAs in that region. In the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial, many of our WWII losses were killed in New Guinea or the Battle of the Philippines and the Allied recapture of the islands, according to the American Battle Monuments Commission — the organization that maintains our military cemeteries. There are no American-maintained cemeteries in Korea or Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

THE BASICS

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel made it official on March 31st during a press conference, explaining that the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) and the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) are to be consolidated into one agency, of which has yet to be named. The newly formed agency will report to a civilian, appointed by the President.

At this point, it appears that Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michael Lumpkin has assumed temporary responsibility. Lumpkin was assigned the task of presenting a plan of how to reorganize the accounting community and given 30 days to complete the assignment. Whoever is appointed to lead the new agency will need nerves of steel. No date was given as to when the agency will be stood up, but it is expected to be headquartered at the Pentagon with changeover coming in weeks, according to one report.

CHANGE IN LAB IDENTIFICATIONS

JPACs Central Identification Laboratory (CIL) will no longer be the lead organization for MIA identifications. The Armed Forces Medical Examiner will work for the new agency and be the single identification authority and oversee operations at the CIL in Hawaii, and satellite labs in Omaha, NE, and Dayton, Ohio. It appears that most remains are expected to be identified through DNA. The Pentagon should have the resources to ensure that all DNA is captured efficiently and quickly. I know how hard DPMO and JPAC worked at every annual meeting and regional meeting to spread the word, but their resources were limited.

Although nothing was mentioned about the role of anthropologists, who have traditionally worked in the field and the lab, I am hopeful that they will continue to assist in the process. Most people do not know that the CIL has earned some of the highest ratings possible in the field of forensic science. It is in the same league as the FBI lab, and in fact has consulted over time with Bureau specialists. The CILs certifications allow their scientists to assist with major disasters throughout the world. The lab, under Dr. Tom Holland, has reportedly never produced a mistaken identification in 20 years. Holland is respected on a global level, as are those who work for him at the top management levels. It was not clear if Holland will be offered a role with the new agency.

JOIN THE SEARCH?

Few details or hardcore questions were asked of Hagel or Lumpkin by the press corps assigned to the Pentagon, namely as to how the military will fit into the newly organized agency, since JPAC is a military command. Because the military is critical for the overall success of the accounting mission, I actually anticipate that military involvement could increase, but with the drawdown, who knows! Even though Lumpkin’s plan calls for expanding opportunities for private search groups to get involved and a host of other ways of doing more with less, I am hoping that the government is sufficiently concerned about liability — operations are dangerous and sometimes hazardous because of UXOs. Plus, there can be political ramifications of sending private groups, as opposed to official groups, to global locations. However, JPAC has been involved with a number of outside groups, and those will likely be given a larger role. Each country has a little different type of welcome mat for teams conducting field operations. My guess is that the new agency will be doing a lot of internal and external policy revisions.

WORKABLE DATABASE

The agency will create a centralized database and case management system that will be comprised of all missing service members’ information. In my opinion, this will be the biggest, most complex part of the reorganization and should reveal a lot about the difficulties that predecessors have had in working many of the cases, especially ones from WWII.

Unless officials understand that historic MIA case files from WWII need to be updated and prioritized before passing them along to operational teams, they will be kicking the can down the road. A good, functioning database should be able to flag those cases that are ready to go. A word of caution — I suggest that the government be very careful not to get rid of experienced forensic analysts and forensic investigators familiar with MIA recoveries — these people can work with whomever is creating a new MIA solutions-oriented program and, hopefully, avoid the garbage in, garbage out situation. One of the biggest advantages that could come out of a good system is the grouping of well-prepared cases to allow multiple field operations in one geographic area. Good logistics will save money as this program becomes bigger in the near future. JPAC has worked effectively in Southeast Asia — mainly in Vietnam — using this type of model.

MAKING THE NUMBERS

It appears that making 200 identifications annually by 2015, as mandated in the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act, is still a go. My assumption is that there are plans for exhumations to ensure that the goal is met. However, I would caution about relying too much on exhumations, because there are different schools of thought about the sanctity of these graves. But perhaps even more concerning would be the potential for exhuming remains for which there is no

DNA match. I know that families and the general public will be eager to learn the results of these recoveries. Most of us are more familiar with hand-overs or field operations. It has been my understanding that many interments consist of co-mingled remains, which can be challenging to sort out, but perhaps science has now broken through most of the barriers.

TRANSPARENCY FOR FAMILIES

Hagel also noted that the new agency would provide a single point of contact for all families. The theory is to offer easy access for learning about search and identification activities and is part of the government’s promise of transparency. With thousands of families wanting information but not being computer literate and living in different time zones, I’m not sure how this will work but we’ll soon find out.

For those of us with loved ones still unaccounted-for from the Vietnam War, there were apparently no sidebar conversations with Lumpkin or Hagel – at least that surfaced immediately – about the future of the detachments in Southeast Asia. But most reporters that cover the Pentagon would not necessarily be aware of the intricacies of recovering our loved ones from the field. However, you can bet that every Vietnam War family who has been following their loved one’s case is eager to know that the work in Southeast Asia will continue and perhaps increase. Time is running out for recovering our MIAs in that part of the world, and I hope that Lumpkin will visit Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia ASAP to see for himself. How large a role our government will play in future Vietnam War recoveries, versus the Vietnamese government, is likely to be a big issue down the road.

ADVICE FOR LUMPKIN

Obviously, the reorganization is in the early stages, and no one at this time is making any promises of when the agency expects to be fully operational. The DoD will officially own this program and be responsible for its achievements and failings and, as most of us know, there are no sacred cows in this arena. My advice to Lumpkin is that he embrace some of the long-time internal experts in DPMO and JPAC, and forget all the BS that has literally taken over the MIA program with journalists looking for the big scoop and people wanting to earn their bones — no pun intended, telling you they know the latest and greatest about historical recoveries. It is the families that need to be convinced that the new agency is not overselling and under delivering, but prepared to keep its promise. We want this new effort to work.

What do I think of the plan? Guardedly optimistic, but as Ann Mills Griffiths was quoted in an article, “the proof is in the pudding.”

MIA RECOVERIES: CAN HAGEL DO IT?

Monday, March 17, 2014 @ 10:03 PM posted by Elaine Zimmer Davis

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel is preparing to overhaul the MIA Accounting Community. He has directed the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Michael Lumpkin, a retired Naval Officer and former SEAL with a distinguished service record, to come up with a plan by 20 March.

ALERT!

CLICK HERE FOR LATEST NEWS ON THE REORGANIZATION

Families with loved ones missing-in-action from WWII, the Korean War, Vietnam War and Cold War could soon learn of the direction that Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel plans to take the accounting community in the near future. Undergoing a huge overhaul, the community is comprised of several organizations involved with MIA operations – most of which also support our nation’s active-duty military. If all goes well, they will find themselves operating as one big happy family.

Included in the group are the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO), Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), Armed Forces DNA Laboratory (AFDIL), Life Sciences Equipment Laboratory of the Air Force (LSEL), casualty and mortuary affairs offices of the military departments and other groups as designated by the Secretary of Defense.

Hagel has directed the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Michael Lumpkin, a retired Naval Officer and former SEAL Team Commander, to take all information given to him by the Military Departments, Combatant Commands and OSD to reorganize the accounting community “into a single accountable entity that has oversight of all personnel accounting resources, research, and operations across the Department.” Hagel signed the directive, Feb. 20th with a 30-day deadline, meaning that Lumpkin has until March 20th to pull it all together.

ON THE TABLE

Hagel’s directive involves the following issues: how to maximize the number of identifications; improve transparency for families; reduce duplicative functions; and how to establish a system for centralized, accessible case files for missing personnel.

Hagel also wants recommendations for changes to the civilian and military personnel policies, contracting and acquisition policies, statutory and regulatory authorities, facilities, budgets and procedures to ensure effective oversight of laboratory operations.

REALITY CHECK

In my opinion the most misunderstood – yet critical component — is in the area of field operations, which fall under JPAC – the military organization that conducts investigations, excavations and recoveries around the globe. The ultimate goal is to bring home remains that will lead to identifications of MIA service members. Currently, all remains are processed at JPACs Central Identification Laboratory (CIL) at Hickam AFB in Hawaii – most are identified by the scientists at the CIL, but with advances in DNA capability and when appropriate, more and more are sent to the AFDIL at Dover AFB in Delaware for identification.

JPAC also conducts exhumations, which are expected to increase over time, especially when DPMO updates policies related to exhumed remains. In addition, JPAC facilitates the recovery of remains, handed over by foreign countries, that have been missing for decades and may belong to an American MIA. All remains are unique, as is the process of identifying them.

MANDATE MADNESS

Many family members and government officials do not understand the nature of field operations, namely because the uniqueness factor comes into play once again. Finding and identifying historic remains is very difficult, as is making the numbers of IDs to meet new government guidelines imposed by the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

The NDAA included a mandate that JPACs lab produce 200 identifications annually by 2015, without paying attention to how the system works and the difficulty of executing such a broad-reaching mandate without sufficient resources across the board. The idea may have been well-meaning, but it was poorly thought out and, in some ways, led us to where we are now.

SUCCESS IN THE FIELD

What the operational teams do in the field is nothing short of amazing. Imagine conducting a recovery in an Alaskan glacier, related to a 1952 Korean War missing aircraft; or finding pieces of aircraft and life support gear 150 ft. below the waters, off the coast of Vietnam — four decades after it crashed. Contrary to what may appear in some recounts of these missions, JPAC is actively involved in the process.

SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM (May 27, 2011) – A Vietnamese Naval Officer, left, learns about the USNS Bowditch from the ship’s Captain and another crew member during an ongoing investigation off the coast of Vietnam. The USNS Bowditch is a Pathfinder Class oceanographic research ship which uses specialized sonar to survey the ocean’s floor, searching for U.S. aircraft lost during the Vietnam War. (JPAC photo by DON civilian Ron Ward/Released)

Our military and experts from other countries or disciplines provide critical support for many operations, beyond boots-on-the-ground. They bring with them specially-equipped ships to look for off shore crashes, while others bring innovative equipment. There is so much that goes on behind the scenes, often not producing immediate success, but slow is not “no” in the recovery business.

We have hundreds of thousands of people who have gone missing in America, never to be found — even when the case was hot and generated a lot of hype and searches; JPAC field teams go out and find our missing service members (some from nearly a century ago), working on cold cases in some of the most horrific conditions in foreign countries, and yet we seem more interested in denouncing instead of crediting them.

MIA EDUCATION

It is never going to be easy to find our MIAs. No one knows the actual number of missing service members due to historic recordkeeping, particularly during the WWII era, nor do we really know how many are recoverable; however, the effort to bring home remains of our loved ones is as much a part of military lore as it is a part of our nation’s promise to help MIA families find closure.

As our nation becomes more disconnected from the military, it is obvious that stories and TV coverage about the MIA situation often lack credibility, because fewer people understand what death in combat is like — never mind historical combat. They do not know how bodies go missing on the battlefield; how aircraft from wars in different eras result in different types of crashes. And how in-country geographic conditions can vary, making it impossible to say that a piece of ground penetrating equipment that works in one area will do likewise in another.

And when field teams are armed with poorly prepared case data, as can exist in WWII cases, the results can be costly on several levels. Finding a former enemy’s remains does not lead to closure for a family back in the states, and JPAC ends up eating the cost of a very time intensive excavation.

The need for solutions oriented software may finally find its way to the accounting community — in my opinion this will be a key element in any plan.

MAKING GOOD CHOICES

Although Lumpkin has not been involved in the global MIA effort, his credentials are impressive, especially as they apply to his military career. Lumpkin spent time in Iraq, Afghanistan, Horn of Africa and the Philippines. He also held top leadership positions throughout his distinguished SEAL career.

Michael Lumpkin

I am confident that Lumpkin will come up with a solid, realistic plan. Where it goes from there remains to be seen.

There are so many moving parts to this huge undertaking that placing emphasis in the right area will be difficult but not impossible. Above all, we have the greatest military in the world, and with proper support and budget, they are well-positioned to take care of their own. I hope Hagel and Lumpkin agree.

We all want the same thing — to bring home our MIAs from former battlefields. It is what America does, and we don’t give up.

Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) News

From DASD Winfield May 5, 2014:

G-o-o-o-o-o-d Afternoon

http://www.missingpatriot.com/news/defense-prisoner-warmissing-personnel-office-dpmo-news/

Teammates, Partners, Stakeholders and Friends,

Spring has finally sprung. After the cold winter the sunshine and cherry blossoms are a welcome sight. I hope this finds warm and sunny skies arriving to your home too. As the weather warms here, there is a lot going on in the Personnel Accounting Community.

Oral History Program:
On March 24 a DPMO analyst attended the annual reunion of the Army’s 24th Infantry Division, West Coast Chapter, in Laughlin Nev. Forty-one Korean War veterans were interviewed to collect information useful for pursuing leads on unaccounted for service members from the Korean War.

National Personnel Records Research:
From March 31 to April 4, two analysts from DPMO conducted research at the National Personnel Records Center for DPMO, JPAC, and the Service Casualty Offices. During their visit, they scanned 320 personnel files related to the Vietnam conflict and 27 related to World War II.

Meeting with Kuentai USA:
Mr. Bruce Harder (DPMO), Dr. Cynthia Chambers (DPMO), Dr. Ian Spurgeon (DPMO), Mr. Dan Melton (JPAC) and Ms. Atsuko Hayashi (JPAC), met with members of Kuentai USA. Kuentai USA is a non-profit organization dedicated to recovering American and Japanese dead from World War II battlefields in the Pacific. Building a relationship with this new organization will enhance our efforts to repatriate our fallen heroes.

Recently laid to rest:
-Cpl. William F. Day, U.S. Army, Company C, 32nd Infantry Regiment, 31st Regimental Combat Team, was lost on Dec. 2, 1950, in North Korea. He was accounted for on March 6, 2014. He was buried with full military honors on April 7, 2014, in La Center, Ky.
-1st Lt. Louis L. Longman , U.S. Army Air Forces, 433rd Fighter Squadron, 475th Fighter Group, 5th Air Force, was lost on April 16, 1944, in Papua New Guniea. He was accounted for on Nov. 1, 2013. He was buried with full military honors on April 12, 2014, in Rock Island, Ill.
-2nd Lt. Verne L. Gibb, U.S. Army Air Forces, 72nd Area Service Squadron, 52nd Area Service Group, 10th Air Force, was lost on Oct. 23, 1945, in Burma. He was accounted for on Nov. 22, 2013. He was buried with full military honors on April 23, 2014, in Leavenworth, Kan.
-Pfc. William T. Carneal, U.S. Army, Company D, 1st Battalion, 105th Infantry Regiment, was lost on July 7, 1944, in Saipan. He was accounted for on Jan. 21, 2014. He was buried with full military honors on April 25, 2014, in Paducah, Ky.

From DASD Winfield April 4, 2014:

DPMO — Did you know? April 4, 2014

To:

G-o-o-o-o-o-d Afternoon Teammates, Partners, Stakeholders and Friends,

It’s hard to believe that spring is upon us! Here is an update on what has
been going on in the Personnel Accounting Community.

Personnel Accounting Community Reorganization:

On February 20, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel directed the Acting Under
Secretary of Defense for Policy, Michael Lumpkin, to provide him with
recommendations on how to reorganize the Personnel Accounting Community so
that DoD can more effectively account for our missing personnel and ensure
their families receive timely and accurate information. Based on his
recommendations, those of past reviews, and inputs from Veteran Service
Organizations and Family Organizations, Secretary Hagel announced on March
31, the actions he has directed the DoD to undertake to reorganize the
mission of accounting for our personnel from previous wars into a single,
accountable organization that has complete oversight of personnel accounting
resources, research and operations.

Secretary Hagel’s decision to reorganize DoD’s Personnel Accounting mission
includes the following:

1. DoD will establish a new Defense Agency that combines DPMO, JPAC,
and select functions of the U.S. Air Force’s Life Sciences Equipment
Laboratory. This agency will be led by a presidentially appointed official
with a General officer deputy, and will be overseen by the Under Secretary
of Defense for Policy. All communications with family members of the
missing from past conflicts will be managed and organized by this new
agency. DoD will provide proposed changes to existing legislation needed to
support this decision for consideration in the 2015 National Defense
Authorization Act.

2. To streamline the identification process, an Armed Forces Medical
Examiner working for the new agency will be the single DoD identification
authority for past conflict identifications. They will oversee the
scientific operations of the Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii,
the satellite laboratory in Omaha, Neb., and the Life Science Equipment
Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio.

3. DoD will work with Congress to realign its appropriations for this
mission into a single budget line, allowing for greater execution
flexibility in the accounting mission with the ability to align resources to
respond more effectively.

4. To improve the search, recovery, and identification process, the DoD
will implement a centralized database and case management system containing
all missing service members’ information.

5. Secretary Hagel has also directed DoD to develop proposals for
expanding public-private partnerships in identifying our missing. The goal
is to leverage the capabilities and efforts of organizations outside of
government that responsibly work to account for our missing.

Implementation of these steps will help improve the accounting mission,
increase the number of identifications of our missing, provide greater
transparency for their families, and expand our case file system to include
all missing personnel. DoD will continue to do everything possible to
account for and bring home our missing and fallen service personnel.

Meeting with Japanese non-governmental organizations:

On February 20, DPMO representatives from Accounting Policy and World War II
Division met with two representatives from the Kuentai, a Japanese
non-governmental organization. Since last summer, both DPMO and Joint
POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) representatives have met several times
with the Kuentai. At this meeting, JPAC J5 representatives participated in a
telephone conference call with DPMO and Kuentai representatives. The Kuentai
conducts research and field activities in the U.S. and Asia to locate
remains of missing Japanese servicemen from World War II. For the last two
years, the Kuentai have conducted work in Saipan and have discovered the
remains of five probable U.S. soldiers from World War II, which have been
transferred to JPAC’s central identification laboratory to undergo the
identification process and analysis. Pfc. William Carneal was accounted for
Jan. 21, 2014. The other identifications are still in progress.

U.S. – Laos Consultations:

On February 28, in Vientiane, Laos, DPMO joined counterparts from JPAC, DIA
(Stony Beach), and the U.S. Embassy Vientiane in semi-annual consultations
with the government of Laos missing in action committee. This meeting was
used to discuss recently completed joint field activities and review planned
future operations in the country. In addition to JPAC commander Maj. Gen.
Kelly McKeague, U.S. Ambassador to Laos Honorable Dan Clune and Deputy Chief
of Mission Paul Mayer also participated in the discussions. The talks were
cordial, with much discussion and useful exchanges, and contributed to our
goal of achieving the fullest possible accounting for Americans missing in
that country. The next round of consultations is tentatively scheduled for
late summer.

Charlotte Family Member Update:

More than 229 families of servicemen missing from the Vietnam War, Korean
War, Cold War, and World War II attended our latest family update meeting on
March 15, making it the second largest monthly meeting since we started the
program in 1995. Of the 229 families that attended, 162 had never been to a
monthly meeting before. This demonstrates the continued strong interest and
support of the families. The unfortunate reality is we will never be able
to account for all those who are missing, but we do have the capability to
reach out and try and provide answers to the families on the fates of their
loved ones. Presently, the DPMO staff is working on some of the follow-up
actions resulting from that meeting.

World War II division case coordination work:

World War II analysts and historians are working on fulfilling the
requirement to build case files for every loss as directed by National
Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2010. This is being accomplished
by three related efforts. The first effort is a contract with Lockheed
Martin (LM) to scan all the Individual Deceased Personnel Files (IDPF) so
that they are available in a digital format. Scanning IDPFs will have
multiple benefits; it will save money in the long-run, it will reduce
contact with the original documents and therefore preserve the originals,
and it will increase the availability of information across the Personnel
Accounting Community. Second, World War II Division is working on writing a
case summary for every missing individual. This work begins with
acquisition of the IDPF and traveling to the National Archives (NARA) in
College Park, Md. to collect unit histories or other archival documentation
necessary to compose a case summary. The primary source documentation held
at NARA allows analysts to reconstruct the circumstances of loss and
previous search and recovery efforts. The standard being applied is the
case summary product that DPMO provides to families that attend the family
member updates. Third, analysts are working to aggregate the historical and
geographic data already collected by DPMO and JPAC into a consolidated
Personnel Accounting Community database.

Vietnam War case coordination work:

Representatives from DPMO, JPAC, LSEL and DIA (Stony Beach) met in Hawaii
from February 24 – 28 for the 48th Case Coordination Conference to determine
the way ahead for 384 of our service members still unaccounted for in
Southeast Asia (SEA). Analysts and field investigators reviewed all
available information on 243 cases involving those lost in Laos (72),
Vietnam (170) and China (one). They agreed upon the next steps toward
accounting for each individual while ensuring all efforts by the Accounting
Community were coordinated and focused on the same goal. SEA Accounting
Community participants also invited the JPAC Deputy Commander and the JPAC
Deputy J2 to observe our coordination process. All parties came away with a
much clearer understanding of how our analytical judgments can and do
support JPAC’s operational planning and resourcing decisions.

Northeast Asia (NEA) case coordination work:

Analysts from DPMO’s NEA Branch, Joint Commission Support Division, and
JPAC Research and Analysis held a Case Coordination Conference February
26-27 to review the past six months of case investigations in the Republic
of Korea and determine next steps for operations for the rest of fiscal year.
Archival research and oral history initiatives from the past year were
also reviewed. The total number of cases covered was 2,706 individual
losses.

Recently laid to rest:

-Pfc. Donald C. Durfee, U.S. Army, Company M, 31st Infantry Regiment, 31st

Regimental Combat Team (RCT), was lost Dec. 2, 1950 in North Korea. He was
accounted for Jan. 30, 2014. He was buried March 6, 2014 in Rittman, Ohio.

-Staff Sgt. Lawrence Woods, U.S. Army, Head Quarters, 5th Special Forces
Group, 1st Special Forces, was lost Oct. 24, 1964 near the Cambodian border.
He was accounted for Sept. 27, 2013. He was buried with full military honors
in Arlington National Cemetery, March 21, 2014.

-Cpl. Cristobal Romo, U.S. Army, Company L, 3rd Battalion, 31st Infantry
Regiment, 7th Infantry Division, was lost Dec. 12, 1950 in North Korea. He
was accounted for Jan. 13, 2014. He was buried with full military honors in
Riverside, Calif., March 22, 2014.

All the best, Q

W Montague “Q” Winfield, Maj Gen (Ret)

Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense

POW / Missing Personnel Affairs and Director, Defense POW / Missing Personnel Office

For additional information visit the DPMO webpage at: www.dtic.mil/dpmo.

http://www.propublica.org/article/pentagon-overhauls-effort-to-identify-its-missing

Pentagon Overhauls Effort to Identify its Missing

The restructuring promises to address many of the problems laid out in a recent ProPublica and NPR investigation.

by Megan McCloskey
ProPublica, March 31, 2014, 7:20

The Pentagon is overhauling its efforts to find and identify missing service members from past wars, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced Monday.

The changes address the problems laid out in an investigation by ProPublica and NPR, including outdated scientific methods, overlapping bureaucracy, a risk-averse disinterment policy for the 9,400 unknowns buried around the world, and poor laboratory management that inhibited the mission.

The Military is Leaving the Missing Behind

by Megan McClosey. Mar. 6, 2014

“The time has come for a paradigm shift,” said Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michael Lumpkin, who headed up a 30-day review of the mission Hagel ordered in February.

One of the bigger changes involves the military’s failure to embrace DNA. Our investigation detailed how the Pentagon identification effort relegated DNA to only a confirmation tool, rather than using it to lead the process as is now done in other countries.

Using a DNA-led process is “absolutely something we’re going to move toward,” Lumpkin said.

The Pentagon will “break away from the way of traditionally doing business...that didn’t fully embrace progressive science,” he said.

The Pentagon spends about $100 million a year on the MIA mission, yet it solves surprisingly few cases. Last year, the military identified just 60 service members out of the about 83,000 Americans missing from World War II, Korea and Vietnam. The lackluster efforts have been subjected to intense Congressional scrutiny and media coverage, including holding fake arrival ceremonies and mismanaging overseas excavations.

In restructuring the mission, the Pentagon is eliminating the two main agencies — the Hawaii-based Joint Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Accounting Command and the Washington-based Defense Prisoner of War Missing Personnel Office — and creating a new single agency. There will be one chain of command and one budget.

“We’re streamlining everything,” Hagel said.

The reorganization “resolves issues of duplication and inefficiency” and makes the effort “more transparent and responsive” to families, he said. The changes will be implemented over the next 18 months.

Although it’s unclear at this point what positions and personnel will be eliminated besides the commanders of JPAC and DPMO, Lumpkin insisted the as-yet-unnamed agency will be a “fundamentally new organization.”

“It’s not business as usual,” he said.

The restructuring pushes aside J-PAC’s scientific director, Tom Holland, who has held the position for 19 years. As ProPublica and NPR detailed, Holland has had nearly total control of each step in the identification process. That job will now be handled by an Armed Forces Medical Examiner.

The move appears meant to address the fact that sign-offs on the lab’s decisions were little more than a rubber stamp. Putting a medical examiner at the head of the process — someone who is scientifically knowledgeable — ensures “the opportunity for rubber stamping doesn’t exist,” Lumpkin said.

Outsiders and former J-PAC officials said the changes were promising.

“I think the Armed Forces Medical Examiners are probably as well suited to do that as anyone else I could think of,” said Mark Leney, a former JPAC anthropologist who now teaches at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

“Selecting a scientific leader with a track record of working in an interdisciplinary scientific environment, preferably someone who has managed a large group of diverse technical and scientific experts before, will be key to making this work,” Leney said.

Hagel also announced a plan to develop public-private partnerships to “leverage capabilities” of nongovernmental groups who work on recovering and identifying MIAs – we which included last month in a rundown of potential ways to fix the effort. “I think that would be a waste if we didn't do that,” Lumpkin said.

ProPublica and NPR also reported that under Holland’s leadership the lab rejected 96 percent of potential disinterments of unknown servicemembers, despite DNA advances that could help lead to their identification.

Lumpkin said that policy will be changed, though he had no specifics.

The Pentagon is also considering a national campaign to collect DNA samples from family members of the missing.

The restructuring will create one case management system for all missing persons, which should make it simpler to conduct research and keep families informed. DPMO and JPAC, long embroiled in a turf war, have often fought over records, duplicated trips to the National Archives, and done competing investigations.

“We’re now taking concrete, enforceable steps to fix what has been a management mess—but as with any effort to demand accountability, the devil will be in the details and the implementation,” Senators Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., said in a statement. “So we’re looking forward to working with the Pentagon to ensure the families of our missing heroes receive nothing less than honesty and transparency in our efforts to recover their loved ones.”

Long quote follows:

"It became clear that DNA analysis, though a crucial element in determining identity, is not in itself sufficient to provide a definitive identifiy for all these mortal remains. The principal reason is that so many bodies were disposed of in mass graves. In secondary and tertiary mass graves in particular - which are to be found all over BH [Bosnia Herzegovina] but especially in relation to the genocide in Srebenica - the remains are frequently commingled (Honig and Both 1997; Rhode 1998; Skinner et al. 2001). In such cases it is possible only to match the DNA profile of samples from bones or teeth with the DNA profile of blood samples provided by relatives. One problem of the DNA-led identification systems are childless brothers, who cannot be differentiated by DNA.

These are the main reasons for the need to resort in each case, nothwithstanding a positive DNA match, to other methods in order to arrive at a positive, definitive and official identification for a given set of skeletal remains. Every fact that is possible to ascertian must be taken into account (e.g., witness statements on the place and circumstances of death, statements by the family on personal effects and clothing), and a careful comparison between the ante-mortem [before death] and post-mortem [after death] data must be conducted (Sarajlic and Skulk, pers. comm. 2005-9; Yazedjian et al. 2005). The basic post-mortem element of this comparison is an anthropological analysis of the moartal remains thta have been exhumed, to determine the biological profile (Klonowski 1997).

Amila Zukanovic et al., 2011:66 - The Routledge Handbook of Archaeological Human Remains and Legislation: Bosnia and Herzegovina.

We need to credit Paul Cole for his report or the IVC. He predicted correctly that JPAC would fail and he was right. He did report that JPAC was dysfunctional because of Tom Holland and he was right. He did call for a reorganization an he was right again.

So the lab will be led by the Air Force and Tom Holland is looking for another job? I believe that Tom Holland did not understand the mission of JPAC and did not want to turn over lead of the mission to the people that did the DNA. He tried to hold on to the system he built without DNA, and he punished people that tried to help to improve and bring the JPAC Lab into the scientific forefront. In my opinion he applied "shallow" science to try to hold on to his failure. JPAC = FAILED

Thanks, Secy Hagel for promising to create a modern, responsible "paradigm shift" in identifying remains of American soldiers.

Two questions: How will the public know whether he's carrying out his promise?

And: Would it have happened if ProPublica had not carried out another of its powerful investigations? Why did no SecDef, present or past, think it worth dislodging the infamous timeserver Tom Holland despite decades of pitiful appeals by family

The families won't let the efforts to go back to where we came from. Tom Holland is gone and now real science can take over. Tom Holland fought for and held on to the only thing he had and that is a phony "Forensic anthropology" system that did not understand or agree with the science of DNA. The reason Tom Holland held on so dearly was because the other commands took the science or the DNA and made it theirs, Tom Holland had nothing.

We often wondered why would Tom Holland be so hard and cold to the science of bringing them home. The earlier NPR said it all, "Tom did not want to lose the autonomy and authority of the process", so he held them all up and kept JPAC away from the DNA science because he did not want to lose the power, pay, and prestige.

Eakins has a law suit that will deliver so results that would make it impossible to go back to where we can from. Tom is finished with the science but he got the scientist of the decade award or lifetime achievement award or some phony award. I hope they had his resignation stapled to the award.

So now what for Holland? Gone is his lab, gone is his certification for the lab and gone is his power. How stupid can one man be? He hires Paul Cole to write the report that brought down the house of cards.

Paul Cole wrote a report that described the house that Holland built out of cards, and poof....it is gone. The biggest loser in this one is Major General McKeague and Holland, gone are their command, soon to be replaced by honest men of real integrity.

What about Paul Cole, well he admitted that he is Marcus Svedicus and now is exposed to a huge liable law suit and violating the law by releasing confidential government documents and privacy act information. How about the rest of the Lab management? I think they are all fired, they are so gone.

Pity the fools that tried to hurt and punish their peers by writing the IVC report to hurt people like Dr. G. and others, little did they know that the knife cuts both ways. They were so arrogant to think they could cut off their nose in spite of their own face. They tried to destroy J2 and destroyed themselves in the process.

How ironic that JPAC hires Paul Cole and his ICV report start the ball rolling to shut down the CIL and the new lab. How ironic that Holland receives the Big award in March and gets fired in April. Maybe this is all an April fool's joke.

Wait, what? McCloskey's piece ran March 6 and Hagel announces a restructuring on March 31 and McCloskey is breaking her arm patting herself on the back taking credit? The change already was on the fast track when she wrote her "expose" so why didn't she write that? The muck-rake was bogus. Nicely timed and orchestrated but a fake. Shame on ProPublica!

McCloskey also never mentioned reviews of JPAC (which certainly could stand an overhaul) that are public record, which she never quoted. This is from today's Army Times:

"A series of internal investigations into JPAC and other defense offices involved in recovering remains found repeated instances of shoddy science and mishandling of remains. JPAC also admitted to holding phony repatriation ceremonies that misled families about how the remains of their loved ones were handled.

"The so-called arrival ceremonies involved honor guards removing flag-draped coffins from cargo planes on a tarmac, giving the impression the remains had arrived that day. But military officials acknowledged that the aircraft used for the ceremonies could not fly and the remains typically arrived days or weeks before the ceremonies."

How did she miss that? Stars and Stripes

Published: October 10, 2013

An honor detail comprised of joint military members prepares to escort the remains of fallen servicemembers who died during World War II and the Vietnam War during an arrival ceremony April 26, 2013, hosted by the U.S. Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command.

SEAN FUREY/U.S. NAVY

Second probe of MIA recovery program shows deep problems

Families express frustration with JPAC's efforts to recover war missing

WASHINGTON — The Department of Defense unit charged with recovering servicemembers’ remains abroad has been holding phony “arrival ceremonies” for seven years, with an honor guard carrying flag-draped coffins off of a cargo plane as though they held the remains returning that day from old battlefields.

The Pentagon acknowledged Wednesday that no honored dead were in fact arriving, and that the planes used in the ceremonies often couldn’t even fly, and were towed into position. The story was first reported on nbcnews.com.

The ceremonies at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii are held up as a sign of the nation’s commitment to its fallen warriors. They have been attended by veterans and families of MIAs, led to believe that they were witnessing the return of Americans killed in World War II, Vietnam and Korea.

In a statement sent to NBC News, the Pentagon wrote:

“Part of the ceremony involves symbolically transferring the recovered remains from an aircraft to a vehicle for follow-on transportation to the lab. Many times, static aircraft are used for the ceremonies, as operational requirements dictate flight schedules and aircraft availability. This transfer symbolizes the arrival of our fallen servicemembers.

“It is important to note that recovered remains ceremoniously transferred from the aircraft to the [bus] have been in the lab undergoing forensic analysis to determine identity. When remains first arrive in Hawaii, JPAC cannot confirm if the remains are those of an American servicemember.”

NBC writes that the ceremonies have been known among some of the military and civilian staff at the base as The Big Lie.

The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, or JPAC, has come under intense scrutiny in recent months after two scathing reports were released this summer.

In July, The Associated Press ran a story exposing a 2012 internal JPAC report that found the agency to be “acutely dysfunctional” with some missions that amounted to little more than paid vacations for staffers.

A second investigation released weeks later by the Government Accountability Office found that Pentagon efforts to account for fallen troops missing overseas were inefficient and in need of overhaul, according to congressional sources.

In 2010, lawmakers mandated JPAC to reach an annual goal of recovering at least 200 fallen troops from overseas battlefields by 2015, but it had failed to build the capacity to do so, the GAO found. Currently the Hawaii-based command averages less than 70 individuals per year.

Much of the inefficiency found by the GAO researchers comes down to a turf war between JPAC and the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office, which shares some of the same responsibilities, Congressional sources said.

The show

According to the NBC report, here’s what the audience was shown:

A C-17 military transport aircraft was parked, its ramp down, outside a hangar at the base. After generals and dignitaries were introduced, a military chaplain said a prayer, the audience sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and “Taps” was played. Then an honor guard carried flag-draped transfer cases, which look like coffins, down the ramp and placed them in the back of blue buses, which were driven away.

The emcee thanked the audience for “welcoming them home.” The script continued, “After removal from the aircraft, the remains will be taken to the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command’s Central Identification Laboratory. There, JPAC scientists will begin the identification process.”

Citing eyewitnesses and photographs taken behind the scenes, NBC wrote that what actually happened is very different:

Before 6 a.m., the honor guard assembled behind the JPAC headquarters on the base. They loaded transfer cases onto the buses and drove to the hangar.

The honor guard loaded the transfer cases into the pre-positioned C-17, then rehearsed for the ceremony. They then returned to the plane, and waited.

The public was allowed in for the 9 a.m. ceremony: invited politicians, media, families of the missing and veterans. Employees from JPAC were bused over to fill out the crowd.

Then the show began, with tears and salutes as the remains were marched to the buses, then driven off to the lab to “begin the identification process.”

Jesse Baker, an 81-year-old Air Force veteran of World War II and Korea living in Honolulu, told NBC News that he has been to more than 50 of these ceremonies. He said he’s always been under the impression that the plane had just arrived carrying recovered remains.

Baker tried to make sense of why the DOD would work so hard to trick him and other veterans. “That’s disturbing. I don’t know when they stopped being honest and switched over to this Mickey Mouse, but whoever did it, I hope they find him a new job somewhere.”

http://www.stripes.com/jpac-admits-to-phony-ceremonies-honoring-returning-remains-1.246322

The anti-American sentiment among radical Islamists in Libya is running at a fevor pitch, as the kidnapping and killing of Americans is advocated by the grave robbing Salafists, who will certainly attack and desecrate the clearly marked graves of the Americans buried at Old Protestant Cemetery in Tripoli, especially the remains of the American naval heroes of the USS Intrepid.

Now an emergency mission must be undertaken by an expert forensic archaeology team to excavate and repatriate the remains of these Americans before they are destroyed.

News Item from Tripoli:

Libyan militants have called for the kidnapping of American citizens in Tripoli and for attacks on gas pipelines, ships and planes to avenge the capture of a senior al Qaeda figure by U.S. special forces in Libya last week, Reuters reported.

Nazih al-Ragye, better known by the cover name Abu Anas al-Liby, is a suspect in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 civilians.

He was snatched on the streets of Tripoli on Saturday and is being held aboard a Navy ship in the Mediterranean Sea, U.S. officials said.

Messages posted by Libyan jihadists on the Internet and monitored by the SITE service included a Facebook page called "Benghazi is Protected by its People".

It told Libyans to close off entrances and exits to the capital and kidnap citizens of the United States and its allies in order to use them to bargain for the release of imprisoned militants. It also urged them to damage pipelines exporting gas to Europe, and target ships and planes.

"Libya today is still a place of disbelief that is ruled by something other than the Shariah of Allah; thus, there is no security for disbelievers there," the message said.

In another message posted on forums and social media, a group called "the Revolutionaries of Benghazi - al-Bayda, Derna" condemned the al Qaeda leader's capture.

It accused Libya's leaders of having prior knowledge of the operation, although Prime Minister Ali Zeidan said at the weekend that the government had asked the United States to explain the raid.

The group vowed to fight "everyone who betrayed his country and involved himself in this conspiracy. We say that this shameful act will cost the Libyan government a lot and it will be as you will see and not as you hear."

Since Muammar Gaddafi's fall, Islamist militants, including groups linked to al Qaeda, have used Libya to smuggle out weapons and as a base for fighters.

North Africa is home to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and other Islamist affiliates who either cooperate with the network or sympathize with its ideology.

Liby is wanted by the FBI, which gives his age as 49 and had offered a $5 million reward for help in capturing him.

He was indicted in 2000 along with 20 other al Qaeda suspects including Osama bin Laden and current global leader of the militant network, Ayman al-Zawahri.

"Happy" in Tripoli

2014-05-04T11:38:00.000-07:00

The Green Door to the Cemetery in Tripoli where the American Naval Heroes are buried and awaiting repatriation home, and featured briefly n a new dance video made in Tripoli based on Pharrell Williams international hit song "Happy."

Dancing at the Graves of American Naval Heroes

Happy in Tripoli

At 2:00 – 202 and again at 3:31 a young girl is dancing on steps in front of a dark green wood door and light brown walls - the "room without a roof."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dlbd3zZvCg

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/middle-east/140423/yes-you-can-be-happy-pharrell-williams-even-if-youre-gaza

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dlbd3zZvCg

One notable version comes from the otherwise unhappy city of Tripoli, Libya. Libya has been wracked by instability since the fall of dictator Muammar Qaddafi after a civil war in 2011. In Tripoli, the unrest has recently taken the shape of a wave of high profile kidnappings.

Uploaded by a breakdance crew from the Libyan capital in late March, the Tripolitan video shows youths undaunted by the violence.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/middle-east/140423/yes-you-can-be-happy-pharrell-williams-even-if-youre-gaza

The steps to the front door of the cemetery.

The Room Without A Roof - Tripoli

The cemetery where American Naval Heroes are buried will be targeted by the radical Islamic extremists who killed Ambassador Stevens, are trying to outlaw music and dancing, and oppose the veneration of the dead - especially Islamic Sufi saints and Americans. They are also grave robbers who have dug up and removed the remains of revered Sufi holy men from the floors of mosques, and will most certainly target the Americans buried in Tripoli.

Who will removed the remains of the American Naval heroes in Tripoli first? The Islamic terrorists who killed the Ambassador who will desecrate their graves and throw their bones to dogs in the desert, or the Americans who will repatriate them and properly rebury them with full military honors at home, where they belong?

Who will get beyond the Green Door first?

Somers Monument Dedicated in Somers Point

2013-10-23T11:33:00.000-07:00

Naval hero Richard Somers monument dedicated in Somers Point

Last Updated on Wednesday, October 23, 2013 12:10 pm

Written by SUZANNE MARINO

Wednesday, October 23, 2013 05:30 am

www.shorenewstoday.com/snt/news/index.php/mainland-/news/45601-n

SOMERS POINT—It was a history lesson centuries in the making Saturday morning as several hundred people gathered at the newly named Richard Somers Memorial Park on Shore Road for the highly anticipated unveiling of the Richard Somers monument. Laurels were heaped upon Somers for his bravery and service to country above all else even in the face of death.

Descendents of Master Commandant Richard Somers made the trek to Somers Point; some like Dean Somers came from Galloway while others like Paul Mack Somers and his family came in from North Jersey and Dave Somers flew in from Rochester, New York.

A mile long parade preceded the ceremony. As they arrived at the park the monument was draped in a black shroud. After the invocation by Rev. Jeffery Rickards and the AMVETS color guard raised a very special flag that was flown over the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli the Somers Point Fire Department ladder truck lifted the shroud to reveal the monument. Applause and cheers came from the crowd.

Sally Hastings thanked the benefactors for allowing this impressive project to come together as quickly as it did. Large donations from Shore Medical Center, Atlantic Electric, Somers Point Historical Society and the Paul Mack Somers Family and all of the others who stepped up to support the project along with the City of Somers Point and the AMVETS Post 911.

Somers Point Mayor Jack Glasser said he was very proud of the project and spoke about his desire to see that the remains of Richard Somers are returned to the U.S. along with his men. A place to bury the remains is just behind the monument.

Atlantic County Executive Dennis Levinson a former history teacher declared Oct. 19 as Richard Somers Day throughout the county. Levinson thanked the Somers Point Historical Society and the monument committee members for caring so deeply about the regions heritage and added that our schools would be wise to teach more history of the United States in school

The bust of Richard Somers was done by Luigi Badia, a world renowned bronze sculptor. He initially did the bust for the hamlet of Somers, New York. (Note that Somers, NY is pronounced with a long “O” sound and very different that the South Jersey pronunciation Somers with the short U sound) That town is named specifically after Richard Somers while Somers Point is named after the original Somers settlers that arrived in southern New Jersey long before Richard Somers was born. Representatives from Somers, New York

In 2011 Somers Point and Somers, NY became sister cities and on Saturday morning three representatives traveled to Somers Point to see the unveiling of the monument. Doris Jane Smith of Somers NY said she was happy to be a part of the celebration and impressed with the community support of the historical project.

Author and journalist, Douglas “Chipp” Reid spoke of his latest effort; “Intrepid Sailors” and the role each of the men played on that fateful night in 1804. His book documents the world at the time and the effort the captain and the crew did to elevate the stature of the U.S. Navy. Because of the kidnappings and blockades ships were stacking up, unable to get through the harbor in Tripoli so the plan was hatched for The Intrepid to load up with explosives head into the harbor light the fuse and row back to the Nautilus. We all know what happened, the explosion went off prematurely and killed Somers and everyone onboard.

Local historian, Seth Grossman spoke about Somers and the events that led up to his volunteering for the mission that would claim his life.

Richard Somers is more than just a name from the past of someone born in Somers Point. He was in his time a very well respected sailor who honed his navigation skills while not yet 20 sailing from Philadelphia to New York, explained Grossman.

A member of the fledgling U.S. Navy he served on board the Nautilus and volunteered to lead a dangerous mission on board the Intrepid. The Barbary War was raging in 1804 in the Mediterranean. Corsairs were boarding ships and holding their captain and crew for ransom, and countries would pay. In Europe it was customary to pay the Barbary pirates tribute in order to get the crew back.

So why is the U.S. Navy in Tripoli fighting a war with the likes of Libya and Tunisia? Because as Seth Grossman explained, the world is much different now than it was at the time. Those Muslim controlled countries nearly brought the Roman Empire to its knees and wielded great power and on the high seas they demanded tributes to be paid. England and Spain even with their powerful navies were not able to pass through the Mediterranean without fear of being boarded and held for ransom. “Here comes this small United States Navy. They only had six ships at the time. It was something the Europeans laughed at saying well good luck but it is easier to just pay them their tribute and keep the seas open,” said Grossman. “The battle cry at the time was ‘Millions for defense and no one cent for tribute.’”

The stats on the monument are pretty impressive; The bust weighs about 400 lbs. and is 24” tall and 36” wide. The granite base is drilled and sits several feet in the ground before rising about 4’5” above the street level. The total height is 8 ft and the granite weighs 7,014 lbs for a total weight of 7,500 lbs. “The bust is glued and drilled into place and it will never fall,” Hastings cautioned any fears that the newest addition to the city’s historic inventory.

A light will shine on the monument so that the city's favorite son along with his ship and the names of the crew of the Intrepid will be a place to stop and reflect any time of the day. The Richard Somers Memorial Park and monument is located in front of the Somers Point branch of the Atlantic County Library at Shore Road and New Jersey Avenue.

A commemorative coin was struck for the dedication and some are still available through the Somers Point Historical Society for $15. Chipp Reid’s book is available through Amazon.com.

Intrepid Graves Threatened

2013-10-08T11:17:00.001-07:00