Word: pasts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...tradition took on great power - in the past, the Pentagon took great pains to ensure the bodies of unknowns remained unidentified, even going so far as to destroy relevant documents about where bodies were discovered and with what, if any, personal effects. But with the advent of DNA testing in the 1980s and '90s, the tradition of burying an unknown soldier has begun to decline. Most soldiers around the world are now required to supply blood samples upon joining the military to ensure their bodies can be identified if they are slain in the line of duty. Although military personnel...
...operational links to organizations or individuals abroad may now be the dominant terrorism threat on U.S. soil. Marc Sageman, a terrorism scholar and onetime CIA case officer in Pakistan, has charted the origins of terrorist events in the West since 2004. "Almost 80% of the plots in the past five years are homegrown groups with no physical links to any transnational terrorists group," he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month. In his 2008 book Leaderless Jihad, Sageman says the "present threat has evolved from a structured group of al-Qaeda masterminds, controlling vast resources and issuing commands...
...that point, his fanaticism did not extend past cheering on his Washington Redskins. He did, however, regularly attend services at the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring, Md., helped at its homeless shelter and even applied to an annual matrimonial center that acts as a kind of matchmaking service. He described himself in his application as "quiet and reserved until more familiar with person. Funny, caring and personable...
...this one he had to attend, if only to make sure that the stories got told, the names got spoken - Aaron and Amy, Jason and John, Frederick, Francheska, Juanita, Kham, Libardo, Justin, Russell, Michael. A young President baptized a new Greatest Generation: "We need not look to the past for greatness," he said, "because it is before our very eyes." Our security is their life's work, he said, and peace is their legacy, and freedom their gift. To the great gray sea of soldiers that stood before him, the deaths were a hard reminder of the challenge of protecting...
...Most of the attention the past few weeks has gone to numbers: How many more troops will the President send to Afghanistan? But there is a more important question: How long will he send them for? The military planners assume a five-to-10-year commitment. A more reasonable strategy would be to focus on the next year and see if there's any progress. Can the Afghan troops be trained? Will the Karzai government buckrake, or cooperate? Who are the Taliban, anyway? I'd send more trainers, and more troops to Kandahar, immediately, to give the effort its best...