Barry Day Educational Jetsam - Gannett

Want to know why the first American diplomats and military attaches in Tripoli were totally unaware of the remains of the men of the USS Intrepid and unattended issues from the First Barbary War?

Just read this, and Jonathan Tamari explains it all.
And why they keep requiring certain subjects to be taught even though certain teachers don't really want to bother teaching them.

It reminds me of a time when I was in Ireland, back packing around Europe, staying at an "anarchist commune," squatters living in the gate house of what was once a great estate that had fallen into disrepair and these hippies were living there. I joined them for a few nights, plowed their little potato garden and ate dinner with them at the end of the day.

While the dinner guests at those meals deserve a story of their own, what makes me think of it now is the young, teenage Irish lass who prepared the dinners, a school girl who complained about having to take compulsory Galic as a language in school.

"It's a dead language," she complained, "and we'll never get a chance to use it, unless we moved to the islands, and they make us take it, by law. It's a waste of time."

And everyone seemed to agree with her, and sorry she had the misfortune of having to learn Galic in Irish schools, but then she said something funny, yet true, and wise beyond her years.

"If they'd outlaw it, we'd all be speaking it," she said.

And indeed, instead of requiring schools teach about John Barry, Richard Somers, the Holocost and 9/11, they should out law them from being taught in the schools, like prayer, and then their stories would be secretly taught, and the lessons of their lives learned.

I think Jonathan Tamari needs a lesson in Constitutional democracy and Jim O'Neill a lesson in researching the lives of early American heroes, John Barry in particular.

There probably wouldn't be a Constitution as we know it today if it wasn't for Barry, and his group of "Persuaders," who acted as an unofficial sergeant at arms, tracked down reluctant delegates and escorted them to Convention Hall to ensure a legal quorum.

And having recognized the role of John Barry, schoolmaster, in educating Somers, Decater and Stewart - the first generation of midshipmen, and the role of Captain John Barry in the development of the Navy, exemplified in three Presidential Resolutions, I have easily determined a dozen lines of inquiry that have yet to be adequately researched about both John Barrys, and Terry Jacob's idiotic statement, "Not much about Commodore Barry has changed." And he says it with a smirk.

Someone will have to change the minds of narrow minded reporters like Tamari, ignorant administrators like O'Neill and idiot principles like Jacob.


Commodore Barry Day? It's educational jetsam.

By Jonathan Tamari
Gannett State Bureau

TRENTON

Today New Jersey school children celebrate the holiday that almost wasn't. At least some of them will.

After all, it's Commodore Barry Day.

What?

You know - Commodore John Barry, the Revolutionary War captain often called the Father of the American Navy. Kids learn about him in school. It's required.

State law mandates that schools teach Commodore Barry Day. Sept. 13. If it doesn't ring a bell you're not alone.

"You're one of the six people who remembers?" Chatham Schools Superintendent Jim O'Neill asked when a reporter called to find out how his district will mark the day.

The little-known holiday had a moment in the limelight earlier this year when lawmakers almost wiped it off the books while trying to eliminate some educational mandates as part of their effort to lower property taxes. Teaching certain holidays would have become optional.

Veterans, however, objected to provisions eliminating the school requirements for Veterans Day and Memorial Day, saying soldiers should be honored and remembered, and Gov. Jon S. Corzine, using his veto, preserved the mandatory teaching of those holidays - along with Presidents Day, Columbus Day and Commodore Barry Day.

The change became a small symbol of property tax reform backpedaling. Even the Commodore Barry lobby flexed its muscle.

O'Neill would have like to see the mandates go, saying more learning has little impact on real education. So will his schools still honor the Commodore?

For a moment, he demurs. This is, after all, required.

"Our teachers recognize Commodore Barry when we cover a part of history that he was involved in. But we do not make special note of the day," O'Neill said. "I think that nine out of ten who are honest will tell you the same thing."

Surely someone must celebrate Barry, an Irish-born seaman who spent most of his life in Philadelphia. What about Logan Township? The Gloucester County community is home to 6,000 residents and the New Jersey end of the Commodore Barry Bridge, which spans the Delaware River.

"You would think of all the schools, we would do something," Terry Jacobs, principal of Logan Elementary School, said with a laugh.

Only it doesn't. The school used to hold an annual essay contest, with the winner reading his or her submission over the P.A. system. But the essays were the same, year after year.

"Not much about Commodore Barry changed," Jacobs said.

But Barry gets his due just down the street, at the Center Square School, home to prekindergarten through first grade. Each year first-graders make telescopes and naval hats out of paper, explained Donna Lezar, a teacher. One lucky student gets a hat from a real Navy uniform, and the school sings a Commodore Barry song to the tune of "Yankee Doodle."

For a school where two of the teachers' husbands helped build the Commodore Barry Bridge, it's simple and fun, Lesar said.

And how will the man who saved Commodore Barry Day mark the first celebration since its near demise?

Corzine has only one public event on his schedule today, and it doesn't involve Commodore Barry. The governor will be at a morning bill signing in Cherry Hill, some 30 miles from LOgan.

Jonathan Tamari
Camden Courier-Post
Thursday, September 13, 2007

jtamari@gannett.com

Official Proclamations & Resolutions

Official Proclamations and Resolutions

RESOLUTIONS, Expressing the Sense of Congress on the Gallant Conduct of Lieut. Sterret, the Officers and Crew of the United States Schooner Enterprize.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/res001.asp

RESOLVED by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That they entertain a high sense of the gallant conduct of Lieutenant Sterret, and the other officers, seamen and marines, on board the schooner Enterprize, in the capture of a Tripolitan corsair, of fourteen guns and eighty men.

Resolved, That the President of the United States be requested to present to Lieutenant Sterret, a sword, commemorative of the aforesaid heroic action; and that one month's pay be allowed to all the other officers, seamen and marines, who were on board the Enterprize when the aforesaid action took place.

APPROVED February 3,1802.

RESOLUTION Expressive of the Sense of Congress of the Gallant Conduct of Captain Stephen Decatur, the Officers and Crew of the United States Ketch Intrepid, in Attacking in the Harbor of Tripoli, and Destroying, a Tripolitan Frigate of Forty-four Guns.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/res002.asp

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the President of the United States be requested to present, in the name of Congress, to Captain Stephen Decatur, a sword, and to each of the officers and crew of the United States ketch Intrepid, two months pay, as a testimony of the high sense entertained by Congress of the gallantry, good conduct and services of Captain Decatur, the officers and crew of the said ketch, in attacking in the harbor of Tripoli, and destroying a Tripolitan frigate of forty-four guns.

APPROVED, November 27, 1804.


Resolutions Expressive of the Sense of Congress of the Gallant Conduct of Commodore Edward Preble, the Officers, Seamen and Marines of His Squadron.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/res003.asp

Resolved by the Senate and Hoarse of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the thanks of Congress be, and the same are hereby presented to Commodore Edward Preble, and through him to the officers, petty officers, seamen and marines attached to the squadron under his command, for their gallantry and good conduct, displayed in the several attacks on the town, batteries and naval force of Tripoli, in the year one thousand eight hundred and four.

Resolved, That the President of the United States be requested to cause a gold medal to be struck, emblematical of the attacks on the town, batteries and naval force of Tripoli, by the squadron under Commodore Preble's command, and to present it to Commodore Preble, in such manner as in his opinion will be most honourable to him. And that the President be further requested to cause a sword to be presented to each of the commissioned officers and midshipmen who have distinguished themselves in the several attacks.

Resolved, That one month's pay be allowed exclusively of the common allowance to all the petty officers, seamen and marines of the squadron, who so gloriously supported the honour of the American flag, under the orders of their gallant commander in the several attacks.

Resolved, That the President of the United States be also requested to communicate to the parents or other near relatives of Captain Richard Somers, lieutenants Henry Wadsworth, James Decatur, James R. Caldwell, Joseph Israel, and midshipman John Sword Dorsey, the deep regret which Congress feel for the loss of those gallant men, whose names ought to live in the recollection and affection of a grateful country, and whose conduct ought to be regarded as an example to future generations.

APPROVED, March 3, 1805.


Resolution Concerning the Danish Consul at Tripoli

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/res004.asp

RESOLVED by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the President of the United States be requested to cause to be made known to Nicholas C. Nissen, Esquire, his Danish majesty's consul residing at Tripoli, the high sense entertained by Congress, of his disinterested and benevolent attentions, manifested to Captain Bainbridge, his officers, and crew, during the time of their captivity in Tripoli.

APPROVED, April 10, 1806.


RICHARD SOMERS DAY

ASSEMBLY JOINT RESOLUTION
No. 91
STATE OF NEW JERSEY
211th LEGISLATURE
INTRODUCED FEBRUARY 23, 2004

Establishing September 4th Richard Somers Day in the State of New Jersey

Sponsored by:
Assemblyman JOHN C. GIBSON
District 1 (Cape May, Atlantic and Cumberland)
Assemblyman JEFF VAN DREW
District 1 (Cape May, Atlantic and Cumberland)

SYNOPSIS

Permanently establishing September 4th as Richard Somers Day

A Joint Resolution permanently establishing September 4th as Richard Somers Day in New Jersey.

WHEREAS, Richard Somers, born during the American Revolution on September 15, 1778, was the great-grandson of John Somers, the founder of Somers Point, New Jersey, and

WHEREAS, Richard Somers first learned to sail as a boy on Great Egg Bay, later joining the United States Navy in 1798 as a Midshipman on the U.S.S. United States under the command of John Barry, the father of the U.S. Navy, and

WHEREAS, Upon being promoted to Lieutenant, Richard Somers was put in command of his own ship the U.S.S. Nautilus, and assigned to the Mediterranean fleet to fight the Barbary pirates in the First Barbary War, and

WHEREAS, Aboard the U.S.S. Nautilus, Richard Somers captured a pirate ship, which became a prize, the profits of which were shared among the crew, and

WHEREAS, With Lt. Stephen Decatur, Lt. James Decatur and under the Command of Captain Edward Preble, led numerous attacks against the enemy fleet at Tripoli Harbor, that resulted in hand-to-hand combat and inflicted heavy damage to the pirates, and

WHEREAS, While in command of the U.S.S. Intrepid, Richard Somers and his crew of 12 volunteers died a hero's death during a daring nighttime raid on the pirate fleet at Tripoli harbor in Libya on September 4,1804, and

WHEREAS, The remains of Richard Somers and his crew are buried in an unmarked grave at Green Square and in the Old Protestant Cemetery in Tripoli, Libya, and

WHEREAS, Richard Somers' contributions helped end the First Barbary War, and important campaign for his fledgling country, proving that the American forces had the cohesion to fight together and execute a war far from home, and

WHEREAS, Richard Somers and the men who fought in that war established the principles, style and traditions of action that are continued by the U.S. Navy and the U.S. military today, and

WHEREAS, Richard Somers has been memorialized by the United States Navy, with at least six U.S. naval warships bearing his name and a monument standing at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and

WHEREAS, September 4, 2004 will mark the 200th anniversary of Richard Somers' death; now, therefore,

BE IT RESOLVED by the Senate and General Assembly of the State of New Jersey:

1. September 4th of each year is designated Richard Somers Day in honor of the anniversary of the heroic death of New Jersey's native son.

2. The Governor shall annually issue a proclamation calling upon public officials, private organizations, and all citizens of the State to observe this day each year with appropriate educational events and activities.

3. This joint resolution shall take effect immediately.

STATEMENT

This resolution declares September 4th of each year Richard Somers Day in the State of New Jersey. Richard Somers, a native of Somers Point, New Jersey, fought bravely against the Barbary pirates in the First Barbary War. September 4, 2004 will mark the 200th anniversary of his heroic death during a daring nighttime raid in Tripoli harbor, Libya.



JOHN BARRY DAY - OFFICIAL RESOLUTIONS

THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF PENNSLVANIA

HOUSE RESOLUTION No. 417 Session of 2009

INTRODUCED BY GABIG, JULY 20, 2009

INTRODUCED AS NONCONTROVERSIAL RESOLUTION UNDER RULE 35, JULY 20, 2009

A RESOLUTION

Designating September 13, 2009, as "Commodore John Barry Day" in Pennsylvania.

WHEREAS, Commodore John Barry was born at Ballysampson in Tachumshin Parish, County Wexford, Ireland, in 1745 and immigrated to Philadelphia at 15 years of age, finding employment with a shipping firm where he prospered and became master of several merchant vessels; and
WHEREAS, Commodore Barry's first command came in 1766 aboard the schooner "Barbadoes" sailing out of Philadelphia, which he adopted as his home port; and
WHEREAS, At the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, Commodore Barry, like many of his fellow Irish Americans who constituted nearly 40% of the continental forces, joined the battle for American independence; and
WHEREAS, Upon the outbreak of war, the Continental Congress commissioned Commodore Barry as Captain of the ship "Lexington," which on April 7, 1776, captured the British sloop "Edward," the first war prize taken by the Americans; and
WHEREAS, On December 24, 1776, with his fleet unable to reach open water, Commodore Barry left his ships behind to recruit a company of volunteers with whom he rushed to the aid of General George Washington on the banks of the Delaware River and participated in the American victories at Princeton and Trenton; and
WHEREAS, During the course of the American Revolutionary War, Commodore Barry boldly and skillfully engaged and captured many British vessels and was wounded in service to his country; and
WHEREAS, In 1781, the Catholic Citizens of France sent to the Americans the sum of $6 million, entrusting the safe transport of those vital funds as well as clothing and munitions to Commodore Barry aboard his ship "Resolute," which he successfully delivered, enabling General Washington to sustain his army through the critical showdown at Yorktown; and
WHEREAS, On March 10, 1783, Commodore Barry, commanding the "Alliance," won the last sea battle of the Revolution when, while escorting a shipment of vital funds, he engaged and avoided capture by the British ship "Sybille"; and
WHEREAS, Commodore Barry was instrumental in the effort to persuade the Pennsylvania General Assembly to ratify the Constitution of the United States, providing observers with a compelling example of persuasive lobbying; and
WHEREAS, After the American Revolutionary War and the dissolution of the Continental Navy, Commodore Barry reentered the maritime trade, helping to open commerce with China and the Orient; and
WHEREAS, Commodore Barry was socially active as a member of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, the Hibernian Fire Company, the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Order of the Cincinnati, the military brotherhood of officers of the Continental Army, Navy and Marines; and
WHEREAS, Under President Washington's guidance, the Navy was revived as a permanent entity, and on February 22, 1797, President Washington conferred Commission Number One in the Navy upon John Barry, designating him Commanding Officer of the United States Navy with the rank of Commodore, the first in the United States Navy; and
WHEREAS, Commodore Barry is generally recognized as the Father of the United States Navy, a title bestowed upon him by his contemporaries; and
WHEREAS, Commodore Barry's last day of active duty came on March 6, 1801, and he remained head of the Navy until his death on September 13, 1803; and
WHEREAS, Commodore Barry was given a full military burial in Philadelphia's Old St. Mary's Churchyard; and
WHEREAS, The death of Commodore Barry was mourned by the entire nation, and monuments honoring him have subsequently been raised in Philadelphia, Washington, DC, New York, Boston and Wexford, Ireland; therefore be it

RESOLVED, That the House of Representatives recognize the significance of the legacy of Commodore John Barry and his monumental role in the American Revolutionary War that allowed this nation to be founded on the principles of freedom and opportunity for all people; and be it further

RESOLVED, That the House of Representatives designate September 13, 2009, as "Commodore John Barry Day" in Pennsylvania.


Proclamation 4853 - Commodore John Barry Day

August 20, 1981

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=44173

By the President of the United States of America

A Proclamation

Commodore John Barry, hero of the American Revolution and holder of the first commission in the United States Navy under the Constitution, was born in 1745, in County Wexford, Ireland. Commodore Barry was commissioned to command the brig Lexington, one of the first ships bought and equipped for the Revolution, and became a national hero with the engagement and capture of the British warship Edward on April 7, 1776. He distinguished himself throughout the Revolution and again shortly thereafter in the Quasi-War with France as a fighter and seaman.

In 1797, with the advice and consent of the Senate, President Washington appointed Commodore Barry Captain in the Navy of the United States and Commander of the Frigate United States. In so doing, the President said that he placed "special Trust and Confidence in (Commodore Barry's) Patriotism, Valour, Fidelity, and Abilities".

Commodore Barry was honored by the United States Congress in 1906, when a statue was commissioned and later placed in Lafayette Park, Washington, District of Columbia, and honored again some fifty years later when President Eisenhower caused a statue of Commodore Barry to be presented on behalf of the people of the United States to the people of Ireland, at County Wexford, Ireland.

Now, Therefore, I, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America, do hereby designate September 13, 1981, as "Commodore John Barry Day", as a tribute to one of the earliest and greatest American Patriots, a man of great insight who perceived very early the need for American power on the sea. I call upon Federal, state, and local government agencies and the people of the United States to observe such day with appropriate ceremonies and activities.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this twentieth day of August, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty-one, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and sixth.

RONALD REAGAN

http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/public_papers.php?id=3332&year=1991&month=8

Proclamation 6328 -- Commodore John Barry Day, 1991
1991-08-26

By the President of the United States of America

A Proclamation

During its War for Independence, our Nation faced a great and proven sea power. The young Continental Navy, which had been established by the Continental Congress in October 1775, was only a fraction of the size of the British fleet. Nevertheless, the small American naval force not only achieved several key victories during the War but also established a tradition of courageous service that continues to this day. On this occasion, we honor the memory of one of America's first and most distinguished naval leaders, Commodore John Barry.

After immigrating to the United States from Ireland, John Barry became a successful shipmaster in Philadelphia. He was also an enthusiastic supporter of American Independence, and when the Revolutionary War began, he readily volunteered for service. Thus, John Barry was commissioned as one of the first captains of the Continental Navy.

Captain Barry served bravely and with distinction throughout the course of the War. While commanding the brig LEXINGTON, he captured the British sloop EDWARD in April 1776. This victory marked the first capture in battle of a British vessel by a regularly commissioned American warship. Seven years later, Captain Barry participated in the last American naval victory of the War, leading the frigate ALLIANCE against H.M.S. SYBILLE in March 1783.

Captain Barry's record of service to our country is distinguished not only by its length but also by his extraordinary patriotism and daring. In late 1776, he led a raid by four small boats against British vessels on the Delaware River and seized a significant quantity of supplies that had been meant for the British Army. Serving as a volunteer artillery officer in December of that year, Captain Barry participated in General George Washington's celebrated campaign to cross the Delaware River, which led to victory at the Battle of Trenton.

Captain Barry continued to serve our country after the end of the Revolution, helping to make the American victory a meaningful and enduring one. Active in Pennsylvania politics, he became a strong supporter of the Constitution, which was ratified by the State Assembly on December 12, 1787. In June 1794, President George Washington appointed him as a commander of the new frigate U.S.S. UNITED STATES, one of six that were built as part of a permanent American naval armament. For the remaining years of his life, Commodore Barry helped to build and to lead the new United States Navy, commanding not only the U.S.S. UNITED STATES but also "Old Ironsides," the U.S.S. CONSTITUTION.

Commodore John Barry died on September 13, 1803, but his outstanding legacy of service is carried on today by all those brave and selfless Americans who wear the uniform of the United States Navy.

The Congress, by Public Law 102 - 92, has designated September 13, 1991, as "Commodore John Barry Day" and has authorized and requested the President to issue a proclamation in observance of this day.

Now, Therefore, I, George Bush, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim September 13, 1991, as Commodore John Barry Day. I invite all Americans to observe this day with appropriate ceremonies and activities in honor of those individuals, past and present, who have served in the United States Navy.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-sixth day of August, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and ninety-one, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and sixteenth.

George Bush

[Filed with the Office of the Federal Register, 12:15 p.m., August 28, 1991]
Note: The Office of the Press Secretary released this proclamation on August 27 and it was published in the Federal Register on August 30.

Proclamation 6589 - Commodore John Barry Day, 1993

September 13, 1993

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=62484&st=6589&st1=

By the President of the United States of America

A Proclamation

During its War for Independence, our Nation faced a great and proven sea power. The young Continental Navy, which had been established by the Continental Congress in October 1775, was only a fraction of the size of the British fleet. Nevertheless, the small American naval force not only achieved several key victories during the War but also established a tradition of courageous service that continues to this day. On this occasion, we honor the memory of one of America's first and most distinguished naval leaders, Commodore John Barry.

After immigrating to the United States from Ireland, John Barry became a successful shipmaster in Philadelphia. He was also an enthusiastic supporter of American independence, and when the Revolutionary War began, he readily volunteered for service and became one of the first captains of the Continental Navy.

Captain Barry served bravely and with distinction throughout the course of the War. While commanding the brig LEXINGTON, he captured the British sloop EDWARD in April 1776. This victory marked the first capture in battle of a British vessel by a regularly commissioned American warship. Later in 1776, he led a raid by four small boats against British vessels on the Delaware River and seized a significant quantity of supplies meant for the British Army. Seven years later, Captain Barry participated in the last American naval victory of the War, leading the frigate ALLIANCE against HMS SYBILLE in March 1783.

Serving as a volunteer artillery officer in December of that year, Captain Barry participated in General George Washington's celebrated campaign to cross the Delaware River, which led to victory at the Battle of Trenton.

Captain Barry continued to serve our country after the end of the Revolution, helping to make the American victory a meaningful and enduring one. Active in Pennsylvania politics, he became a strong supporter of the Constitution, which was ratified by the State Assembly on December 12, 1787. In June 1794, President George Washington appointed him as commander of the new frigate USS UNITED STATES, one of six that were built as part of a permanent American naval armament. For the remaining years of his life, Commodore Barry helped to build and lead the new United States Navy, commanding not only USS UNITED STATES but also "Old Ironsides," USS CONSTITUTION.

Commodore John Barry died on September 13, 1803, but his outstanding legacy of service is carried on today by all the brave and selfless Americans who wear the uniform of the United States Navy.

The Congress, by House joint Resolution 157, has designated September 13, 1993, as "Commodore John Barry Day" and has authorized and requested the President to issue a proclamation in observance of this day.

Now, Therefore, I, William J. Clinton, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim September 13, 1993, as Commodore John Barry Day. I invite all Americans to observe this day with appropriate ceremonies and activities in honor of those individuals, past and present, who have served in the United States Navy.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this thirteenth day of September, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and ninety-three, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and eighteenth.

William J. Clinton

JFK & John Barry both Wexford Boys

 

xxxx

During President Kennedy’s historic visit to Ireland in June 1963, he remarked to the people of New Ross, Ireland:

“When my great grandfather left here to become a cooper in East Boston, he carried nothing with him except two things: a strong religious faith and a strong desire for liberty. I am glad to say that all of his great-grandchildren have valued that inheritance.”

On display in the Museum is the Fitzgerald family bible brought from Ireland by President Kennedy’s forebears. A clerk of the U.S. Supreme Court held the large bible as John Fitzgerald Kennedy took his oath of office as 35th President of the United States on January 20, 1961. The Bible is an 1850 Edition of the Douay English translation containing a handwritten chronicle of the Fitzgerald family from 1857 and including a record of the birth of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on May 29, 1917.

In the Museum’s Oval Office exhibit is a fragment of a pennant flown on the Raleigh, a ship commanded by John Barry, a founder of the U.S. Navy and former commander of the USS Constitution. Barry, who served during the Revolutionary War as one of the first captains of the Constitutional Navy, was born in County Wexford, Ireland, the ancestral home of President Kennedy.

President Kennedy displayed the pennant in the White House Oval Office, and during his visit to Wexford, Ireland on June 27, 1963, placed a wreath at the John Barry statue.


President Kennedy visits the John Barry Memorial, Wexford, Ireland, 27 June 1963
JFK at the John Barry Memorial, Wexford, Ireland
Date: June 27, 1963
Copyright: Public Domain
Credit: Photograph by Robert Knudsen, White House, in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

http://www.jfklibrary.org/NR/rdonlyres/80277362-55B4-403E-A057-03A05BBC525F/24487/8027736255B4403EA05703A05BBC525F4.jpg

KN-C29399 27

June 1963 President's Trip to Ireland. Wreath laying ceremony at Commodore John Barry Memorial. President Kennedy, Mayor of Wexford Thomas Burne, Minister of Extrenal Affairs of Ireland Frank Aiken, U. S. Ambassador to Ireland Matthew McCloskey, Naval Aide to the President Tazewell Shepard, others. Wexford, Ireland, Crescent Quay.

Photograph by Robert Knudsen, White House, in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boys_of_Wexford

"The Boys of Wexford" is a famous Irish ballad commemorating the Irish Rebellion of 1798. The ballad was lyrics were composed by Patrick Joseph McCall and music by Arthur Warren Darley, who also composed other wexford ballads "Boolavogue", "Kelly the Boy from Killanne".

The Boys of Wexford

(Chorus):
We are the boys of Wexford,
Who fought with heart and hand
To burst in twain the galling chain
And free our native land.

In comes the captain's daughter,
The captain of the Yeos,
Saying "Brave United Irishmen,
We'll ne'er again be foes.
A thousand pounds I'll bring
If you will fly from home with me,
And dress myself in man's attire
And fight for liberty."

I want no gold, my maiden fair,
To fly from home with thee.
You shining eyes will be my prize,
More dear than gold to me.
I want no gold to nerve my arm
To do a true man's part -
To free my land I'd gladly give
The red drops of my heart."

And when we left our cabins, boys,
We left with right good will
To see our friends and neighbours
That were at Vinegar Hill!
A young man from our Irish ranks
A cannon he let go;
He slapt it into Lord Mountjoy
A tyrant he laid low!

We bravely fought and conquered
At Ross and Wexford town;
And if we failed to keep them,
'Twas drink that brought us down.
We had no drink beside us
On Tubberneering's day,
Depending on the long, bright pike,
And well it worked that way.

And Oulart's name shall be their shame,
Whose steel we ne'er did fear.
For every man could do his part
Like Forth and Shelmalier!
And if for want of leaders,
We lost at Vinegar Hill,
We're ready for another fight,
And love our country still!


http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/june/27/newsid_4461000/4461115.stm

1963: Warm welcome for JFK in Ireland

The US President John F Kennedy has received a rapturous welcome on an emotional visit to his ancestral homeland in County Wexford, Ireland.

On the second day of his four-day trip to Ireland, the president travelled by helicopter this morning to County Wexford.

Hundreds of well wishers cheered and waved flags on his arrival at Wexford town and a choir of 300 boys greeted him singing "The Boys of Wexford", a ballad about an insurrection in 1798.

The president left his bodyguards to join them in the second chorus, prompting one American photographer to burst into tears.

Once the singing was over, Mr Kennedy shook hands with as many schoolchildren as he could reach……

JFK's Fovorites -

Favorite Sports: Golf, Sailing, Swimming, Tennis

Favorite Songs:

Greensleeves
"I believe that Hail to the Chief has a nice ring."
The Boys of Wexford
The Wearin' o' the Green
Londonderry Air
Kelly, the Boy from Killane
The Minstrel Boy
Beyond the Blue Horizon
When Irish Eyes are Smiling
Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral
Danny Boy
Killarney
As a boy, John F. Kennedy enjoyed the Nutcracker Suit

In his speech to the Irish parlament JFK said:

…For knowing the meaning of foreign domination, Ireland is the example and inspiration to those enduring endless years of oppression. It was fitting and appropriate that this nation played a leading role in censuring the suppression of the Hungarian revolution, for how many times was Ireland’s quest for freedom suppressed only to have that quest renewed by the succeeding generation? Those who suffer beyond that wall I saw on Wednesday in Berlin must not despair of their future. Let them remember the constancy, the faith, the endurance, and the final success of the Irish. And let them remember, as I heard sung by your sons and daughters yesterday in Wexford, the words, "the boys of Wexford, who fought with heart and hand, to burst in twain the galling chain and free our native land."

John Barry Memorial - Gazing out to sea, opposite the tourist office in the Crescent, is the fine figure in bronze of Commodore John Barry - father of the American Navy. Born in Wexford, he went to sea as a boy and settled in the United States. During the American War of Independence he became a naval hero and was made Commander-in-chief of the Navy in 1797. He is buried in St. Mary's Churchyard in Pennsylvania, U.S.A. The statue was presented to Ireland by the U.S. government to honour the outstanding contribution made by John Barry to the naval annals of his adopted country.


http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:oIx2G4FuG9gJ:www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php%3Fpid%3D9315+JFK+at+John+Barry+Monument+Wexford&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

276 - Remarks at Redmond Place in Wexford
June 27, 1963

Mr. Mayor, Chairman of the Council, Mr. Minister, my friends:

I want to express my pleasure at being back from whence I came. There is an impression in Washington that there are no Kennedys left in Ireland, that they are all in Washington, so I wonder if there are any Kennedys in this audience. Could you hold up your hand so I can see?

Well, I am glad to see a few cousins who didn't catch the boat.

And I am glad to take part in this ceremony this morning for John Barry. I have had in my office since I was President the flag that he flew and the sword that he wore. It is no coincidence that John Barry and a good many of his successors played such a leading part in the American struggle, not only for independence, but for its maintenance.

About 2 months ago I visited the Battle of Gettysburg, the bloodiest battlefield in the American Civil War, and one of the monuments to the dead was to the Irish Brigade. In Fredericksburg, which was another slaughter, the Irish Brigade was nearly wiped out. They went into battle wearing a sprig of green in their hats and it was said of them what was said about Irishmen in other countries: "War battered dogs are we, gnawing a naked bone, fighting in every land and clime, for every cause but our own."

It seems to me that in these dangerous days when the struggle for freedom is worldwide against an armed doctrine, that Ireland and its experience has one special significance, and that is that the people's fight, which John Boyle O'Reilly said outlived a thousand years, that it was possible for a people over hundreds of years of foreign domination and religious persecution--it was possible for that people to maintain their national identity and their strong faith. And therefore those who may feel that in these difficult times, who may believe that freedom may be on the run, or that some nations may be permanently subjugated and eventually wiped out, would do well to remember Ireland.

And I am proud to come here for another reason, because it makes me even prouder of my own country. My country welcomed so many sons and daughters of so many countries, Irish and Scandinavian, Germans, Italian, and all the rest, and gave them a fair chance and a fair opportunity. The Speaker of the House of Representatives is of Irish descent. The leader of the Senate is of Irish descent. And what is true of the Irish has been true of dozens of other people. In Ireland I think you see something of what is so great about the United States; and I must say that in the United States, through millions of your sons and daughters and cousins-25 million, in fact--you see something of what is great about Ireland.

So I am proud to be here. I am proud to have connected on that beautiful golden box the coat of arms of Wexford, the coat of arms of the kingly and beautiful Kennedys, and the coat of arms of the United States. That is a very good combination.

Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 1:40 p.m. His opening words referred to Thomas F. Burne, Mayor o Wexfordf; James I. Bowe, Chairman of the County Council; and Frank Aiken, Minister of External Affairs.

After leaving New Ross that morning the President and his party drove to Dunganstown to visit the farm where Patrick Kennedy had spent his early years. Hostess for the occasion was Mrs. Mary Kennedy Ryan, third cousin to the President, who had assembled about 25 relatives and the Parish Priest for a family reunion. The President was shown the house and was served light refreshments in the farmyard. He gave no speech but proposed a simple toast "to the Kennedys who went away and to the Kennedys who stayed behind."

The President then flew to Wexford where he laid a wreath at the Barry Memorial -- a 1956 gift from the U.S. Government to the people of Ireland. He then proceeded to Redmond Place where he spoke and was given the freedom of Wexford.


In addition, JFK bought land near Middleburg, Virginia, where he had a house built that he called Wexford.

[Bill Kelly Notes: For those interested in solving some of history's mysteries, research could be done into how, exactly, John F. Kennedy came into possession of John Barry's sword, as he kept it in the Oval Office at the White House and it is now part of the Kennedy collection at the JFK Presidential Library. Can the provenance of the sword be established? Was it given to JFK as a gift? Did he buy it at a garage sale? Or what?]

Tripoli Graves Discovered & Rediscovered

The American Legion Magazine - May 1977 Vol. 102 - #5

Notes On Our Desk

MEMORIAL DAY brings to mind visions of immaculate national cemeteries at home and military cemeteries abroad where so many thousands of Americans rest in peace, but author Melba Edmunds reminds us of a tiny corner of America that is marked and preserved in far-off Libya, on the shores of Tripoli.

This is how she found it:

Already the glare of the morning sun had beaten the waves into submission. From the modern asphalt highway, weathered stone steps made their way toward the sea. On one side was the whitewashed wall of the British Rod and Gun Club, on eh other a well[repaired stone wall. The steps turned abruptly and clung to the cliff. The rocks below were green from the dampness of the Mediterranean.

The stone steps stopped at a small opening in the wall. Inside, the vaulted doorway framed a picturesque landscape. A tanker rode on the blue purple sea. White birds floated in and out of view.

The Arab who approached could have been a traveler on the road to Emmaus, or he could have watched the Turkish Pasha on the palace ramparts. The unbleached wool he wore served as protection from the cold at night and the heat of the sun by day. His skin had lost the dark swarthy color of his youth. It made a fragle pale frame for his still intense dark eyes.

"Kiel halek," he said in greeting. He held out his hand for a coin. Then, leaning on his cane he withdrew to sit silently in the shade.

The walls enclosed an area not larger than half a city block. On top of the stone floor were positioned burial crypts about the size of a coffin. Markers noted the deceased. Most were members of embassy families who had served in Tripoli during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Babies, children and young mothers seemed to dominate the tiny Christian cemetery. One marker mourned a young man who had lived without enemies, but had been killed by assassins.

In the northwest corner of the room-like cemetery a gnarled olive tree spread its limbs over five stone coffins. On each crypt a bronze marker has been placed:

"Here lies an American sailor who
gave his life in the explosion of the
U.S. ship Intrepid, who lost their
lives in the battle against the Bar-
bary Coast pirates Sept. 4, 1804.
"The honor we accord them for
their heroism is no less because
their names are unknown.
" - errected by The Wheelus Air
Force Wives Club."

The waves could be heard splash-
ing gently against the rocks below.
Americans have left Wheelus Air
Force Base. The old Arab seemed to
have faded into the colorless wall.
The sun shortened the shadows and
increased the heat. But the five
young American sailors continued
their long sleep under the ancient
olive tree.

[Bill Kelly Notes: There are a few mistakes in this article, though it is the most comprehensive report since that of James F. Cooper of a century before. It is Richard, not William Somers, who commanded the Intrepid into Tripoli harbor on its last mission, and the mystery of the five Intrepid graves at Old Protestant Cemetery has been resolved. While this account falsely reports that the five men buried together in the cemetery washed ashore nearby and were buried on site, it is now known that all thirteen men were buried together in a grave 720 feet from the old castle fort. In the 1930s, the Italian occupation army, while building a road, uncovered the remains of five of the men, and they were reburied at Old Protestant Cemetery. The others remain at the original grave site. More on this to come.]

TRIPOLI GRAVES DISCOVERED

U.S. NAVAL INSTITUTE PROCEEDINGS - April, 1950

By LIEUTENANT (J.G.) ARTHUR P. MILLER, JR. U.S. Naval Reserve

The bodies of five American Naval heroes of th Barbary Wars which have been lying unmarked, untouched, and unclaimed for nearly a century and a half have been discovered in Tripoli, North Africa.

The five were among thirteen officers and men who were killed in the explosion of the ketch U.S.S. Intrepid September 4, 1804. The graves were found by an American consul in Tripoli with the help of an Arab harbor-master after a painstaking search which was begun by the State Department in 1938.

The overwhelming bulk of circumstantial evidence collected through hundreds of interviews of descendants of inhabitants of the town in 1804, and from other sources points to the fact that the bodies were five of possibly six which were mentioned as having washed ashore after the explosion close to the site where they were rediscovered.

The five bodies were reinterred in the spot where they were discovered, a high-walled cemetery on the outskirts of Tripoli overlooking the harbor. U.S.S. Sp;okane (CL 120), one of the fleet's newest cruisers, was dispatched from the Mediterranean to Tripoli where her officers and men paid their final respects to these heroes of yesterday's Navy where they were lowered into the ground for the last time, their graves now plainly marked.

The location of the five bodies after all these years recalls to mind one of the most dramatic and heroic chapters of American naval history. The thirteen officers and men - which five of the thirteen these are is not known - had bravely met their death on a mission which was a calculated risk and which, had it been successful, would have ct half the Tripolitan fleet into splinters. The Tripolitan fleet had been anchored close together along the seawall. The Bashaw's castle stood....The Intrepid and her crew of thirteen volunteers was to be sent into the harbor as a "fireship" to be set off amongst the enemy ships. Had the dangerous plan worked, many of the enemy ships would undoubtedly have been sent to the bottom and even the heavily fortified castle might have been seriously damaged.

The scheme was a perilous mission in the finest tradition of the U.S. Navy. Commodore Edward Preble, who at the time was in command of the American squadron in the Mediterranean, knew the risk as did the gallant men who took part in the venture.

In addition, there was at least one other man who knew, a man who at the time was in Tripoli, a prisoner of the enemy in the Bashaw's castle. He was Commodore William Bainbridge who conceived the plan and smuggled his idea to Preble on the outside.

Bainbridge and his officers and men had been captured by the Tripolitan pirates after his ship, the frigate U.S.S. Philadelphia, had run aground on some unchartered rocks while chasing a smaller enemy ship some months before. The Philadelphia had been captured intact by the enemy and Bainbridge and his crew had fallen into the hands of the Tripolitans. They were henceforth thrown into prison, from where, incidently, they had an excellent view of the harbor.

Once in prison, Bainbridge had been able to get the confidence of Nicholas Nissen, the Danish consul in Tripoli. Through Nissen, Bainbrige was able to smuggle secret letters out of prison, letters which carried an innocuous message in regular ink and another secret message written between the lines in lime juice which was invisible to the naked eye. When a match was run under the paper by Preble, the message immediately showed up.

It was through Nissen that Bainbrige had been able to get a message to Preble suggesting the plan of sending a fireship into the harbor laden with high explosives, there to be exploded among the enemy shipping. According to the plan, the volunteer crew which was to man the fireship should escape out of the harbor in small boats after applying the match to the train.

Preble had tried this type of hit and run tactic before, and it had paid off handsomely in that case. That had been several months previously when another volunteer crew had sneaked into the harbor in a ketch and burned the Philadelphia, rendering her useless to the Tripolitans.

Many of the officers and men who lost their lives when the Intrepid exploded had been among the crew of volunteers who had entered the harbor that night to board and burn the Philadelphia. In a fierce battle, they had climbed over the rails of the ship, killed most of her enemy crew and burned her to the waterline. The leader of that earlier encounter was another early American Naval hero, Stephen Decatur.

Now, Preble decided to try once more, tactics similar to some used by the British and American commandos and raiders in World War II. he put Bainbridge's idea into action.

He chose the ketch Intrepid for the mission. The Intrepid had been captured originally from the Tripolitans in a running engagement in the open sea and had been converted to an American man-of-war. Perhaps Preble thought that by using a ship whose lines would be familiar to the Tripolitans and by sending her into the harbor on a black night as a friendly merchantman, he could disguise the true purpose of the fireship. In any event, he chose the Intrepid and ordered her to be fitted out as a floating incendiary bomb.

A special compartment was built into the hold of the ketch just forward of her mainmast. one hundred barrels (approximately 15,000 pounds of powder in bulk) were placed in the hold. On top of this lethal load, 100 thirteen-inch and nine-inch shells were stacked, loaded and fused,....for action.

A tube was run from the powder ...to another compartment alft in

Inside the tube was laid a train cal...burn for fifteen minutes - time for all volunteer crew to escape from the doomed....
The compartment aft was filed with combustibles which were to be set afire...setting the fire in the after compartment...keep any boarders off the ship until it was too late.

Lieutenant William Somers (Sic) captain...brig U.S.S.Nautilus, was chose,...man to guide this fireship or "inferno" as it was then called, into the harbor...had acquitted himself well in a battle...enemy gunboats only a few week previous. WHen they heard that Somers was ....the mission, the entire crew of the Nautilus asked to accompany their captain.

Somers however, chose only four from his own crew. they were Thomas,..James Harris, William Keith and...Simms, all seamen. From the U.S.S. Constitution he chose William Harrison,...Clark, Hugh McCormick, Jacob Will....Peter Penner and Isaac Downes, all seamen.

Originally, one other officer besides Somers was to undertake the mission. He was Lieutenant Henry Wadsworth of the Constitution. At the last minute, however, Midshipman Joseph Israel of the Constilation came aboard the Intrepid with a message from Commodore Preble. He pleaded with Somers to take him along, and Somers finally obtained the consent of the Commodore to allow Israel to join the band as the thirteenth member.

Somers impressed upon his crew the seriousness and heavy risk of the venture and gave to each and every man the chance to stay behind if he wished. But each of the ten seamen voiced his determination to go and left their respective ships Nautilus and Constitution with a joke on their lips.

"Mind boys," one said according to the diary of a shipmate, "give a good account of us when you get home!"

All was now in readiness. A light breeze came up on the evening of September 4 and Somers and Preble decided that now was the time to go. At 2000 the Intrepid weighed anchor and got underway. Two of the fastest rowing boats in the squadron accompanied her to take the crew after they had guided the ship into the harbor and had lighted the combustibles.

The ketch was convoyed to the harbor entrance by the brig U.S.S. Argus, U.S.S. Vixen and the Nautilus. These vessels then turned back but remained near at hand to watch the result and to pick up the rowing boats upon their return.

Everything seemed favorable for the success of the mission except that three Tripolitan gunboats were seen hovering about the harbor entrance. But the enemy ships disappeared, and the Intrepid approached in the manner of a friendly merchantman bound for an anchorage in the harbor.

It was a dark night, according to the eyewitnesses, and the Intrepid was soon lost to sight to most of those who stood watching on the decks of the American ships outside the harbor. The fireship entered the harbor and drifted slowly toward the anchored ships war of the Bashaw's fleet. Several minutes elapsed with no more noise than the lap of the waves.

Suddenly, the sound of guns firing could be heard by the men watching from the ships outside. Almost instantly a jarring explosion reverberated through the harbor and the town and a great blaze of light outlined the Intrepid and the other ships in the harbor.

Lieutenant Charles C. Ridgely was intently watching the spectacle with night glasses from his vantage point on the deck of the Nautilus. Here is his description of the explosion:

"For a moment, the flash illuminated the whole heavens around, while the terrific concussion shook everything far and near. Then all was hushed again and every object ...veiled in a darkness of double gloom. On board the Nautilus, the silence of death seemed to pervade the whole crew; but, quickly the din of kettle drums, beating to...., with the noise of confusion and alarm....heard from the inhabitants on shore. To ...the escape of the boats, an order was.....to show a light, upon the appearance of which, hundreds of shot, from an...number of guns, of heavy calibre, from the batteries near, came rattling over and around us. But we heeded them not; one thought and one feeling alone had possession of our souls - the preservation of Somers and his crew.

"As moment after moment passed by without bringing with it the preconcerted signal from the boat, the anxiety on board became intense; and the men with lighted lanterns hang themselves over the sides of the vessel until their heads almost touched the water - a position in which an object on the surface of the water can be seen furthers on a dark night - with the hope of discovering something which could give us an assurance of its (the boat's) safety. Still no boat came, and no signal was given; and the unwelcome conclusion was at last forced upon us....We lingered on the spot until broad daylight - thought we lingered in vain - in the hope that someone at least of the number might yet be rescued by us from a floating plank or spar to tell the tale of his companions' fate."

That the explosion of the Intrepid, described in this vivid passage from Lieutenant Ridgely's notebook, was premature is certain. There was no blaze of combustibles preceding the explosion. It was also evident to those waiting outside the harbor that there had not been enough time to have allowed the ketch to have reached her target and exploded on schedule.

The exact manner of the explosion, however, remains a mystery and will probably never be ascertained for certain. The sound of the firing is said to have come from the enemy shore guns. The most widely accepted theory is that one of these shots from the shore batteries passed through the magazine of the fireship, igniting the concentration of powder and shells and detonating them. Another opinion holds that the Tripolitans sighted the American ship, boarded her, and that Somers and his crew set fire to the train and blew their ship up rather than let it fall into the hands of the enemy.

Bainbridge records that all thirteen of the bodies were recovered following the explosion, but he gives an account which varies somewhat from the bodies that were recently found. Bainbridge, incidently, had appealed to the Bashaw to allow him to view the bodies as soon as he realized that the explosion he heard had been that of the Intrepid. The Bashaw reluctantly granted permission for Bainbridge and two of his lieutenants to see the bodies after they had been washed up on shore.

Bainbridge states in his diary that two of teh bodies were found in the bottom of the ketch itself, which grounded on the rocks at the north side of the western entrance to the harbor. Another body was found in one of the two boats that had accompanied the Intrepid and had later drifted ashore to the westward entrance to the harbor. Another body was found in one of the two boats that accompanied the Intrepid and had later drifted ashore to the westward.

Four others were recovered floating near the harbor and the six remaining bodies were found on the beach to the southeast of the town. This would place the later group near the site of the present high-walled cemetery where they were found.

What has become of the sixth body or whether Bainbrige actually saw six and not five bodies lying on the beach is hard to say. The account he gives is sketchy and he mentions the number but once.

He notes down that all the bodies were so mutilated that it was impossible to identify them. He adds that the six were taken to the top of the bluff overlooking the beach where they were found and were provided with graves that "they were laid to rest with all small honors that could be given them," including a funeral service which Bainbridge himself read over their graves.

These facts, except for the exact number of the bodies, which were set down by Bainbridge nearly a century and a half ago, have been borne out as a result of the exhaustive investigation initiated by the Arab harbor master of Tripoli, Mustafa Burchis, and the American counsul in that city, Mr. Orray Taft, Jr.

The investigation actually got its start in 1938 when, in response to an inquiry from the American embassy in Rome concerning the fate of the men of the Intrepid, Mr. burchis undertook a meticulious examination of old Jewish records, private Arab collections of letters, papers, and diaries, and interviewed innumerable descendants of residents of Tripoli at the time of the disaster.

The harbormaster set down in detail the results of his investigation and ....complete report on the matter which ...then transmitted to the American....in Rome. Unfortunately, however...report was among American state papers which were burned by embassy officials in 1941 upon the outbreak of the war. The investigation was revived last year when Mr. Burchis retraced his findings from his original notes. Together with Mr. Taft, he was able once more to piece together the story of the five graves.

"The Intrepid had exploded in a place located about half way down the length of the present north breakwater and all of the pertinent stories he [Mr. Burchis] has hadto day that fivge bodies had drifted up on the beach in front of a cliff," Counsel Taft re......in a report to the State Department concerning his research. "From this beach they were unceremoniously dragged to the cliff and were interred in a rough pattern. I questioned Mr. Burchis at length as to his belief in the reliability of his information and could find no flaw in his pattern of investigation," Mr. Taft adds.

Mr. Taft and Mr. Burchis, together with the American vice counsel, went to the cemetery, named the old Protestant Cemetery, on the outskirts of the town and directly above the cliff where Mr. Burchis said the bodies had been dragged. Mr. Burchis then without hesitation picked out five graves located in the northeast corner.

Subsequent to the burial of the bodies in 1804, Mr. Burchis explained, it became necesssary to establish the old Protestant Cemetery for the burial of foreigners. Since five Americans were already known to be interred there, a wall was erected around the plot and the whole cemetery was dedicated in the ceremony which was attended by the then present diplomatic and consular officials, including those of the United States.

Upon this identification of the five bodies as being those of five men from the Intrepid, Mr. Taft sent a telegram to Vice Admircal Forrest P. Sherman, USN, commanding the U.S. Mediteranean Fleet, stating that he had substantial evidence that the graves of five American sailors lost on the Intrepid in 1804 had been discovered. Admiral Sherman immediately arranged for a visit to Tripoli of Rear Admiral R. H. Cruzen, Commander, Cruiser Division Two, and the Spokane.

The five unknown sailors who had died so valiantly fighting for their country were given final honors in a colorful ceremony attended by many high diplomatic, military, and government officials. A band of Scottish Camerons played martial music as the detachment from the Spokane as well as a unit of the British Army stationed at Tripoli marched the half a mile from the town to the grave site.

In short addresses, Rear Admiral Cruzen spoke on the early history of the Navy and of its exploits during the Barbary Wars. Captain W. J. Marshall, USN, commanding officer of the Spokane, narrated the Intrepid mission, and Consul Taft told of the research done to identify the graves and unveiled the memorial plaque to the five heroes. Lieutenant E. J. Sheridan, USN, chaplin of the Spokane, read a short prayer, and an honor guard of Marines fired several volleys over the new graves and played taps.

Interestingly enough, Joseph Karamanli, the present mayor of Tripoli and a direct descendant of the Joseph Karamanli who was Bashaw of Tripoli at the time of the Barbary Wars, attended the ceremony with approximately 50 other guests.

The plaque honoring the five men was placed in the cemetery on the cliff by the officers and men of the Spokane. The money for the markers was collected through voluntary contributions. Individual plaques, which will be replaced at a later date by permanent markers, were placed near each grave.

On each of these individual plaques is written: "Here Lies An Unknown American Sailor Lost From USS Intrepid in Tripoli Harbor 1804." - a worthy tribute to the courageous sailors of the Navy of yesterday from the sailors of the Navy of today.

Richard Somers & Somerville, Mass.

 

Caption: In the summer of 1804, Somers commanded a division of gunboats during five attacks on Tripoli.

Another take on where Somerville’s name originated.

April 25, 2009
Somerville News, Massachusetts)

http://somervillenews.typepad.com/the_somerville_news/2009/04/another-take-on-where-somervilles-name-originated.html

Melissa Woods

A report commissioned by the Somerville Historical Society has declared Somerville to have a “purely fanciful name,” not of any particular origin. Somerville fire inspector Bob Doherty has ideas of his own, however and even better, they have to do with pirates.

The Blessing of the Bay, the first seaworthy ship built in Massachusetts, was armed in response to piracy and became essentially, the first Coast Guard. Aggressive action needed to be taken against the Barbary pirates, however, if American ships were to sail in safety. This is where a young Naval officer named Richar Somers enteres the picture.

“Pirating in Somerville goes way back,” muses Doherty. After the Revolutionary War, American trading ships could no longer fly under the British flag, nor claim backing by the impressive British navy. The Barbary pirates, just off the coast of Tripoli (in present-day Libya), then became a threat.

Born in Somer’s Point at Great Egg Harbor, New Jersey, Richard Somers was one of the first Naval Lieutenants in the then-new American Navy. Together with his two childhood friends Stephen Decatur and Charles Stewart, they fought together “like the three musketeers,” says Doherty, against the Barbary pirates in the summer of 1804. Their exploits at Tripoli are famously sung in the first line of the Marine’s Hymn: “from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.”

These three friends protected the U.S.S. Constitution in equal parts, commanding six small gunships apiece around the heavy frigate as if it were “a modern aircraft carrier.” Somers’ performance as Captain of the schooner Nautilus after he arrived in the Mediterranean earned him promotion to master commandant on May 18, 1804. He afterward sailed alongside Commodore Edward Preble – then of the Constitution – to Tangier, and then in five attacks on Tripoli, once fighting five Tripolian vessels at once at close quarters.

“Millions for defense, but not once cent for tribute,” said Thomas Jefferson when he entered office, in reference to the pirate threat. As that summer of successful campaigns drew to a close, Somers realized that the Americans had a chance to squelch the pirates once and for all. Calling for volunteers, Somers spearheaded a plan to load the first ship the Intrepid up with about 15,000 lbs of gunpowder and 200 loaded shells, and sail it into the pirates’ midst under the cover of night. The ship was to be set off by remote detonation, but because this was so risky a venture, Somers insisted that none of his volunteers be family men. This proved a wise decision. The Intrepid sailed, as planned, into Tripoli harbor, but was discovered before Somers and his men had time to escape. The ship was detonated as was, killing all aboard, including Somers himself.

“A fanciful name,” exclaims Doherty,” Not on your life!” Richard Somers was a nationally-known Naval hero whom has spent time on the United States, the Boston, and had spent the last day of his life on the Constitution, out of Charlestown harbor. Six ships in the U.S. navy have been named the U.S.S. Somers, since. Somerville, New Jersey, is known to be named after Somers, as well as Somers, New York and his birthplace, Somers Point, but there is no hard proof that Somerville, Massachusetts is the same case.

It is unlikely, however, that an area so dense with history as Greater Boston should have names of no historical importance in its midst. Bob Doherty, with his argument for Richard Somers, provides a defiant yet plausible alternate explanation in the face of what the history books say.


Bill Kelly Notes: Somers Point, New Jersey is named after the founding father John Somers, grandfather of Richard Somers, Jr., who died at Tripoli.

And the graphic is apparently one of the many paintings portraying Reuban James, or is Daniel Fraser, stepping in to take the blow of the pirate sword aimed at the head of Stephen Decatur in August, 1804. The painting, and others like it, attempt to depict the swashbuckling, hand-to-hand combat that these men fought.

Both James and Fraser were wounded in the battle, and both are given credit for saving Decatur while he was avenging the life of his own brother, slain earlier in the same battle. US Navy ships have been named after both Fraser and James, with the Reuban James being the first US Navy ship sunk by a German U boat during World War II, and the subject of a popular Woody Gunthrie song.

Satelite View Tripoli Harbor

 

The yellow dot at the center is the approximate location of the Old Protestant Cemetery, which when viewed closer, and zoomed in on from the air, is seen as a perfect square, near the triangular harbor pier.

The yellow dot on the left is the approximate location of the original grave site, 720 feet east of the old castle fort in what is now known as Green Square.

Cemetery and Tripoli Harbor

 

Inside the cemetery at Tripoli

 

Tripoli Cemetery Grave Marker

 

Qadaffi at the UN

I was going to go up to the City, that's New York City today, and visit the Intrepid museum, have lunch at Elaine's or P.J. Clarke's with my new most eccentric friend of all time - Jones Harris, and maybe get some photos of demonstrators with a throwaway camera, but then I decided it wasn't worth the trouble.

Even those who were there wished they weren't, and I got periodic phone reports from Jonesy, who went into a tirade when he heard reports of what Qadaffi said in his speech, and called, asking for a verbatum transcript of what he really said off the internet, but alas, here it is twelve hours later and there are still no on line transcripts of the Qadaffi speech as far as I can tell.

But from what I can tell he did say some nice things about O'Bama, blamed the Isralies for killing JFK and called for a new investigation of the MLK assassination.

The Families of the Victims of Lockerbie were there protesting, but if you read the Bloomsberg story of Quadaffi's meeting with the American black Muslems, you would of thought everybody loves him and there were no protests at all.

The situation with the Royal Tent has yet to be resolved, at least as to what actaully happened, as apparently Donald Trump had a change of mind and gave Qadaffi the boot after his tent was pitched, just when I began to have visions of Qadaffi Junior visting Atlantic City and the Trump Tripoli casino....

But in the end, nobody seems to any more the wiser about the plight of Richard Somers and the men of the Intrepid, who lay buried in an unmarked, desecrated grave under the Martyer's Green Square in Tripoli, and no one has yet spoken up for them.

Today Qadaffi spoke for over an hour and a half, right after O'Bama's thirty-eight minute talk, and their paths will cross tomorrow at the Security Council Meeting where O'Bama will sit at the same table with Qadaffi, separated only by the Irish delegate.

Maybe the Irish delegate will recommend that after the meeting they all go over to P.J. Clarke's for a beer and talk things over.

Here's the CSM report, the best I've seen so far.

-BK


Qaddafi UN speech: Six highlights - or lowlights?
By Mark Sappenfield and Tracey D. Samuelson

http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2009/09/23/qaddafi-un-speech-six-highlights-or-lowlights/

Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi’s rambling, 1-1/2 hour speech to the United Nations is proof that the man desperately needs a Twitter account.

Speaking directly after President Obama, President Qaddafi far exceeded his allotted 15 minutes and in the process seemed to be on a personal mission to wrest the crown of World’s Foremost Fount of Political Inanity from front-runners Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

In a speech cobbled together from pages of hand-written notes, he fulminated on topics as diverse as JFK’s assassination and swine flu. One blogger has already christened the speech the lowest point in the history of the United Nations.

Here are the high points:

1. ‘Our son’ Obama

Qaddafi extended his congratulations to “our son Obama” on the occasion of his first speech at UN.

“Obama is a glimpse in the darkness after four or eight years,” Qaddafi said. “We are content and happy if Obama can stay forever as president of the United States.”

2. UN Security Council Terror Council

“We are not committed to obeying or adhering to resolutions by the Security Council in its composition right now,” Qaddafi said. “It should not be called the Security Council, it should be called the ‘terror council.’ ”

3. Swine Flu: The capitalists made it

“The swine virus may have gotten out in the open after escaping from a laboratory. It may have been put together in a lab by the military…. We do sometimes make viruses in a laboratory and then they make viruses for capitalist companies who will make vaccinations and make money.”

4. Iraq war the ‘mother of all evils’

“Sixty-five aggressive wars took place without any collective action by the United Nations to prevent them,” Qaddafi said. He noted the Iraq war, in particular, as being “the mother of all evils.”

5. JFK killed because he wanted to investigate Israelis

“Why did this Israeli kill the killer of Jack Kennedy?” Qaddafi asked, after noting that Jack Ruby, “an Israeli,” killed Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. “The whole world should know that Kennedy wanted to investigate the nuclear reactor of the Israeli demon,” Qaddafi said.

Qaddafi also called for a reinvestigation into the assassination of the Martin Luther King Jr. “His killing was a plot, and we should know why he was killed and who killed him,” Qaddafi said.

6. UN should relocate to Libya

“You will thank me for not having to travel for 20 hours to this place.”

The White House on Qaddafi

“I think it was Qaddafi being Qaddafi,” Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said, as though Qaddafi was now a wide receiver for the Buffalo Bills.

In response to Qaddafi’s suggestion that Obama should rule the US forever, Gibbs deadpanned: “Leaving aside the amendments to the Constitution that the president agrees with wholeheartedly, it would be an interesting concept to continue being president beyond one’s natural-born life.”

—–
http://features.csmonitor.com/connectingthedots/2009/09/23/gaddafi-kaddafi-qadhafi-how-do-you-spell-it/

Al Megrahi & Richard Somers The Famous & Forgotten

Al Megrahi & Richard Somers
The Famous & Forgotten

By William Kelly

Al Megahri and Richard Somers, though separated by two centuries in time, crossed paths briefly at Green Square, Tripoli, where Al Megahri was honored on the 40th anniversary of the Ghaddafi coup and where Somers lies buried with his men in an unmarked, desecrated grave.

Famously convicted in the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, Abdelbaset ali Mohmed al Megrahi is now world renown for having received a hero’s homecoming at Tripoli after being released by a Scottish judge on humanitarian grounds.

Richard Somers, the forgotten American naval hero, led a special mission against the Barbary pirates that ended in the explosion of the USS Intrepid in Tripoli Harbor on September 4, 1804, an event that still resonates today.

The body of Somers and his men were recovered and buried near the old Red Castle, where they remain to this day, despite the efforts of the Somers’ family, the citizens of Somers Point, New Jersey, and the veterans who have sought the repatriation of the remains of the men of the USS Intrepid.

According to Col. Mommar Gaddafi’s son Saif, Al Megrahi’s name was mentioned during every meeting held between Libya and Great Britain over trade, oil and arms, while the repatriation of Somers and the men of the Intrepid has yet to be officially mentioned. This is the case even though then Secretary of State Condi Rice met with Gaddafi 204 years to the day the men of the Intrepid washed ashore and Sen. John McCain led a Senate delegation to Tripoli to discuss oil, trade and arms deals, but made no mention of repatriation of the remains of the Navy heroes.

A number of other Republican senators were with McCain's delegation, but none of them publicly mentioned the missing MIAs or broached the subject with the Libyans, probably because they were unaware of them.

Two presidential proclomations and a State of Pennsylvania resolution honoring John Barry, and one New Jersey State resolution honoring Richard Somers requires that their stories be taught in public schools, and similar resolutions have been introduced requiring the teaching of the Holocaust and 9/11, but it futile to force school children to learn certain aspects of American history when our representatives, diplomatic and military leaders are ignorant of it.

It isn't the school children who should be taught about Richard Somers and the Barbary Pirates, it is our own diplomats and military men like McCain, a Navy man who should have put his priorities straight and asked about the remains of the men of the Intrepid and the Navy flyer missing since Operation El Dorado Canyon. Instead they ship McCain out to view some old Roman ruins, distracting him from the real unfinished duties at hand, of which he is totally oblivious.

It is also the fault of the US Embassy personnel at Tripoli, who have learned about the Old Protestant Cemetery site, secured and maintained it, but have failed to secure the original grave site or brief visiting dignataries of the American graves.

Secretary of State Condi Rice visited on September 5, 2008, two hundred and four years to the day the bodies of the men of the Intrepid washed ashore, yet she was blissfully unaware of the signifiance of the anniversary of the occasion, and use it as a non-partisan, unpolitical issue that they can get immediate results on.

It seems that every American visitor new to Tripoli finds the old cemetery site and thinks that is a long lost and forgotten treasure, an incredible story that must be retold. And it is an incredible story, but one that not should have to be rediscovered by every American visitor new to Tripoli.

The Officer's Wives from Wheeler Air Force Base did their duty and maintained the Old Protestant Cemetery for as long as they were there, and then it fell into disrepair and was forgotten until two American women from New Jersey stumbled upon it and wrote about the cemetery site in a Veterans magazine.

That stimulated a renewed effort to obtain the return of the remains of the Americans in Tripoli, but since we were engaged in combat with Libya at the time(See: Operation El Dorado Canyon), Rep. William Hughes did what he could, and got a Congressional Resolution reserving space at Arlington National Cemetery for the reinterment of the remains of the men of the Intrepid.

More recently, the first American government report on US relations with Libya mention the Return Richard Somers Committee of the Somers Point (NJ) Historical Society, and the efforts to repatriate these remains. The first State Department employees in Tripoli went to the cemetery and sent back reports and photos.

But when the first US Military attache arrived in Tripoli, he had to be told about the cemetery site by a cab driver.

One year ago, shortly before US Ambassador Gene Cretz arrived at his post, I sent him and email updating the situation, and received a response from a newly arrived charge d'affairs, who had met with the Director of Antiquities at the official museum at the old Red Castle fort. This officer promised to mention the original grave site to the Director, and ask about the 2004 excavation of the original grave site when they discovered "buttons and bones."

But now, a year later, that Charge d'affairs has been rotated out of Tripoli and is now back in Washington at another desk, and the new military attache discovers the cemetery grave site, talks with the Director of Antiquities about the restoration of the cemetery site, and two other nearby historic sites - the wreckage of the USS Philadelphia and USS Intrepid.

But he has no knowledge of the original grave site, and in a feature article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, is quoted as saying the original grave site "is lost to history." (See; CPD story).

It seems every time a new military attache or Charge d' affairs arrives in Tripoli, they have to learn about the Old Protestant Cemetery from cab drivers, things they should know from the reports of their predessors.

I know of at least two such official reports, one from a women colonel from the Pentagon POW/MP office, who visited Tripoli, and whose report, I understand, only mentions the cemetery site, and recommends that it remain as is, and not repatriated. These graves would then come under the jurisdiction of the US foreign graves section of the DOD, but the remains would still be subjected to DNA testing to determine if they are the remains of any of the officers of the Intrepid (Somers, Wadsworth, Israel), whose DNA can be identified.

The other document is a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report prepared for a Michigan Congessman who has had an interest in this issue, but he has not responded to my emails and his liason has moved on to another job. The author of the report however, has said that it is primarily concerned with only the cemetery site, and not the original grave site, and relies a lot on the research posted on this site. While CRS reports are not made available to the public, they can be obtained from the Congressman who has requested the report.

It is because these two reports fail to deal with the original grave site, that the position of the US military is that they don't know anything about it, and it's location "has been lost to history."

The only thing that has been lost to history is the failure of our educational school system, US military communications, the diplomatic corps and th government to provide basic historical information about American patriots.

Al Megrahi on the other hand, will be dead and buried long before anybody with any power and influence officially brings up the name Richard Somers with the Libyans.

And then people will want to know who is Richard Somers?

And they can be told that he is a long forgotten American Naval hero who is buried in a parking lot at the shores of Tripoli harbor.

Fighting Pirates - Yesterday & Today

Fighting Pirates – Yesterday & Today

Pirates are capturing American merchant ships off Africa, demanding tribute and holding the crews for ransom.

Sound familiar?

Well that’s what the situation was in the early 1800s, when American merchant ships were being captured and enslaved or held for ransom by the pirates of the Barbary Coast African nations of Morocco, Tunesia and Tripoli.

But instead of paying the tribute and the ransoms, the United States, as a matter of national policy, decided to build at navy, a fleet of ships that would be sent over to engage the pirates and convince them otherwise.

Among those sent over was Captain William Bainbridge of the USS Philadelphia, a battleship of its day, built in Philadelphia and the largest ship in Commodore Edward Preble’s fleet of American warships sent to the Mediterranean to fight the pirates.

More recently, the USS Bainbridge was the first American warship to the scene of an American merchantman captured by pirates off Africa, leading today’s fight against the African pirates.

Unlike the millions of dollars in ransoms paid for ships captured by pirates off Africa today, the American response was to kill the pirates when given the opportunity, a policy and operational style that dates back to the first Barbary wars, and best exemplified by the American schooner Enterprise.

Although written decades later, the Memoir of Commodore David Porter (1875) is a first hand report from someone who was there. Porter reports that, “…The Enterprise was the first vessel that had the satisfaction of humbling the pride and lowering the flag of these corsairs. Notwithstanding the Tripolitan admiral had assured Commodore Gale that no war existed against the United States, on the part of Tripoli, on the first of August, 1801, the Enterprise fell in with a polacre-rigged vessel near the island of Malta, mounting 14 guns (and carrying Tripolitan colors), that was known to be cruising against our commerce. As soon as the colors were recognized, the Enterprise cleared for action, and ran down close to the enemy. As Lieut. Com. Sterrett got within pistol shot he opened his batteries, and continued for three hours to pour in a heavy fire, at the end of which time the Triplotian struck his colors. The polacre was superior in every respect to her antagonist, but the precision of the American’s fire told fearfully upon the enemy and her crew, while the beautiful manner in which the Enterprise was handled (taking whatever position she chose and raking her enemy several times), elicited the admiration even of the corsairs. There are no braver people than the Turks, but on this occasion though they fought desperately they exhibited very little skill. The Corsair lost fifty men in killed and wounded, and the ship was a perfect wreck, her mizzen mast shot away and her yards and sails cut to pieces. On the other hand, owing to the skill with which the Enterprise was handled she received little damage. Three times during the combat did the Tripolitians strike their colors, renewing the fight again when they thought they saw an opportunity of redeeming the fortunes of the day; till at last Lieut. Com. Sterrett, irritated by this treachery, opened fire, with a determination to sink his enemy; when the Tripolitans threw their flag into the sea and cried for quarter. The Tripolitan proved to be the Tripoli commanded by Mahomet Sous, the latter confessed to his orders from the bashaw were to capture American merchant vessels….”

As Porter notes, “Up to the time of the capture of the Philadelphia, the bashaw had received from the Americans nothing but humiliation, or to use the figurative language of the Turks, “The Christian dogs had made him eat dirt.”

The capture of the Philadelphia was probably the single biggest catastrophe of the war, and it is a testament to Bainbridge, who over came the stigma of having lost his ship to the enemy without having fired a shot, to become a US Navy hero and a getting a modern warship named after him.

Born in Princeton, New Jersey, the son of a Tory physician and surgeon for a British regiment during the Revolution, Bainbridge went by the book. He had orders to blockade Tripoli harbor until the rest of the fleet could arrive, with Richard Somers and the schooner Nautilus expected, but in his haste to fulfill his mission to blockade the harbor, Bainbridge chased a pirate corsair too close to the shore and the Philadelphia ran aground. [For in depth report see the Capture of the Philadelphia at Tripoli].

The ship was taken as a prize and the men imprisoned in the dungeon of the old Red Castle fort, prisoner of Yousef Karamanli, the Bashah of Tripoli.

While most of the 300 man crew, when not working on public projects, were confined to the dungeon, Bainbridge was permitted to dine with the Danish ambassador and Dr. Jonathan Powdery, the ship’s surgeon, was permitted to make house calls of sick citizens of the old city, which dates to pre-Roman times.

So now with his prize battleship and 300 hostages, Karamanli wanted a ransom as well as a tribute, but rather than pay, the Americans were resolute, determined to defeat the pirates in battle and win their release. In one of the first successful special ops, Lt. Stephen Decatur took the USS Intrepid, disguised as a pirate ship, into Tripoli harbor and destroyed the Philadelphia, escaping with no casualties.

With a full compliment of ships Commander Preble opened an offensive that attacked the enemy on the water, handily defeating the pirates in the Battle of Tripoli (Aug. 1804). The Americans had Lt. Somers lead one flotilla and Lt. Stephen Decatur another, going up against the pirates in hand-to-hand, swashbuckling combat. These victories were somewhat negated however, by the killing of Midshipman James Decatur, Stephen’s younger brother, and the explosion of the USS Intrepid on September 4, 1804.

In an attempt to duplicate the success of Decatur’s earlier mission to destroy the Philadelphia, Somers took the Intrepid back into Tripoli harbor outfitted as a fire ship.

Twelve men, volunteers all, including officers Lt. Richard Somers and Lt. Henry Wadsworth (uncle of Longfellow), were joined at the last minute by Midshipman Charles Israel, who delivered a message from Preble with final instructions. Israel refused to return to the flagship, and insisted on joining the mission, becoming the unlucky thirteenth man.

The Intrepid slipped quietly into Tripoli Harbor, a lantern could be seen bobbing in the darkness, and then a tremendous explosion lit up the landscape, with the old Red Castle fort in the background, and then all fell quiet and dark.

The next morning thirteen bodies washed ashore and placed on the beach where the Philadelphia’s surgeon, Dr. Cowdery and a party of prisoners buried the men of the Intrepid just outside the castle walls. The three officers were identified and separated from the others and buried in a common grave. They marked the spot with four corner stones and clearly identified the plot with a makeshift cross.

This original grave site, they reported, was one cable’s length from the castle walls, a nautical length of one tenth of a nautical league, or 720 feet, about two and a half football fields. That’s where most of them are today, but the remains of five were uncovered by the Italian army while they were building a road during their occupation in the 1930s, and reentered in the nearby Old Protestant Cemetery, about a mile east along the coastal highway.

The original gravesite is located in what is now known as Green Square, where Col. Mommar Ghaddafi recently celebrated the 40th anniversary of the coup that put him in power, September 1, 1969, when he overthrew the monarchy.

When the US Navy held an official ceremony at the Old Protestant Cemetery in 1949, the Libyan leader was then named Karamanli, of the same family and dynasty as Yousaf Karamanli, the leader of the Barbary pirates two hundred years ago.

At that time Yousaf Karamanli, the Bashaw of Triopoli, was having a family spat with his brother, Hamet Karamanli, pretender to the throne of their father, who was originally from Turkey and an extension of the ancient Ottoman Empire.

In the course of fighting Yousaf Karamanli, the United States supported the efforts of his brother Hamet. Under the leadership of a pistol packing American diplomat William Eaton and Sgt. Presley O’Bannon’s detachment of eight US marines, they put together a small army of 200 Greek mercenaries, a thousand bedouin cavalry they picked up along the way, and supporters of Hamet Karamanli. They marched across the desert and attacking from land, captured the port city of Derna, east of Tripoli. While this expedition is often referred to as the “Battle of Tripoli” in movie and song, it is actually the Battle of Derna.

The loss of Derna certainly made Yousaf Karamanli come around to the Americans way of thinking, and with an army massing against him, he agreed to a peace treaty, one that paid extra ransom for Bainbridge and the men of the Philadelphia, but didn’t pay any outright tribute.

When news of the treaty reached Eaton, O’Bannon and Hamet Karamanli at Derna, they had to quietly lower the Stars & Stripes, slip onto waiting ships and escape the harbor before their mercenary followers learned the news of the betrayal.

Apparently Hamet Karamanli understood how the politics worked and didn’t take it personally because he presented his sword to Presley O’Bannon, the Mamaluk sword that is part of the dress uniform of every US marine.

The diplomats may have prematurely ended the war when they had the upper hand, but Bainbridge, Dr. Cowdery and the officers and men of the Philadelphia were freed and given a heroes homecoming in Philadelphia.

“FALLEN BEFORE THE WALLS OF TRIPOLI”

As David Porter described the conclusion: “…The Tripolitans, seeing that the United States was determined to prosecute the war until they were conquered, concluded at length to succumb, and on the third of June, 1805, the treaty of peace was signed.”

“It was agreed that the United States should never be required to pay tribute to Tripoli, but after exchanging prisoners man for man it was settled that $60,000 should be paid to Tripoli for the excess of prisoners in her possession. This later clause in the treaty sounds rather strangely after such loss of life and outlay of money in prosecuting the war; and no doubt, the United States could have made better terms by carrying on hostilities a little longer, but the sufferings of the prisoners in Tripolitan hands were exciting so much sympathy at home, and the expense of further warfare would have been so great that, perhaps, the course pursued may have been the wisest.”

“ It was a joyful day when all these poor fellows were released, and received the congratulations of their friends; but amid all their joy at being relieved from confinement, the prisoners could not but experience deep sorrow when they missed the many comrades who had fallen before the walls of Tripoli. A few years had made sad havoc among their friends, but such is ever the result of war.”

“In this conflict the American nation, which had been fighting for the rights of civilized nations, had won great renown through its navy, and the thanks of Christendom for setting an example that was soon followed by all Europe. When we look at these insignificant Barbary powers today we can hardly realize that we ever consented to pay tribute to them in the first place, and in the last act abandoned all the principles for which we had contended by paying that ransom of $60,000. With all this, however, the navy had nothing to do, and had the matter been left to them to decide, the barbarians would never have got anything, since they knew that they could conquer a peace.”

“Throughout the trying ordeal they had to undergo, the honor of the navy remained untarnished; and painful as had been the imprisonment of the officers and crew of the Philadelphia, yet it produced good fruit, for without the loss of that vessel and its results, the government might have abandoned a contest which in the end put a stop to the enslaving of Christian people.”

Characters Persona - The Barbary Wars

Characters Persona

Abercrombie, Dr. – Director of the Philadelphia Free Academy.

Adams, John – President of the United States

Bainbridge, William – Captain of the USS Philadelphia, ran ground Tripoli habor, captured, with 300 man crew.

Barry, John – Captain, Commodore, US Navy.

Mrs. John Barry – Wife of Commodore

Barry, John – Schoolmaster, Philadelphia Free Academy

Bashaw of Tripoli – Karamanli,

Cooper, James Finimore – Historian, author of American Naval biographies.

Cowdery, Dr. Jonathan – Physician, USS Philadelphia, captured and help prisoner by Bashaw of Tripoli, identified officers and buried the remains of the men of the USS Intrepid, Tripoli Harbor, September 4, 1804.

Cruzen, Rear Admiral – Present at US Navy ceremony at Old Protestant Cemetery, 1949, with Captain of USS Spokane.

Decatur, James – Younger brother of Stephen Decatur, killed in the battle of Tripoli Harbor, Summer, 1804.

Decatur, Jr., Stephen – Captain, USS Enterprise. Led assault on captured USS Philadelphia on USS Intrepid, 1804.

Decatur, Sr., Stephen – Commodore, Privateer, American Revolution; father of Stephen, Jr. and James, seasonal resident of Cape May, NJ.

Decatur, Mrs. Stephen – Wife of Captain Decatur.

Eaton, William – US emissary to Egypt, leader of expedition to Derne with O’Bannon and Hamet Karamanli.

Humphreys, Joshua – Philadelphia shipbuilder, contractor for USS United States.

Israel, Joseph – Midshipman, USN, 14 years old, perished aboard the USS Intrepid, Tripoli Harbor, September 4, 1804, buried at Tripoli.

Jefferson, Thomas – President of the United States.

Karamanli, Hamet – Brother to Yusef Karamanli.

Karamanli,Yusef – Bashaw of Tripoli.

Keen, Sarah Somers – Wife of William Jonas Keen, sister of Richard Somers.

Keen, Esq., William Jonas – Husband of Sarah Somes Keen, wrote last wills and testaments of John Barry and Richard Somers, executor of the estate of Richard Somers, and payment of prize money to crew of USS Nautilus.

Leaming, Jonathan – Morristown, NJ, inherited Somers’ Washington Ring, loaned it to Pennsylvania Historical Society for display.

Lear, Tobias – US counsel to Algiers, signed treaty freeing prisoners of USS Philadelphia.

Porter, David – Captain, naval officer and author of Navy history and took up collection for Tripoli monument.

Preble, Edward – Captain, Commodore of the Mediterrean Fleet.

Rush, Richard – Student at Philadelphia Free Academy, son of Revolutionary treasure, Dr. Benjamin Rush.

Somers, Jr., Richard – Lt., Captain, (b. 1776 – d. Sept. 4, 1804), buried at Tripoli harbor.

Somers, Richard, Sr. – Col., Privateer during the American revolution, father of Richard, Jr.

Somers, Sarah – Neice of Richard Somers. Inherited Somers’ Washington Ring.

Somers, Sarah – Sister of Richard Somers. Inherited Somers’ Washington Ring.

Sterrett, Andrew – Lt., Captain of USS Enterprise.

Stewart, Charles – Student at Philadelphia Free Academy, Lt. USS United States, Captain Barry, Captain.

Taft, Jr., Orray – US diplomat, present at US Navy ceremony at Old Protestant Cemetery, Tripoli, 1949.

Wadsworth, Henry – Lt. USN, died in the explosion of the Intrepid at Tripoli, Sept. 4, 1804.

Washington, George – President of the United States.

Ships of the Barbary Wars

Ships of the Barbary Wars and their Contemporary Mates

Primary American Ships at Tripoli

Nautilus – Schooner Lt. Richard Somers
Enterprise – Schooner Lt. Stephen Decatur
United States - Frigate Captain John Barry.
Philadelphia – Frigate Captain William Bainbridge
Constitution - Frigate Captain Edward Preble
Intrepid – Ketch, formerly Masticho.


SHIPS OF THE BARBARY WARS

Adams – Frigate
Agusta – Brig
Amazon – Frigate
Argus – Brig – Captain Hull
Boston – Frigate
Burceau – Prize
Burns – Packet
Cheseapeake – Frigate
Cicero –
Commodore Barry – Brig
Congress – Frigate
Constellation –
Constitution – Frigate – Commodore Edward Preble
Delaware – Sloop-of-war
Democrat – Privateer
Diamid – Schooner
Diligance – Revenue Cutter
Eagle – Revenue Cutter
Enterprise – Captain Stephen Decatur
Essex –
Experiment – Schooner
Ganges –
George Washington –
Gloria –
Goard Blosom – Schooner
Hannah – Brig
Hassan Bashaw – Brig
Jalouse – Privateer
John Adams –
L’Amour De La Patrie – Privateer
Le Croyable – Prize
Leopard – Ship-of-the-line
L’Insurgents – Frigate
Madusa – Prize

Mastico – Prize Ketch, captured by USS Enterprise, Stephen Decatur Captain, on December 23rd, 1803, off Tripoli, bound for Constantinople, under Turkish colors, including two Tripolitan naval officers, ten soldiers, 42 slaves and gifts to the Sultan of Constantinople from the Bashaw of Tripoli. Renamed USS Intrepid, out of Syracuse.

Merrimack –
Meshbona – Prize
Montezuma –
Nautilus – Captain Richard Somers
New York – Frigate
Norfolk – Brig
Phoenix –
Pickering – Revenue Cutter
Polly –
Portsmouth –
President –
Prince of Wales – Ship-of-the-line
Sally – Brig
Sans Pareil – Prize
Scourge – Brig
Syren – Brig – Captain Stewart
St. Crucifisso
Siren –
Sophia – Brig
Tartuffe - Privateer
Transfer – Prize
Tripoli – Corsair – Captured by Enterprise, Aug. 1, 1801
Vixen – Schooner – Captain Smith
Warren
William & Mary


Modern Ships

USS Bainbrige – Captain William Bainbrige, of the USS Philadelphia.
USS Spokane – Visited Tripoli 1949

SS United States – Commercial ship docked at Philadelphia.
Starship Enterprise – TV spaceship
Space Shuttle Enterprise


Bainbridge (1842-1863)
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-b/bainbrdg.htm
Bainbridge (Destroyer #1), 1902-1920
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-b/dd1.htm
Bainbridge DD-246, 1921-1945
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-b/dd246.htm63
Bainbridge DLGN-25, later CGN-25, 19 -1967
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-b/dlgn25.htm

Barry (Destroyer #2, 1902-1920
Barry DD-248, Later APD-29, 1920-1945
Barry DD-933 1956-

Decatur (1840-1865)
Decatur (Destroyer #5), 1902-1920
Decatur DD-341, 1922-1945
Decatur DD-936, later DDG-31, 1956-2004. SDTS, EEDG-31

Enterprise (1877-1909)
Enterprise CV-6, later CVA-6 & CVS-6, 1938-1958

Essex (1861-1865)
Essex CV-9, later CVA-9 & CVS-9, 1942-1975

Intrepid (1804)
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-i/intrepid.htm
Intrepid (later USS Fern) 1862-1865
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-f/fern.htm
Intrepid (1874-1892)
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-i/intrepd2.htm
Intrepid CV-11, later CVA-11 & CVS-11, 1943-1982
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-i/cv11.htm

Philadelphia (1800-1803)
Philadelphia (1861-1865)
Philadelphia Cruiser #4, C-4, Later IX-24, 1890-1927
Philadelphia CL-41, 1937-1951

Porter Torpedo Boat #6, TB-6, 1897-1912
Porter DD-59, 1916-1934
Porter DD-356, 1936-1942

Somers (1842-1846)
Somers Destroyer #301, later DD-301, 1920-1931
Somers DD-381, 1937-1947

United States (1797-1961). Later CSS United States, 1861-1862
United States CC-6, 1919 – 1923. Cancelled.
United States CVA-58, 1949 Cancelled

CV-9 Essex http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/cv-9.htm
CVA-58 United States http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/cva-58.htm
CVN-65 Enterprise http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/cvn-65.htm
USS Constitution http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/constitution.htm
CGN-25 Bainbridge http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/cgn-25.htm
DDG-96 USS Bainbridge http://www.bainbridge.navy.mil/default.aspx
DDG-73 USS Decatur http://www.decatur.navy.mil/default.aspx
CVN-65 USS Enterprise http://www.enterprise.navy.mil/
LHD-2 USS Essex http://www.essex.navy.mil/default.aspx
SSN 690 USS Philadelphia http://www.ussphiladelphiassn690.com/
DDG 88 USS Preble http://www.preble.navy.mil/default.aspx
DDG-104 USS Sterett http://www.sterett.navy.mil/default.aspx

The Repatriate Game on Richard Somers Day

The Repatiration Game –

Elaborations on my remarks at Somers Mansion on Richard Somers Day
Sunday, September 13, 2009

William Kelly

The Repatriate Game

All of sudden it seems, within the span of one month, August 2009, there has been a spate of repatriations of prisoners and remains of soldiers that may indicate an important shift is taking place, one that will effect international trade and relations for years and possibly decades to come, and also affect the repatriation of Richard Somers and the men of the Intrepid from Tripoli.

Bill Clinton visited North Korea on August 5, 2009 and returned with reporter-spies Laura Ling and Euna Lee, a celebrated event that has loosen tensions between North and South Korea and has been followed with further fraternal diplomatic exchanges.

Two weeks later Sen. Jim Web traveled to Burma to free wayward American John Yetaw, a religious fanatic who twice swam a lake to warn political prisoner Aung San Suv of a dream he had of her assassination. Nut case or not, both Laura Ling, Euna Lee and John Yetaw had influencial friends who got powerful politicians like Clinton and Web to make those moves.

On the same day Yetaw was freed, on August 16, 2009, after 18 years in the desert, the remains of Capt. Michael Scott Speicher were returned to his Jacksonville, Florida home. Speicher’s plane was shot down over Iraq on June 17, 1991, the first day of the first Iraq war, and speculation as to what became of him was the subject of many web pages, petitions, official investigations, a book and Congressional legislation.

The military had been looking for Speicher since the day he went down, and once his remains were located, there was no question as to whether, when or how they were to be repatriated, it was all a matter of routine.

While Speicher’s homecoming was not covered by the international or even national media or press, the entire world was pretty much shocked by the release of the Lockerbie bomber from a Scottish jail.

On August 20, convicted Pan Am 103 Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset ali Mohmed al Meghari was released “on compassionate grounds,” by Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill, as he was suffering from cancer. While the shock of Meghari’s release had yet to settle in, many people were horrified to see the hero’s welcome he received at his homecoming in Tripoli, creating an uproar among the families of the victims and shaking American and British political ranks.

While the fallout from that escapade has yet to shake out completely, and probably won’t until at least after Ghaddafi’s visit to New York and the United Nations on September 24, Meghari was certainly the toast of Tripoli during the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the September 1st 1969 coup that put Ghaddafi in power.

On the eve of that party, on August 31, the remains of Australian Flying Officer Michael Herbert and Pilot Officer Robert Corse were repatriated to Australia from Vietnam, having been lost in action on November 3, 1970. Escorted to their new graves by family and members of the air squadron, they were the last remaining Australian MIA, thus accounting for all of their men, while there are still 1800 US servicemen unaccounted for in SEA, 1, 335 in Vientam.

So in the month of August, 2009, seven prisoners or remains were repatriated to their homeland involving nine countries – the United States, Korea, Burma, Scotland, England, Libya, Iraq, Vietnam and Australia.

While I would think Clinton and Webb were moved by more than just “compassionate grounds,” and the power of oil, trade and arms deals seems to have weighed heavy on release of al Meghari, a lot of people were surprised at the sudden discovery and repatriation of the remains of Captain Michael Scott Speicher.

Speicher’s case is also relevant to Richard Somers because they are both Navy men and were buried in the desert.

Speicher’s remains were recovered with information from a new witness, a ten year old boy at the time of the crash of his plane, who reported that Speicher’s body was found and buried by a group of wandering Bedouins.

Col. Mohmar Ghaddafi is a Bedouin, and proud of his heritage, famously meeting with foreign dignitaries in his elaborate royal tent. That the Bedouins came across Speicher’s body and buried him at all is a testament to their sense of dignity, and the dry desert weather and sand acts as a natural preservative for the remains.

But there was some hope that Speicher had survived the crash and was taken prisoner, and many people believed that’s what happened. Over the years Speicher’s case changed from being classified as Missing In Action to Killed In Action/Body Not Recovered, and then with reports of him being captured and help prisoner, Missing/Captured. Now that we know what happened, the sources for the other reports can be reappraised, along with reports of other American POWs from other wars still being held in North Korea, China and Russia.

It also gives hope for the eventual finding of the remains of Captain Paul Lorence, who is presumed Killed In Action and listed Body Not Recovered after going missing in action during the April 15, 1986 Operation El Dorado Canyon attack on Tripoli.

On December 25, 1988, via the Vatican, Libya returned the remains of Capt. Fernando Ribas-Dominicci of Puerto Rico, who also went missing on that mission.

But Captain Paul Lorence has never been accounted for, and like Captain Speicher, perhaps he too was buried by Bedouins, and someday the truth will come out, and his remains brought home and given a proper burial, with full military honors.

There may be two centuries that separate Captain Somers and Captain Speicher, but they are both Navy men who died on duty in combat, fighting for the same cause, and despite being the oldest MIA/BNR case on record, Somers, Wadsworth, Israel and the Intrepid crew should be treated in the same way as Speicher and our men who are killed in combat today.

There was no debate over whether their remains should be brought home, there was no discussion as to who would pay for it, or whose responsibility it was, the policy is simple and the procedures are clear.

Locating the grave site, as it was with Speicher, is not the problem with Richard Somers and the men of the Intrepid, as we know exactly where they are buried. And like Captain Speicher, their remains should be treated like those of any other Navy man who is killed behind the lines. The remains of the men of the Intrepid should be retrieved from Green Square in Tripoli and returned home, so they can be given a proper burial, with full military honors. As is their due.

Al Meghari has had his homecoming, and now it is time for Richard Somers to come home.

Report From Tripoli -

There’s a lot happening besides the spate of repatriations. The new ambassador to Tripoli Gene Cretz has a professional embassy staff that includes a number of personnel who have taken it upon themselves to clean and upkeep the Old Protestant Cemetery site, and the military have officers on site who are negotiating with the Libyans about archelogical excavations of the harbor where the Philadelphia and the Intrepid washed ashore and sunk. There could be artifacts worth preserving, including cannon, masts and spars, swords and buttons.

The reports from the scene (from the article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer), and the photos indicate that the brick and cement wall of the cemetery is falling apart in places, and some $3,000 to $5,000. The historic plaque from the 1949 Navy ceremony is also missing, as well as the flag pole. While the Navy is responsible for the plaque, and the graves of the five men from the Intrepid, there are some 60 other graves in the cemetery, mainly the families of American, English and other European Christian diplomats from the 19th century.

I suggest that the people of Somers Point and New Jersey chip in and pay for the restoration of the cemetery walls, replace the 1949 plaque, place another plaque and a new flag pole and mention on the plaque it was donated by the citizens of Somers Point and New Jersey.

The remains of Richard Somers and the men of the Intrepid will not be repatriated home until the name Richard Somers becomes a well known household cleche, and everyone knows the story.

We will have the opportunity to educate people about Richard Somers and promote his repatriation when Col. Mohmmar Khaddafi visits New York City to give an address at the UN on Thursday, September 24th.

While Khaddafi is at the UN uptown on the East River, across town the USS Intrepid aircraft carrier sits docked on the Hudson, a very large and imposing reminder that the story of the USS Intrepid at Tripoli harbor is still not over.



For more on Scott Speicher see:

Saga of Michael Scott Speicher comes to an end. Tim Engstrom, Pothole Prarie Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2009
http://www.albertleatribune.com/news/2009/aug/18/saga-michael-scott-speicher-reaches-end/

Cpt. Michael Scott Speicher, 1991, US Navy, Florid State http://www.bostonherald.com/news/national/south/view/20090907missing-man_flyover_will_honor_florida_state_graduate_shot_down_during_gulf_war/srvc=home&position=recent

Missing-man flyover will honor Florida State grad shot down during first Gulf War
Orlando Sentinel, Andrea Adelson.

http://www.emporiagazette.com/news/2009/aug/17/leave_no_man_behind/
Leave no man behind

Pat Roberts, U.S. Senator

Monday, August 17, 2009

THE 1991 GULF WAR is a fairly faded memory for most Americans who see Iraq now only through the current context. But for the family of one Gulf War veteran, the last 18 years have been full of unanswered questions and endless speculation as they waited to hear the fate of Navy pilot Captain Michael “Scott” Speicher.

Recently, the Speicher family finally got an answer: Captain Speicher’s remains have been positively identified after U.S. Marines, acting on a tip from a local Iraqi, found them in an unmarked grave in the desert.

For Scott’s family, this discovery enables them to move on with their grief and provide a proper burial for a military hero who grew up in Kansas. Finding Captain Speicher’s remains also fulfills a pledge — 18 years later — that the military makes to its own to “leave no man behind.”

For a time however, fulfilling that pledge was in doubt. I joined with Scott’s friends, family and colleagues to protest the Navy’s initial decision to classify his status as KIA, “Killed in Action” because there was simply no real proof to support that finding.

All we knew at the time was that Scott’s squadron had seen his plane go down on the first night of the war. Subsequently, the Secretary of Defense referred to Scott as the first casualty of the Gulf War, unintentionally confirming his death and halting efforts to find him.

As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a former Marine, I was moved when I heard Scott’s story. As I learned more about it, I agreed that without a body or proof of death at the crash site, no one could be certain Scott had perished.

I believe we owe it to our service members and their families to bring our troops home, no matter the cost. In 2000, I authored and passed legislation to ensure our intelligence agencies never stopped looking for Americans missing, captured or killed in conflict, no matter how difficult the charge.

Without confirmation on Scott’s status, I also helped force the Department of Defense to change his status from KIA to Missing and Missing/Captured. After a determined effort on behalf of the family, we achieved this change in October 2002.

Finally, due to our persistence, the DoD sent a team to the crash site to analyze what was left of the plane, including a portion of Scott’s flight suit that was recovered. The intelligence team found more questions than answers in the wreckage. Most tellingly, there was no body.

When we entered Iraq for the second time in 2003, finding Captain Speicher or his remains was a priority for the military. In the end, their perserverence paid off when human intelligence recently led the Marines to his remains, buried not far from his plane. The investigation continues even today regarding the exact cause of death.

While there was a time when I hoped I would see Scott standing in uniform again on American soil, I am relieved for his family that at least his story now has an end. His sacrifice and his legacy will pave the way for every other man and women who wears the uniform. We owe them nothing less than our best effort to leave no American behind.

If you would like to know more about issues before the Senate, visit Sen. Roberts’ Web site at http://roberts.senate.gov. For regular updates, sign up for a monthly e-newsletter, The Roberts Report.

Rear Admiral Ron Denney (USNR) at Somers Mansion

 

Rear Admiral Ron Denney addresses the crowd gathered at Somes Mansion in Somers Point for Richard Somers Day, celebrated this year on September 13.

Admiral Denney talked about how he first came to Somers Point as college student to go to Bay Shores and Tony Marts, but since he was a student at the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, he took note of Richard Somers name on the Tripoli Monument and learned not only the connection to Somers Point, but to US history.

Great Egg Bay from Somers Mansion

 

Richard Somers Interviewed

 

Richard Somers Day at Somers Mansion

 

Their Martyrs and Our Heroes By John Feffer

Here's a recent article by John Feffer in LeMonde that mentions Somers and quotes the Pope's support for his mission. Besides spelling Somers' name wrong, I don't think the Pope ever knew about Richard Somers and doubt the quote is accurate.

In any case, this is a recent and interesting article, as well as Feffer's article on Pirates today and their relation to the Barbary Wars of yesteryear. - BK

Suicide Missions THE WEST ALSO HAS JIHAD

Their martyrs, our heroes

By John Feffer

....Armies and guerrilla movements both deploy suicide missions, and both sides believe in a shared culture of heroic sacrifice. The difference between a ‘just war’ and terrorist targeting of civilians has been blurred for a long time...

... In America’s first war against Islam, we were the ones who introduced the use of suicide bombers. Indeed, the American seamen who perished in the incident were among the US military’s first missing in action.

It was 4 September 1804. The United States was at war with the Barbary pirates along the North African coast. The US Navy was desperate to penetrate the enemy defences. Commodore Edward Preble, who headed up the Third Mediterranean Squadron, chose an unusual stratagem: sending a booby-trappedUSS Intrepid into the bay at Tripoli, one of the Barbary states of the Ottoman empire, to blow up as many of the enemy’s ships as possible. US sailors packed 10,000 pounds of gunpowder into the boat along with 150 shells.

When Lieutenant Richard Sommers, who commanded the vessel, addressed his crew on the eve of the mission, a midshipman recorded his words: “‘No man need accompany him, who had not come to the resolution to blow himself up, rather than be captured; and that such was fully his own determination!’ Three cheers was the only reply. The gallant crew rose, as a single man, with the resolution yielding up their lives, sooner than surrender to their enemies: while each stepped forth, and begged as a favour, that he might be permitted to apply the match!” (1).

Yielding their lives

The crew of the boat then guided the Intrepid into the bay at night. So as not to be captured and lose so much valuable gunpowder to the enemy, they chose to blow themselves up with the boat. The explosion didn’t do much damage – at most, one Tripolitan ship went down – but the crew was killed just as surely as the two men who ploughed a ship piled high with explosives into the USS Cole in the Gulf of Aden nearly 200 years later.

Despite the failure of the mission, Preble received much praise for his strategies. “A few brave men have been sacrificed, but they could not have fallen in a better cause,” opined a British navy commander. The pope at the time went further: “The American commander, with a small force and in a short space of time, has done more for the cause of Christianity than the most powerful nations of Christendom have done for ages!”

Preble chose his tactic because his American forces were outgunned. It was a Hail Mary attempt to level the playing field. The bravery of his men and the reaction of his supporters could be easily transposed to the present day, when “fanatics” fighting against similar odds beg to sacrifice themselves for the cause of Islam and garner the praise of at least some of their religious leaders.

For the complete article see:

Their Martyrs and Our Heroes
http://mondediplo.com/2009/09/06jihad


http://www.ips-dc.org/articles/their_martyrs_and_our_heroes

http://www.tomdispatch.org/post/175103/john_feffer_their_martyrs_and_our_heroes

The Piracy Problem:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175062/john_feffer_the_piracy_problem


John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies and writes its regular World Beat column. Kathryn Zickuhr contributed research assistance to this article, which is published online at TomDispatch.com

http://www.ips-dc.org/staff/johnf

The entire article:

Powerful, developed countries have suicide bombers too.

Note: This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.

The actor Will Smith is no one's image of a suicide bomber. With his boyish face, he has often played comic roles. Even as the last man on earth in I Am Legend, he retains a wise-cracking, ironic demeanor. And yet, surrounded by a horde of hyperactive vampires at the end of that film, Smith clasps a live grenade to his chest and throws himself at the enemy in a final burst of heroic sacrifice.

Wait a second: surely that wasn't a suicide bombing. Will Smith wasn't reciting suras from the Koran. He wasn't sporting one of those rising sun headbands that the Japanese kamikaze wore for their suicide missions. He wasn't playing a religious fanatic or a political extremist. Will Smith was the hero of the film. So how could he be a suicide bomber? After all, he's one of us, isn't he?

As it happens, we have our suicide bombers too. "We" are the powerful, developed countries, the ones with an overriding concern for individual liberties and individual lives. "We" form a moral archipelago that encompasses the United States, Europe, Israel, present-day Japan, and occasionally Russia. Whether in real war stories or inspiring vignettes served up in fiction and movies, our lore is full of heroes who sacrifice themselves for motherland, democracy, or simply their band of brothers. Admittedly, these men weren't expecting 72 virgins in paradise and they didn't make film records of their last moments, but our suicidal heroes generally have received just as much praise and recognition as "their" martyrs.

The scholarly work on suicide bombers is large and growing. Most of these studies focus on why those other people do such terrible things, sometimes against their own compatriots but mainly against us. According to the popular view, Shiite or Tamil or Chechen suicide martyrs have a fundamentally different attitude toward life and death.

If, however, we have our own rich tradition of suicide bombers—and our own unfortunate tendency to kill civilians in our military campaigns—how different can these attitudes really be?

Western Jihad

In America's first war against Islam, we were the ones who introduced the use of suicide bombers. Indeed, the American seamen who perished in the incident were among the U.S. military's first missing in action.

It was September 4, 1804. The United States was at war with the Barbary pirates along the North African coast. The U.S. Navy was desperate to penetrate the enemy defenses. Commodore Edward Preble, who headed up the Third Mediterranean Squadron, chose an unusual stratagem: sending a booby-trapped U.S.S. Intrepid into the bay at Tripoli, one of the Barbary states of the Ottoman empire, to blow up as many of the enemy's ships as possible. U.S. sailors packed 10,000 pounds of gunpowder into the boat along with 150 shells.

When Lieutenant Richard Sommers, who commanded the vessel, addressed his crew on the eve of the mission, a midshipman recorded his words:

"'No man need accompany him, who had not come to the resolution to blow himself up, rather than be captured; and that such was fully his own determination!' Three cheers was the only reply. The gallant crew rose, as a single man, with the resolution yielding up their lives, sooner than surrender to their enemies: while each stepped forth, and begged as a favor, that he might be permitted to apply the match!"

The crew of the boat then guided the Intrepid into the bay at night. So as not to be captured and lose so much valuable gunpowder to the enemy, they chose to blow themselves up with the boat. The explosion didn't do much damage—at most, one Tripolitan ship went down—but the crew was killed just as surely as the two men who plowed a ship piled high with explosives into the U.S.S. Cole in the Gulf of Aden nearly 200 years later.

Despite the failure of the mission, Preble received much praise for his strategies. "A few brave men have been sacrificed, but they could not have fallen in a better cause," opined a British navy commander. The Pope went further: "The American commander, with a small force and in a short space of time, has done more for the cause of Christianity than the most powerful nations of Christiandom have done for ages!"

Preble chose his tactic because his American forces were outgunned. It was a Hail Mary attempt to level the playing field. The bravery of his men and the reaction of his supporters could be easily transposed to the present day, when "fanatics" fighting against similar odds beg to sacrifice themselves for the cause of Islam and garner the praise of at least some of their religious leaders.

The blowing up of the Intrepid was not the only act of suicidal heroism in U.S. military history. We routinely celebrate the brave sacrifices of soldiers who knowingly give up their lives in order to save their unit or achieve a larger military mission. We commemorate the sacrifice of the defenders of the Alamo, who could have, after all, slunk away to save themselves and fight another day. The poetry of the Civil War is rich in the language of sacrifice. In Phoebe Cary's poem "Ready" from 1861, a black sailor, "no slavish soul had he," volunteers for certain death to push a boat to safety.

The heroic sacrifices of the twentieth century are, of course, commemorated in film. Today, you can buy several videos devoted to the "suicide missions" of American soldiers.

Our World War II propaganda films—er, wartime entertainments—often featured brave soldiers facing certain death. In Flying Tigers (1942), for example, pilot Woody Jason anticipates the Japanese kamikaze by several years by flying a plane into a bridge to prevent a cargo train from reaching the enemy. In Bataan (1943), Robert Taylor leads a crew of 13 men in what they know will be the suicidal defense of a critical position against the Japanese. With remarkable sangfroid, the soldiers keep up the fight as they are picked off one by one until only Taylor is left. The film ends with him manning a machine gun against wave upon wave of oncoming Japanese.

Our warrior culture continues to celebrate the heroism of these larger-than-life figures from World War II by taking real-life stories and turning them into Hollywood-style entertainments. For his series of "war stories" on Fox News, for instance, Oliver North narrates an episode on the Doolittle raid, an all-volunteer mission to bomb Tokyo shortly after Pearl Harbor. Since the bombers didn't have enough fuel to return to their bases, the 80 pilots committed to what they expected to be a suicide mission. Most of them survived, miraculously, but they had been prepared for the ultimate sacrifice—and that is how they are billed today. "These are the men who restored the confidence of a shaken nation and changed the course of the Second World War," the promotional material for the episode rather grandly reports. Tokyo had the same hopes for its kamikaze pilots a few years later.

Why Suicide Missions?

America did not, of course, dream up suicide missions. They form a rich vein in the Western tradition. In the Bible, Samson sacrificed himself in bringing down the temple on the Philistine leadership, killing more through his death than he did during his life. The Spartans, at Thermopylae, faced down the Persians, knowing that the doomed effort would nevertheless delay the invading army long enough to give the Athenians time to prepare Greek defenses. In the first century AD in the Roman province of Judea, Jewish Zealots and Sicarians ("dagger men") launched suicide missions, mostly against Jewish moderates, to provoke an uprising against Roman rule.

Later, suicide missions played a key role in European history. "Books written in the post-9/11 period tend to place suicide bombings only in the context of Eastern history and limit them to the exotic rebels against modernism," writes Niccolo Caldararo in an essay on suicide bombers. "A study of the late 19th century and early 20th would provide a spate of examples of suicide bombers and assassins in the heart of Europe." These included various European nationalists, Russian anarchists, and other early practitioners of terrorism.

Given the plethora of suicide missions in the Western tradition, it should be difficult to argue that the tactic is unique to Islam or to fundamentalists. Yet some scholars enjoy constructing a restrictive genealogy for such missions that connects the Assassin sect (which went after the great sultan Saladin in the Levant in the twelfth century) to Muslim suicide guerrillas of the Philippines (first against the Spanish and then, in the early twentieth century, against Americans). They take this genealogy all the way up to more recent suicide campaigns by Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and Islamic rebels in the Russian province of Chechnya. The Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, who used suicide bombers in a profligate fashion, are ordinarily the only major non-Muslim outlier included in this series.

Uniting our suicide attackers and theirs, however, are the reasons behind the missions. Three salient common factors stand out. First, suicidal attacks, including suicide bombings, are a "weapon of the weak," designed to level the playing field. Second, they are usually used against an occupying force. And third, they are cheap and often brutally effective.

We commonly associate suicide missions with terrorists. But states and their armies, when outnumbered, will also launch such missions against their enemies, as Preble did against Tripoli or the Japanese attempted near the end of World War II. To make up for its technological disadvantages, the Iranian regime sent waves of young volunteers, some unarmed and some reportedly as young as nine years old, against the then-U.S.-backed Iraqi army in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.

Non-state actors are even more prone to launch suicide missions against occupying forces. Remove the occupying force, as Robert Pape argues in his groundbreaking book on suicide bombers, Dying to Win, and the suicide missions disappear. It is not a stretch, then, to conclude that we, the occupiers (the United States, Russia, Israel), through our actions, have played a significant part in fomenting the very suicide missions that we now find so alien and incomprehensible in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Lebanon, and elsewhere.

The archetypal modern suicide bomber first emerged in Lebanon in the early 1980s, a response to Israel's invasion and occupation of the country. "The Shiite suicide bomber," writes Mike Davis in his book on the history of the car bomb, Buda's Wagon, "was largely a Frankenstein monster of [Israeli Defense Minister] Ariel Sharon's deliberate creation." Not only did U.S. and Israeli occupation policies create the conditions that gave birth to these missions, but the United States even trained some of the perpetrators. The U.S. funded Pakistan's intelligence service to run a veritable insurgency training school that processed 35,000 foreign Muslims to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Charlie Wilson's War, the book and movie that celebrated U.S. assistance to the mujihadeen, could be subtitled: Suicide Bombers We Have Known and Funded.

Finally, the technique "works." Suicide bombers kill 12 times more people per incident than conventional terrorism, national security specialist Mohammed Hafez points out. The U.S. military has often publicized the "precision" of its airborne weaponry, of its "smart" bombs and missiles. But in truth, suicide bombers are the "smartest" bombers because they can zero in on their target in a way no missile can—from close up—and so make last-minute corrections for accuracy. In addition, by blasting themselves to smithereens, suicide bombers can't give away any information about their organization or its methods after the act, thus preserving the security of the group. You can't argue with success, however bloodstained it might be. Only when the tactic itself becomes less effective or counterproductive, does it recede into the background, as seems to be the case today among armed Palestinian groups.

Individual motives for becoming a suicide bomber or attacker have, when studied, proved to be surprisingly diverse. We tend to ascribe heroism to our soldiers when, against the odds, they sacrifice themselves for us, while we assume a glassy-eyed fanaticism on the part of those who go up against us. But close studies of suicide bombers suggest that they are generally not crazy, nor—another popular explanation—just acting out of abysmal poverty or economic desperation (though, as in the case of the sole surviving Mumbai suicide attacker put on trial in India recently, this seems to have been the motivation). "Not only do they generally not have economic problems, but most of the suicide bombers also do not have an emotional disturbance that prevents them from differentiating between reality and imagination," writes Anat Berko in her careful analysis of the topic, The Path to Paradise. Despite suggestions from Iraqi and U.S. officials that suicide bombers in Iraq have been coerced into participating in their missions, scholars have yet to record such cases.

Perhaps, however, this reflects a narrow understanding of coercion. After all, our soldiers are indoctrinated into a culture of heroic sacrifice just as are the suicide bombers of Hamas. The indoctrination doesn't always work: scores of U.S. soldiers go AWOL or join the peace movement just as some suicide bombers give up at the last minute. But the basic-training techniques of instilling the instinct to kill, the readiness to follow orders, and a willingness to sacrifice one's life are part of the warrior ethic everywhere.

Suicide missions are, then, a military technique that armies use when outmatched and that guerrilla movements use, especially in occupied countries, to achieve specific objectives. Those who volunteer for such missions, whether in Iraq today or on board the Intrepid in 1804, are usually placing a larger goal—liberty, national self-determination, ethnic or religious survival—above their own lives.

But wait: surely I'm not equating soldiers going on suicide missions against other soldiers with terrorists who blow up civilians in a public place. Indeed, these are two distinct categories. And yet much has happened in the history of modern warfare—in which civilians have increasingly become the victims of combat—to blur these distinctions.

Terror and Civilians

The conventional picture of today's suicide bomber is a young man or woman, usually of Arab extraction, who makes a video proclamation of faith, straps on a vest of high explosives, and detonates him or herself in a crowded pizzeria, bus, marketplace, mosque, or church. But we must expand this picture. The September 11th hijackers targeted high-profile locations, including a military target, the Pentagon. Hezbollah's suicidal truck driver destroyed the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut on October 23, 1983, killing 241 U.S. soldiers. Thenmozhi Rajaratnam, a female Tamil suicide bomber, assassinated Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

Suicide bombers, in other words, have targeted civilians, military installations, non-military sites of great significance, and political leaders. In suicide attacks, Hezbollah, Tamil Tiger, and Chechen suicide bombers have generally focused on military and police targets: 88%, 71%, and 61% of the time, respectively. Hamas, on the other hand, has largely targeted civilians (74% of the time). Sometimes, in response to public opinion, such movements will shift focus—and targets. After a 1996 attack killed 91 civilians and created a serious image problem, the Tamil Tigers deliberately began chosing military, police, and government targets for their suicide attacks. "We don't go after kids in Pizza Hut," one Tiger leader told researcher Mia Bloom, referring to a Hamas attack on a Sbarro outlet in Jerusalem that killed 15 civilians in 2001.

We have been conditioned into thinking of suicide bombers as targeting civilians and so putting themselves beyond the established conventions of war. As it happens, however, the nature of war has changed in our time. In the twentieth century, armies began to target civilians as a way of destroying the will of the population, and so bringing down the leadership of the enemy country. Japanese atrocities in China in the 1930s, the Nazi air war against Britain in World War II, Allied fire bombings of German and Japanese cities, the nuclear attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. carpet bombing in Cambodia and Laos, and the targeted assassinations of the Phoenix program during the Vietnam War, Russian depredations in Afghanistan and Chechnya, the tremendous civilian casualties during the Iraq War: all this has made the idea of conventional armies clashing in an area far from civilian life a quaint legacy of the past.

Terrorist attacks against civilians, particularly September 11th, prompted military historian Caleb Carr to back the Bush administration's declaration of a war against terror. "War can only be answered with war," he wrote in his best-selling The Lessons of Terror. "And it is incumbent on us to devise a style of war more imaginative, more decisive, and yet more humane than anything terrorists can contrive." This more imaginative, decisive, and humane style of war has, in fact, consisted of stepped-up aerial bombing, beefed-up Special Forces (to, in part, carry out targeted assassinations globally), and recently, the widespread use of unmanned aerial drones like the Predator and the Reaper, both in the American arsenal and in 24/7 use today over the Pakistani tribal borderlands. "Predators can become a modern army's answer to the suicide bomber," Carr wrote.

Carr's argument is revealing. As the U.S. military and Washington see it, the ideal use of Predator or Reaper drones, armed as they are with Hellfire missiles, is to pick off terrorist leaders; in other words, a mirror image of what that Tamil Tiger suicide bomber (who picked off the Indian prime minister) did somewhat more cost effectively. According to Carr, such a strategy with our robot planes is an effective and legitimate military tactic. In reality, though, such drone attacks regularly result in significant civilian casualties, usually referred to as "collateral damage." According to researcher Daniel Byman, the drones kill 10 civilians for every suspected militant. As Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch.com writes, "In Pakistan, a war of machine assassins is visibly provoking terror (and terrorism), as well as anger and hatred among people who are by no means fundamentalists. It is part of a larger destabilization of the country."

So, the dichotomy between a "just war," or even simply a war of any sort, and the unjust, brutal targeting of civilians by terrorists has long been blurring, thanks to the constant civilian casualties that now result from conventional war-fighting and the narrow military targets of many terrorist organizations.

Moral Relativism?

We have our suicide bombers—we call them heroes. We have our culture of indoctrination—we call it basic training. We kill civilians—we call it collateral damage.

Is this, then, the moral relativism that so outrages conservatives? Of course not. I've been drawing these comparisons not to excuse the actions of suicide bombers, but to point out the hypocrisy of our black-and-white depictions of our noble efforts and their barbarous acts, of our worthy goals and their despicable ends. We—the inhabitants of an archipelago of supposedly enlightened warfare—have been indoctrinated to view the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a legitimate military target and September 11th as a heinous crime against humanity. We have been trained to see acts like the attack in Tripoli as American heroism and the U.S.S. Cole attack as rank barbarism. Explosive vests are a sign of extremism; Predator missiles, of advanced sensibility.

It would be far better if we opened our eyes when it came to our own world and looked at what we were actually doing. Yes, "they" sometimes have dismaying cults of sacrifice and martyrdom, but we do too. And who is to say that ending occupation is any less noble than making the world free for democracy? Will Smith, in I Am Legend, was willing to sacrifice himself to end the occupation of vampires. We should realize that our soldiers in the countries we now occupy may look no less menacing and unintelligible than those obviously malevolent, science-fiction creatures. And the presence of our occupying soldiers sometimes inspires similar, Will Smith-like acts of desperation and, dare I say it, courage.

The fact is: Were we to end our occupation policies, we would go a long way toward eliminating "their" suicide bombers. But when and how will we end our own cult of martyrdom?

OpEd - The Current - September 9, 2009

From: The Current of Northfield, Linwood and Somers Point
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
On line at Shore News Today http://shorenewstoday.com/nls/
Page 17

When will Intrepid heroes come home?

Also see Seth Grossman's column, Page 16
Why Richard Somers is still a hero,
205 years later By Seth Grossman, Political Columnist. Liberty and Prosperity.org

OP ED –

Libyans Dancing on the Graves of American Heroes

When will Intrepid heroes come home?

By William Kelly [billkelly3@gmail.com]

If you were upset when a Scottish judge released convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset ali al Megrahi, and like President Obama, thought the hero's welcome he received in Tripoli was "highly objectionable, outrageous and disgusting," then you also agreed with Governor Corzine and other politicians who objected to Col. Moammar Gaddafi setting up his tent in New Jersey.

Then how do you feel about the Libyans dancing on the graves of American heroes, as they do at Green Square in celebration of the anniversary of the Gaddafi revolution?

This year’s September 1 celebration was special because it was the 40th anniversary of the Gaddafi coup and al Megrahi was honored when Gaddafi gives his speech to the people assembled at Green Square.

Green Square is just outside the walls of the Red Castle, where the bodies of the men of the USS Intrepid were buried when they washed ashore on September 5, 1804, two hundred and four years to the day that Condi Rice visited Tripoli last year.

Their unmarked graves are seven hundred and twenty feet south, southeast of the castle walls, a few feet below the Green Square, where the celebrations are held.

The original grave site contains the remains of eight of the men of the Intrepid. Five others were removed when the Italian army built a road in the 1930s, and reburied at the old walled cemetery about a mile away. Both of these sites can be clearly seen on any satellite view of Tripoli harbor.

While the five graves in the cemetery have been secured by US embassy personnel, the eight graves of the Intrepid officers and men has reportedly been excavated by the Libyans, who found "bones and buttons." These relics have either been reburied or are being kept in the Jamahiriya museum in the Red Castle where many ancient Greek and Roman artifacts are kept, along with the Volkswagon Beetle Colonel Moammar Gaddafi rode into Tripoli during the coup, cannon from the USS Philadelphia and some say, a mast from the wreck of the Intrepid.

Originally a pirate ship captured by the Americans, the USS Intrepid was used by Stephen Decatur to sink the captured Philadelphia in Tripoli harbor, and then by Lt. Richard Somers and his men who sailed the Intrepid back into the harbor at night on September 4, 1804, with the intention of destroying the anchored pirate fleet. Instead, the Intrepid exploded, and the bodies of the men washed ashore the next day.

The remains of all thirteen men were recovered, and the officers were identified by Dr. Jonathen Cowdery, the ship’s surgeon from the Philadelphia, whose Captain Bainbridge and his 300 man crew were being held in the castle dungeon. Cowdery and a party of prisoners from the Philadelphia buried them together, marking the graves one cable’s length south from the castle walls.

According to sailing manuals of the day, one cable length is listed as 720 feet, or a little more than two football fields, which if extended from the castle walls, is right at Green Square.

The Men of the USS Intrepid, who died on September 4, 1804, and are buried at Tripoli Harbor, are Master Commandant Richard Somers, of Somers Point, N.J., Lt. Henry Wadsworth, uncle of Longfellow, Midshipman Joseph Israel (14 years old) and ten volunteer seamen. From the USS Nautilus - “Bos’n” James Simms, Thomas Tompline, James Harris and William Keith. From the USS Constitution - William Harrison, Robert Clark, Hugh McCormick, Peter Penner, Issac Downes and Jacob Williams.

These men enlisted in the US Navy and fought the Barbary pirates for the same reasons we fight pirates and terrorist today. In fact, they established the spirit, principles and Navy traditions that are continued today, and we honor them by naming modern Navy warships Somers, Decatur, Bainbridge, Nautilus, Enterprise and Intrepid after them and their ships.

And one of those traditions is that no one is left behind. As Admiral Gary Roughead, Chief of Naval Operations recently said, after the return of the remains of a Navy airman shot down during the first Gulf War 18 years ago, "Our Navy will never give up looking for a shipmate, regardless of how long or how difficult that search may be."

For anyone really interested, the search for the men of the USS Intrepid leads to Green Square, Tripoli, where they are buried in the little park outside of the Red Castle.

When al Megrahi was released, Gadaffi’s son said that every time the Libyans engaged in talks over oil or trade with England, al Megrahi’s name came up in the negotiations. But now, after 205 years and dozens of US politicians having recently visited Libya, they’ve made deals for oil, trade and military equipment, but no one has yet publicly mentioned the names of the men of the USS Intrepid, or has requested their repatriation.

Who will be the first to bring up the names of the men of the Intrepid? Who will take the first step in bringing them home, so they can have an American hero’s homecoming, and be buried with full military honors rather than lay in an unmarked grave in the pirate’s lair?

When you see tapes of Gadaffi gave his speech at Green Square, remember the men of the Intrepid are buried there. And Remember the men of the Intrepid on September 11th, Patriot's Day, and September 13 - Richard Somers/John Barry Day, when we are supposed to remember those heroes but seldom do. And remember the men of the Intrepid on September 24 when Col. Gaddafi addresses the United Nations.

Sign Petition:

http://www.petitiononline.com/Intrepid/petition.html

Remember the Intrepid blog Update:

Article 20 Treaty of Peace & Amity w/ Tripoli

Treaty of Peace & Amity, signed at Tripoli, June 4, 1805

Treaty of Peace and Amity, signed at Tripoli June 4, 1805 (6 Rabia I, A. H. 1220). Original in English and Arabic. Submitted to the Senate December 11, 1805. Resolution of advice and consent April 12, 1806. Ratified by the United States April 17, 1806. As to the ratification generally, see the notes. Proclaimed April 22, 1806.

The English tent of the copy of the treaty, signed by Tobias Lear, follows; to it is appended the receipt for the $60,000 ransom paid on June 19, 1805 (21 Rabia I, A. H. 1220), as written in the same document; then is reproduced the Arabic text of that paper, in the same order as the English. Following those texts is a comment, written in 1930, on the Arabic tent.

Treaty Of Peace and Amity between the United States of America and the Bashaw, Bey and Subjects of Tripoli in Barbary.

ARTICLE 1st

There shall be, from the conclusion of this Treaty, a firm, inviolable and universal peace, and a sincere friendship between the President and Citizens of the United States of America, on the one part, and the Bashaw, Bey and Subjects of the Regency of Tripoli in Barbary on the other, made by the free consent of both Parties, and on the terms of the most favoured Nation. And if either party shall hereafter grant to any other Nation, any particular favour or priviledge in Navigation or Commerce, it shall immediately become common to the other party, freely, where it is freely granted, to such other Nation, but where the grant is conditional it shall be at the option of the contracting parties to accept, alter or reject, such conditions in such manner, as shall be most conducive to their respective Interests.

ARTICLE 2d

The Bashaw of Tripoli shall deliver up to the American Squadron now off Tripoli, all the Americans in his possession; and all the Subjects of the Bashaw of Tripoli now in the power of the United States of America shall be delivered up to him; and as the number of Americans in possession of the Bashaw of Tripoli amounts to Three Hundred Persons, more or less; and the number of Tripolino Subjects in the power of the Amelicans to about, One Hundred more or less; The Bashaw of Tripoli shall receive from the United States of America, the sum of Sixty Thousand Dollars, as a payment for the difference between the Prisoners herein mentioned.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/bar1805t.asp#art6


ARTICLE 20th

Should any Citizen of the United States of America die within the limits of the Regency of Tripoli, the Bashaw and his Subjects shall not interfere with the property of the deceased; but it shall be under the immediate direction of the Consul, unless otherwise disposed of by will. Should there be no Consul, the effects shall be deposited in the hands of some person worthy of trust, until the party shall appear who has a right to demand them, when they shall render an account of the property. Neither shall the Bashaw or his Subjects give hindrance in the execution of any will that may appear.

Whereas, the undersigned, Tobias Lear, Consul General of the United States of America for the Regency of Algiers, being duly appointed Commissioner, by letters patent under the signature of the President, and Seal of the United States of America, bearing date at the City of Washington, the 18" day of November 1803 for negotiating and concluding a Treaty of Peace, between the United States of America, and the Bashaw, Bey and Subjects of the Regency of Tripoli in Barbary-

Now Know Ye, That I, Tobias Lear, Commissioner as aforesaid, do conclude the foregoing Treaty, and every article and clause therein contained; reserving the same nevertheless for the final ratification of the President of the United States of America, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate of the said United States.

Done at Tripoli in Barbary, the fourth day of June, in the year One thousand, eight hundred and five; corresponding with the sixth day of the first month of Rabbia 1220.

[Seal] TOBIAS LEAR.

Having appeared in our presence, Colonel Tobias Lear, Consul General of the United States of America, in the Regency of Algiers, and Commissioner for negotiating and concluding a Treaty of Peace and Friendship between Us and the United States of America, bringing with him the present Treaty of Peace with the within Articles, they were by us minutely examined, and we do hereby accept, confirm and ratify them, Ordering all our Subjects to fulfill entirely their contents, without any violation and under no pretext.

In Witness whereof We, with the heads of our Regency, Subscribe it.

Given at Tripoli in Barbary the sixth day of the first month of Rabbia 1220, corresponding with the 4th day of June 1805.

(L. S.) JUSUF CARAMANLY Bashaw
(L. S.) MOHAMET CARAMANLY Bey
(L. S.) MOHAMET Kahia
(L. S.) HAMET Rais de Marino
(L. S.) MOHAMET DGHIES First AIinister
(L. S.) SARAH Aga of Divan
(L. S.) SEEIM Hasnadar
(L. S.) MURAT Dqblartile
(L. S.) MURAT RAIS Admiral
(L. S.) SOEIMAN Kehia
(L. S.) ABDAEEA Basa Aga
(L. S.) MAHOMET Scheig al Belad
(L. S.) ALEI BEN DIAB First Secretary
[Receipt]

We hereby acknowlidge to have received from the hands of Colonel Tobias Lear the full sum of sixty thousand dollars, mentioned as Ransum for two hundred Americans, in the Treaty of Peace concluded between Us and the United States of America on the Sixth day of the first Month of Rabbia 1220-and of all demands against the said United States.

Done this twenty first day of the first month of Rabbia 1220.

(L. S.) Signd (JOSEPH CARMANALY) Bashaw

Gaddafi son resists IRA pay-out

Gaddafi son resists IRA pay-out -

But the Irish are happy they get to go to court.

Lawyers happy.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8241006.stm


The son of Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi has said his country will resist demands from the families of IRA victims for compensation.
Saif al-Islam Gaddafi said any claims for compensation based on Libya's supply of explosives to the IRA would be a matter for "the courts".

He told Sky News: "They have their lawyers, we have our lawyers."
Compensation campaigners welcomed Mr Gaddafi's remarks as a "positive sign of engagement".

On Sunday the relatives also welcomed Gordon Brown's announcement on the government's support for compensation.

Mr Gaddafi's comments came hours after Mr Brown announced that he was setting up a dedicated Foreign Office team to assist the IRA families' victims.
The move was seen by opposition MPs as an U-turn, which had left Britain looking "weak".

'Sign of engagement'

Speaking about the looming British attempts to claim compensation, the Libyan leader's son said: "Anyone can knock on our door. You go to the court."

And when asked if his answer to the compensation demand would be "no" in the first instance, he replied: "Of course."

The response by Mr Gaddafi - seen by many as the most likely successor to his father's leadership - was welcomed by campaigners as a sign of Libyan "engagement".
Victims' families' lawyer Jason McCue said: "I am optimistic about the Libyan response.

IRA victims' lawyer Jason McCue:"PM has made the right decision"

"It means they have decided to engage with us whereas previously there was no engagement.

"We always expected this to go to the courts and now it means there will be a process to getting compensation."

The families had previously welcomed the prime minister's change of mind over whether or not it was "appropriate" to put pressure on Libya.

Mr McCue told the BBC their cases "had been very much in the hands of the civil servants", so they had gone "straight to the prime minister".

"We asked for a principled decision, rather than a bureaucratic decision," he said.
On relations with Libya, he said, we were "dealing" with the past. "We are talking. I think that's very positive".

'Disgusting, immoral'

Also in the interview with Sky News, Mr Gaddafi condemned British opposition politicians as "disgusting and immoral" for using the case of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi to make political capital.

"They are trying to use this human tragedy for their own political agenda," he said.
"It's completely immoral to use this case to advance your own political agenda."
On the question of whether Prime Minister Gordon Brown had involved himself in the release of the Lockerbie bomber, Mr Gaddafi said: "He didn't."

The discussions had been "very, very technical", he said.

He added: "It couldn't be discussed at a high level. It is not something that should be discussed at a leadership level."

Earlier on Sunday, Conservative foreign affairs spokesman William Hague said Gordon Brown's change of mind was a "stunning admission" that the government had failed to support the families of the victims of IRA terrorism.

He said: "The British government should have provided active support as a matter of course, not as a result of public pressure.

"But Gordon Brown and the government he leads have long lost their moral compass."

Inside of cemetery from South East

 

 

Inside the Cemetery Site

 

 

Old Protestant Cemetery from the SE

 

This is a view of the Old Protestant Cemetery from the South East, looking towards the North West corner of the habor.

I believe that is an olive tree, as refered to in the 1970s article.

 

This is a view of the old Red Castle fort from where approximately the original grave site is located, 720 feet from the castle. Green Square, while paved over for the most part, includes pockets of grass and palm trees, and it is within one of these pockets that the original grave site is located.

Al Megheri Sponsored by Nike?

 

Libya: A Hero's Welcome
Written by Scott Stewart and Fred Burton
WEDNESDAY, 26 AUGUST 2009 18:47
Stratfor.com

On Aug. 24, Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill addressed a special session of the Scottish Parliament. The session was called so that MacAskill could explain why he had decided to release Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the former Libyan intelligence officer convicted of terrorism charges in connection with the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, and who had been expected to spend the rest of his life in prison. MacAskill said he granted al-Megrahi a compassionate release because al-Megrahi suffers from terminal prostate cancer and is expected to live only a few months.

The Aug. 20 release of al-Megrahi ignited a firestorm of outrage in both the United Kingdom and the United States.

FBI Director Robert Mueller released to the press contents of an uncharacteristically blunt and critical letter he had written to MacAskill in which Mueller characterized al-Megrahi's release as inexplicable and "detrimental to the cause of justice." Mueller told MacAskill in the letter that the release "makes a mockery of the rule of law."

The flames of outrage over the release of al-Megrahi were further fanned when al-Megrahi received a hero's welcome upon his arrival in Tripoli - video of him being welcomed and embraced by Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi was broadcast all over the world.

For his part, Gadhafi has long lobbied for al-Megrahi's release, even while taking steps to end Libya's status as an international pariah. Gadhafi first renounced terrorism and his nuclear ambitions in 2003, shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In October 2008 he completed the compensation agreement with the families of the U.S. victims of the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 and of an April 1986 Libyan attack against the La Belle disco in Berlin.

Yet despite the conviction of al-Megrahi, the 2003 official admission of Libyan responsibility for the Pan Am bombing in a letter to the United Nations, and the agreement to pay compensation to the families of the Pan Am victims, Gadhafi has always maintained in public statements that al-Megrahi and Libya were not responsible for the bombing. The official admission of responsibility for the Pan Am bombing, coupled with the public denials, has resulted in a great deal of ambiguity and confusion over the authorship of the attack - which, in all likelihood, is precisely what the denials were intended to do.

The Pan Am 103 Investigation

At 7:03 p.m. on Dec. 21, 1988, an improvised explosive device (IED) detonated in one of Pan Am Flight 103's cargo containers, causing the plane to break apart and fall from the sky. The 259 passengers and crew members aboard the flight died, as did 11 residents of Lockerbie, Scotland, the town where the remnants of the jumbo jet fell.

Immediately following the bombing, there was suspicion that the Iranians or Syrians had commissioned the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC) to conduct the bombing. This belief was based on the fact that German authorities had taken down a large PFLP-GC cell in Frankfurt in October 1988 and that one member of the cell had in his possession an IED concealed inside a Toshiba radio. Frankfurt is the city where Pan Am 103 departed before stopping in London. Indeed, even today, there are still some people who believe that the PFLP-GC was commissioned by either the Iranian or the Syrian government to conduct the Pan Am bombing.

The PFLP-GC theory might eventually have become the officially accepted theory had the bomb on Pan Am 103 detonated (as planned) while the aircraft was over the North Atlantic Ocean. However, a delay in the plane's departure from London resulted in the timed device detonating while the aircraft was still over land, and this allowed authorities to collect a great deal of evidence that had been scattered across a wide swath of the Scottish countryside. The search effort was one of the most complex crime-scene investigations ever conducted.

Through months of painstakingly detailed effort, investigators were able to determine that the aircraft was brought down by an IED containing a main charge of Semtex, that the IED had been placed inside a Toshiba radio cassette player (in a macabre coincidence, that particular model of Toshiba, the RT-SF 16, is called the "BomBeat radio cassette player"), and that the radio had been located inside a brown Samsonite hard-side suitcase located inside the cargo container.

Investigators were also able to trace the clothing inside the suitcase containing the IED to a specific shop, Mary's House, in Sliema, Malta. While examining one of the pieces of Maltese clothing in May 1989, investigators found a fragment of a circuit board that did not match anything found in the Toshiba radio. It is important to remember that in a bombing, the pieces of the IED do not entirely disappear. They may be shattered and scattered, but they are not usually completely vaporized. Although some pieces may be damaged beyond recognition, others are not, and this often allows investigators to reconstruct the device

In mid-1990, after an exhaustive effort to identify the circuit-board fragment, the FBI laboratory in Washington was able to determine that the circuit board was very similar to one that came from a timer that a special agent with the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service had recovered from an arms cache while investigating a Libyan-sponsored coup attempt in Lome, Togo, in 1986. Further investigation determined that the company that produced the timers, the Swiss company MEBO, had sold as many as 20 of the devices to the Libyan government, and that the Libyan government was the company's primary customer. Interestingly, in 1988, MEBO rented one of its offices in Zurich to a firm called ABH, which was run by two Libyan intelligence officers: Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Badri Hassan.

The MEBO timer, model MST-13, is very different from the ice-cube timer in the PFLP-GC device found in Frankfurt in October 1988. Additionally, the ice-cube timer in the PFLP-GC device was used in conjunction with a barometric pressure switch, and the IED used a different main charge, TNT, instead of the Semtex used in the Pan Am 103 device.

Perhaps the fact that does the most damage to the PFLP-GC conspiracy theory is that the principal bombmaker for the PFLP-GC Frankfurt cell (and the man who made the PFLP-GC Toshiba device), Marwan Khreesat, was actually an infiltrator sent into the organization by the Jordanian intelligence service. Kreesat not only assisted in providing the information that allowed the Germans to take down the cell, but he was under strict orders by his Jordanian handlers to ensure that every IED he constructed was not capable of detonating. Therefore, it is extremely unlikely that one of the IEDs he created was used to destroy Pan Am 103.

One of the Libyans connected to MEBO, al-Megrahi, is an interesting figure. Not only was he an officer with Libyan intelligence, the External Security Organization, or ESO, but he also served as the chief of security for Libyan Arab Airlines (LAA) and had visited Malta many times. The owner of the Mary's House clothing shop in Sliema identified al-Megrahi as the man who purchased the clothing found in the suitcase, and Maltese immigration records indicated that al-Megrahi was in Malta on Dec. 7, 1988, the time that the clothing was purchased. Al-Megrahi left Malta on Dec. 9, 1988, but returned to the country using a false identity on Dec. 20, using a passport issued by the ESO in the name of Ahmed Khalifa Abdusamad. Al-Megrahi left Malta using the Abdusamad passport on Dec. 21, 1988, the day the suitcase was apparently sent from Malta aboard Air Malta Flight KM180 to Frankfurt and then transferred to Pan Am 103.

On Nov. 13, 1991, the British government charged al-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, the LAA station manager at Luqa Airport in Malta, with the bombing. One day later, a federal grand jury in the United States returned an indictment against the same two men for the crime. In March 1995, the FBI added the two men to its most wanted list and the Diplomatic Security Service's Rewards for Justice Program offered a $4 million reward for their capture. Al-Megrahi and Fhimah were placed under house arrest in Libya - a comfortable existence that, more than actually confining them, served to protect them from being kidnapped and spirited out of Libya to face trial.

After many years of boycotts, embargos, U.N. resolutions and diplomatic wrangling - including extensive efforts by South African President Nelson Mandela and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan - a compromise was reached and all parties agreed to a trial in a neutral country - the Netherlands - conducted under Scottish law. On April 5, 1999, al-Megrahi and Fhimah were transferred to Camp Zeist in the Netherlands to stand trial before a special panel of Scottish judges.

On Jan. 31, 2001, after a very long trial that involved an incredible amount of technical and detailed testimony, the judges reached their decision. The Scottish judges acquitted Fhimah, finding that there was not proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he was involved in the plot (the British government had charged that he had been the person who stole the luggage tags and placed the suitcase on the Air Malta flight), but they did find al-Megrahi guilty of 270 counts of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison, with a minimum sentence of 27 years.

Although the case against al-Megrahi was entirely circumstantial - there was no direct evidence he or Fhimah had placed the device aboard the aircraft - the Scottish judges wrote in their decision that they believed the preponderance of the evidence, including al-Megrahi's knowledge of airline security measures and procedures, his connection to MEBO, his purchase of the clothing in the suitcase that had contained the IED and his clandestine travel to Malta on Dec. 20 to 21, 1988, convinced them beyond a reasonable doubt that al-Megrahi was guilty as charged.

In a December 2003 letter to the United Nations, Libya accepted responsibility for the Pan Am 103 bombing. (In the same letter, Libya also took responsibility for the September 1989 bombing of UTA Flight 772, a French airliner destroyed by an IED after leaving Brazzaville, Congo, and making a stop in N'Djamena, Chad. All 170 people aboard the aircraft died when it broke up over the Sahara in Niger.) Nevertheless, the Libyan government continued to maintain al-Megrahi's innocence in the Pan Am bombing, just as al-Megrahi had done throughout the trial, insisting that he had not been involved in the bombing.

Al-Megrahi's reluctance to admit responsibility for the bombing or to show any contrition for the attack is one of the factors singled out by those who opposed his release from prison. It is also one of the hallmarks of a professional intelligence officer. In many ways, al-Megrahi's public stance regarding the bombing can be summed up by the unofficial motto of the CIA's Office of Technical Services - "Admit nothing, deny everything, make counter-accusations."

Shadows

In the shadow world of covert action it is not uncommon for the governments behind such actions to deny (or at least not claim) responsibility for them. These governments also often attempt to plan such attacks in a way that will lead to a certain level of ambiguity - and thereby provide plausible deniability. This was a characteristic seen in many Libyan attacks against U.S. interests, such as the 1986 La Belle Disco bombing in Berlin. It was only an intercept of Libyan communications that provided proof of Libyan responsibility for that attack.

Many attacks that the Libyans sponsored or subcontracted out, such as the string of attacks carried out against U.S. interests by members of the Japanese Red Army and claimed in the name of the Anti-Imperialist International Brigade, were likewise meant to provide Libya with plausible deniability. Gadhafi did not relish the possibility of another American airstrike on his home in Tripoli, like the one that occurred after the La Belle attack in April 1986. (A number of Libyan military targets also were hit in the broader U.S. military action, known as Operation El Dorado Canyon.) Pan Am 103 is considered by many to be Gadhafi's retribution for those American airstrikes, one of which killed his adopted baby daughter. Gadhafi, who had reportedly been warned of the strike by the Italian government, was not injured in the attack.

During the 1980s, the Libyan government was locked in a heated tit-for-tat battle with the United States. One source of this friction were U.S. claims that the Libyan government supported terrorist groups such as the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO), which conducted several brutal, high-profile attacks in the 1980s, including the December 1985 Rome and Vienna airport assaults. There was also military tension between the two countries as Libya declared a "line of death" across the mouth of the Gulf of Sidra. The U.S. Navy shot down several Libyan fighter aircraft that had attempted to enforce the edict. But these two threads of tension were closely intertwined; the U.S. Navy purposefully challenged the line of death in the spring of 1986 in response to the Rome and Vienna attacks, and it is believed that the La Belle attack was retribution for the U.S. military action in the Gulf of Sidra. The Libyan ESO was also directly implicated in attacks against U.S. diplomats in Sanaa, Yemen, and Khartoum, Sudan, in 1986.

Because of the need for plausible deniability, covert operatives are instructed to stick to their cover story and maintain their innocence if they are caught. Al-Megrahi's consistent denials and his many appeals, which often cite the PFLP-GC case in Frankfurt, have done a great deal to sow doubt and provide Libya with some deniability.

Like Osama bin Laden's initial denial of responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, al-Megrahi's claims of innocence have served as ready fuel for conspiracy theorists, who claim he was framed by the U.S. and British governments. However, any conspiracy to frame al-Megrahi and his Libyan masters would have to be very wide ranging and, by necessity, reach much further than just London and Washington. For example, anyone considering such a conspiracy must also account for the fact that in 1999 a French court convicted six Libyans in absentia for the 1989 bombing of UTA Flight 772. The six included Abdullah al-Sanussi, Gadhafi's brother-in-law and head of the ESO.

Getting two or more governments to cooperate on some sort of grand conspiracy to frame the Libyans and exonerate the Iranians and Syrians is hard to fathom. Such cooperation would have to involve enough people that, sooner or later, someone would spill the beans - especially considering that the Pan Am 103 saga played out over multiple U.S. administrations. As seen by the current stir over CIA interrogation programs, administrations love to make political hay by revealing the cover-ups of previous administrations. Surely, if there had been a secret ploy by the Reagan or Bush administrations to frame the Libyans, the Clinton or Obama administration would have outed it. The same principle applies to the United Kingdom, where Margaret Thatcher's government oversaw the beginning of the Pan Am 103 investigation and Labour governments after 1997 would have had the incentive to reveal information to the contrary.

While the U.S. and British governments work closely together on a number of intelligence projects, they are frequently at odds on counterterrorism policy and foreign relations. From our personal experience, we believe that it would be very difficult to get multiple U.S. and British administrations from different political parties to work in perfect harmony to further this sort of conspiracy. Due to the UTA investigation and trial, the conspiracy would have to somehow involve the French government. While the Americans working with the British is one thing, the very idea of the Americans, British and French working in perfect harmony on any sort of project - much less a grand secret conspiracy to frame the Libyans - is simply unimaginable. It is much easier to believe that the Libyans were guilty, especially in light of the litany of other terror attacks they committed or sponsored during that era.

Had the IED in the cargo hold of Pan Am 103 exploded over the open ocean, it is very unlikely that the clothing from Malta and the fragment of the MEBO timer would have ever been recovered - think of the difficulty the French have had in locating the black box from Air France 447 in June of this year. In such a scenario, the evidence linking al-Megrahi and the Libyan government to the Pan Am bombing might never have been discovered and plausible deniability could have been maintained indefinitely.

The evidence recovered in Scotland and al-Megrahi's eventual conviction put a dent in that deniability, but the true authors of the attack - al-Megrahi's superiors - were never formally charged. Without al-Megrahi's cooperation, there was no evidence to prove who ordered him to undertake the attack, though it is logical to conclude that the ESO would never undertake such a significant attack without Gadhafi's approval.

Now that al-Megrahi has returned to Libya and is in Libyan safekeeping, there is no chance that any death-bed confession he may give will ever make it to the West. His denials will be his final words and the ambiguity and doubt those denials cast will be his legacy. In the shadowy world of clandestine operations, this is the ideal behavior for someone caught committing an operational act. He has shielded his superiors and his government to the end. From the perspective of the ESO, and Moammar Gadhafi, al-Megrahi is indeed a hero.

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Capt. Greg Miller at the Cemetery

 

U.S. Navy Reserve Capt. Greg Miller of Cleveland kneels beside one of the tombs of American crewmen of the Intrepid that have stood in a Libyan cemetery overlooking Tripoli harbor since 1804.

The story:

U.S. Navy Reserve Capt. Greg Miller of Berea restoring U.S. tombs in Libyan cemetery
Posted by Brian Albrecht, The Plain Dealer August 15, 2009 20:04PM

Five fallen U.S. sailors from what has been described as America's first war on terrorism lie in a crumbling cemetery in Libya, their graves identified only by their heroism on a night more than 200 years ago.

They represent a lingering legacy of the Intrepid -- a small ship used in a daring raid in 1804 to destroy the captured American frigate Philadelphia anchored in Tripoli Harbor, denying the enemy use of the former U.S. warship.

Much the same tactic was attempted six months later when the Intrepid sailed into the same harbor, packed with gunpowder for use as a floating bomb to destroy the Tripolitan fleet.

But just as the Intrepid entered the harbor, it exploded, either by accident, an enemy cannon shot or intentionally blown up by its own crew as the vessel was attacked and boarded. All 13 officers and crewmen perished.

History was vividly in mind when U.S. Navy Reserve Capt. Greg Miller, 48, of Berea, recently walked through the cemetery after meeting with Libyan officials to explore the possibility of refurbishing the burial grounds and tombs of the Intrepid seamen.

His visit was the first such joint Navy/Libyan effort at the site since 1949 when memorial services were held there and a plaque, now missing, was installed on a cemetery wall, commemorating the Intrepid sailors.

Miller is a member of the Reserve's Maritime Partnership Program, created to work cooperatively with African coastal nations to improve maritime security and anti-piracy, anti-terrorism efforts.
Miller said that mission, when it came to Libya, was problematic, given this country's stormy and sometimes violent relations with Libya's leader, Muammar Gaddafi, from 1970 to 2002. Those relations have improved in recent years, including establishment of a U.S. Embassy in Tripoli this year.

Some kind of initial nonthreatening, apolitical, mutually beneficial, cooperative project was needed so the maritime project could progress in Libya, according to Miller.

Something like what happened in 1971 when the U.S. pingpong team helped open the door to improved U.S. relations with China.

The Libyan cemetery could provide some suitably common ground between two formerly antagonistic nations, Miller said. And the more he studied the concept, the more fascinated he became with the history behind the project.

America first went to war with Libya in 1801, when it was known as Tripoli, part of the coalition of Barbary Coast states in North Africa that demanded, and got, tribute from countries for safe passage of their ships across the Mediterranean Sea. The ships of countries refusing to pay tribute were pirated, their goods confiscated and crews held hostage for ransom.

When Thomas Jefferson became president, he refused to pay the tribute and sent American warships to blockade and raid cities along the Barbary Coast. The Philadelphia ran aground in Tripoli harbor during one such action, resulting in the successful raid to destroy the ship, led by Lt. Stephen Decatur on the Intrepid.

The second, doomed attack of the Intrepid was described as "a suicide mission" by Miller, even though plans had been made for the crew to escape in smaller boats before the floating bomb was set off.

Miller said that although U.S. Navy officials concluded the Intrepid had been blown up by its own crew as it came under attack, he was told by Libyan officials that they believe a "hot shot" (heated cannonball) fired from shore fortifications hit the ship's magazine, causing the premature explosion.

The captured crew of the Philadelphia, held hostage in Tripoli, may have gathered the remains of the Intrepid seamen and buried them, including five interred on a knoll overlooking the harbor, Miller said. (Exact location of the other burials have been lost to history.)


That site later became known as the "Old Protestant Cemetery" where Christians, largely members of diplomatic families and seamen who died in Tripoli, were buried, he added.

The five Intrepid remains are encased in tombs, each marked with an inscription: "Here lies an American sailor who gave his life in the explosion of the United States ship Intrepid in Tripoli Harbor, Sept. 4, 1804."

See Photo of tomb inscription. Courtesy Capt. Greg Miller

Tombs of the Intrepid seamen are only identified by an inscription probably added to each of the five in 1949. The inscription reads: "Here lies an American sailor who gave his life in the explosion of the United States Ship Intrepid in Tripoli Harbor September 4, 1804."

Miller said the inscriptions probably were added to the tombs in 1949 during memorial ceremonies attended by officers of the USS Spokane and Libyan officials.

The cemetery has been protected from surrounding commercial development and vandalism, but the combined impact of blowing sand and saltwater during the past two centuries have taken a toll on now-crumbling and eroded sandstone walls surrounding the 58 graves.

Portions of the walls are hovering near collapse, according to Miller, a home builder during his off-duty time from the Reserves.

He recommends reconstructing portions of the wall and applying a protective latex coating, restoring the spalled and time-worn individual Intrepid tombs, and installing spotlights to emphasize the cemetery's role as a historic landmark. The effort could cost several thousand dollars, he said.

The Libyans, particularly Giuma Anag, of the Department of Archaeology and Antiquities, have expressed strong interest in the project, Miller said.

He noted that Anag also talked about someday raising whatever remains of the Philadelphia and Intrepid in the way of cannons, anchors, chains, etc. now buried under a portion of the old harbor that has been filled in and paved over.

"You have to be very tactful," Miller said. "There's a sensitivity there. This is historically significant for them. They view this as something in which their side fought courageously, too."

And while the past may be crumbling in a little hillside cemetery in Libya, its continued presence still can remind us of a small group of American sailors who long ago embodied the name of their ship on its final voyage.

As Miller remarked of his visit to the Intrepid tombs, "It's really a humbling experience. When you think about what these men did, you realize what a bold, courageous thing it was, and it's very gratifying to see that they haven't been forgotten."

Old Protestant Cemetery