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From Los Angeles Times

Inmate hunger strike expands to more California prisons

Inmates in at least a third of California's prisons are believed to be refusing meals in solidarity with maximum-security prisoners at Pelican Bay.

By Sam Quinones, Los Angeles Times

July 6, 2011

Inmates in at least 11 of California's 33 prisons are refusing meals in solidarity with a hunger strike staged by prisoners in one of the system's special maximum-security units, officials said Tuesday.

The strike began Friday when inmates in the Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison stopped eating meals in protest of conditions that they contend are cruel and inhumane.

"There are inmates in at least a third of our prisons who are refusing state-issued meals," said Terry Thornton, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

The number of declared strikers at Pelican Bay — reported Saturday as fewer than two dozen — has grown but is changing daily, she said. The same is true at other prisons.

Some inmates are refusing all meals, while others are rejecting only some, Thornton said. Some were eating in visitation rooms and refusing state-issued meals in their cells, she said.

Assessing the number of actual strikers "is very challenging," Thornton said.

Prison medical staff are "making checks of every single inmate who is refusing meals," she said.

More than 400 prisoners at Pelican Bay are believed to be refusing meals, including inmates on the prison's general-population yard, said Molly Poizig, spokeswoman for the Bay Area-based group Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity.

The group had received reports on the strike from lawyers and family members visiting inmates over the weekend, she said.

The group's website claims that prison officials attempted to head off the strike by promoting a Fourth of July menu that included strawberry shortcake and ice cream. According to the website, the wife of a Security Housing Unit inmate said her husband had never had ice cream there and "has never seen a strawberry."

Inmates at Calipatria State Prison — with more than a thousand prisoners — were among those reported to be refusing meals, Poizig said. Prison officials could not be reached for comment.

But Thornton acknowledged that inmates at the prison were refusing to eat state-issued meals.

The strike was organized by Security Housing Unit inmates at Pelican Bay protesting the maximum-security unit's extreme isolation. The inmates are also asking for better food, warmer clothing and to be allowed one phone call a month.

The Security Housing Unit compound, which currently houses 1,100 inmates, is designed to isolate prison-gang members or those who've committed crimes while in prison.

The cells have no windows and are soundproofed to inhibit communication among inmates. The inmates spend 22 1/2 hours a day in their cells, being released only an hour a day to walk around a small area with high concrete walls.

Prisoner advocates have long complained that Security Housing Unit incarceration amounts to torture, often leading to mental illness, because many inmates spend years in the lockup.

Gang investigators believe the special unit reduces the ability of the most predatory inmates, particularly prison-gang leaders, to control those in other prisons as well as gang members on the street.

Prison administrators are meeting with inmate advisory councils to discuss the inmates' complaints, Thornton said.

But "I have not heard there's been any decision" to modify policies governing the Security Housing Unit, she said. "A lot of those policies have been refined through litigation."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0706-hunger-strike-20110706,0,378335,print.story

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Terrorism suspect secretly held for two months

Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, a Somali, is the first detainee known to have been secretly held by the Obama administration outside the criminal justice system.

By Ken Dilanian, Washington Bureau

July 6, 2011

Reporting from Washington

A Somali militant linked to Al Qaeda was held and interrogated for two months on a U.S. Navy ship — the first publicly known example of the Obama administration secretly detaining a new terrorism suspect outside the criminal justice system.

Senior administration officials revealed the case Tuesday after an indictment against the man, Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, was unsealed in federal court in New York. The indictment, which does not mention Warsame's military detention, charges that he worked to broker a weapons deal between Al Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen and the Somali militant group Shabab. It alleges that he fought on Shabab's behalf in Somalia in 2009, then went to Yemen in 2010 for explosives training and took part in terrorist activities there.

According to administration officials, Warsame was seized April 19 by U.S. forces in international waters while traveling between Yemen and Somalia. He had been identified by U.S. intelligence as an important target, the officials said. A second person taken into custody with Warsame was later released, the officials said. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were discussing intelligence matters.

Warsame was turned over to the FBI after extensive "humane" interrogation aboard ship by a unit known as a High-Value Interrogation Group, made up of FBI, CIA and Defense Department personnel, the officials said. But a U.S. official said CIA officers did not directly question Warsame. After the controversy surrounding George W. Bush-era interrogations of detainees, the CIA has consistently said it has kept its agents away from direct questioning.

Warsame's detention marks a significant new step for the administration in its handling of terrorism suspects. President Obama pledged during his campaign to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which was designed during the Bush administration as a place to hold detainees outside the reach of U.S. law. Although the administration has not succeeded in closing Guantanamo, it has, until now, not disclosed the existence of any new detainees.

After Obama significantly expanded the targeted killing of militants in Pakistan and elsewhere through Predator drone strikes, Republicans and some outside analysts charged that the administration seemed to prefer to kill Al Qaeda members rather than sort through the messy legalities of detaining them. Crucial intelligence was being lost, they said.

In recent weeks, however, senior officials had suggested that situation was changing. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, in his confirmation hearings to become CIA director, said in response to questions from Republican senators that he believed the U.S. should find a way to capture and detain militants and hold them someplace other than Guantanamo.

Adm. William H. McRaven, who is taking over as head of U.S. Special Operations Command, was asked last week during his confirmation hearings what the U.S. did with militants captured outside Afghanistan.

"In many cases, we will put them on a naval vessel and we will hold them until we can either get a case to prosecute them in U.S. court," send them to a third country or release them, McRaven said, without providing specifics. Shipboard detentions had been alleged by human rights groups but never confirmed.

Although the Warsame case shows that extrajudicial detentions have resumed, the administration officials who discussed the case were at pains to note the differences between his case and those carried out under Bush.

Officials said Warsame's interrogation was conducted under the rules of the U.S. Army Field Manual, which strictly limits the techniques that can be used. After the High-Value Interrogation Group had completed its questioning of Warsame and transferred him to FBI custody, he was read his Miranda rights, the officials said. Warsame waived his right to a lawyer and continued talking, the officials said.

The Bush administration had authorized several interrogation techniques prohibited under the Army Field Manual, including simulated drowning known as waterboarding, which critics charged amounted to torture. The Bush administration also moved detainees out of the civilian justice system, initially asserting that the president had the authority to hold detainees indefinitely without trial. After the Supreme Court rejected that position, Bush authorized trying detainee cases in front of military tribunals.

In Warsame's case, the information gleaned in the intelligence interrogation was not used against him in the criminal case, the officials said. Instead, questioning by the FBI formed the basis of the nine-count indictment, they added. And, as the indictment indicates, the administration plans to try him on charges of providing material support to a terrorist group in civilian, not military, court.

"This is an ideal example of how individuals can be captured and interrogated and intelligence can be gleaned, and then we can decide what to do with them," a senior administration official said.

Warsame is in federal custody in New York, where he was flown. Currently, no terrorism suspect is being held on a U.S. ship, the officials said. But they pointedly did not foreclose the possibility of similar detentions in the future. They declined to say how often such detentions had happened.

During his interrogation, Warsame provided valuable information about activities in Yemen and links between the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Shabab, the officials said. They did not link him to any plot or attack against the U.S., but said he had "clearly served as an important conduit" between Shabab and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, facilitating contacts and weapons transfers.

In the last year, U.S. intelligence officials have seen signs of increasing cooperation between the two organizations, based in two of the world's poorest, least-stable countries. Somalia and Yemen are linked by traditional sea trade routes across the Gulf of Aden, which Al Qaeda in recent years has been able to use for the movement of arms and fighters, according to a U.S. intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information.

Foreign fighters from around the Arab world, drawn to the seemingly endless battles in Somalia, have traveled in recent years to Yemen and crossed the Gulf of Aden by boat to avoid being on an airline manifest, the official said.

In 2009, key leaders of Shabab in Somalia pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda in a video posted on the Internet. Al Qaeda had been trying to bring local insurgent groups in East Africa into its leadership structure for more than a decade, and had made major inroads with Shabab, according to U.S. officials.

A senior Al Qaeda operative in East Africa, Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, whom U.S. officials have labeled as the mastermind of the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, was gunned down by Somali government security forces at a checkpoint outside Mogadishu, the capital, on June 7. Mohammed was a key link between Shabab and the top leaders of Al Qaeda, as well as the leadership of Al Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen, a U.S. intelligence official said.

"Shabab has faced serious setbacks," said Rick Nelson, a counter-terrorism expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.

The relationship between Shabab and the Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen is one of "mutual convenience," Nelson said. Militants in Yemen have an ample supply of firearms, and the Somalis have better sources of income from piracy and kidnap-for-ransom schemes, said Nelson, citing independent research done by the center in East Africa.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-somali-detainee-20110706,0,1268288,print.story

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Iran's execution binge

Human rights abuses are increasing as Tehran's leaders use public executions to send a message to dissenters.

By Mark D. Wallace

July 6, 2011

Why not Iran?

Egypt and Tunisia have overthrown repressive regimes. Citizens in Syria, Yemen and other Middle East countries are demanding change. Yet in Iran, where a wave of 2009 demonstrations helped spark the movements we are now witnessing elsewhere in the Middle East, the populace is strangely silent.

What accounts for the relative quiet in Iran? The answer, at least in part, is that one of the great human rights tragedies of the modern era is underway in Iran.

From the moment the first protesters hit Tahrir Square in Cairo, Iran's leadership has cracked down hard, instituting a brutal campaign of terror against its own people. The most gruesome manifestation of this repression has been a wave of public executions.

Since January, Iran has been on an execution binge. In February, the United Nations reported that the rate of executions in Iran had increased threefold in 2011 over the previous year. Amnesty International reported that Iran is the only country this year known to have executed juvenile offenders, a violation of international law. And though exact numbers are difficult to come by, it is now estimated by human rights organizations that more than 140 people have been executed in Iran so far this year, a rate that, if continued, would push the number far past the total for 2010.

What is perhaps most disturbing, and provides clear evidence of Iran's effort to intimidate and terrorize its own population, is the growing number of executions in Iran taking place in public. Amnesty International estimates that as many as 13 people had been hanged in public by the end of April, compared to a total 14 in all of 2010. In a number of instances, those executed have been left hanging high in the air on construction cranes for all to see.

As an Amnesty official noted in an April report: "It is deeply disturbing that despite a moratorium on public executions ordered in 2008, the Iranian authorities are once again seeking to intimidate people by such spectacles, which not only dehumanize the victim but brutalize those who witness it." Only a month later, Iran Human Rights, a leading human rights group on Iran, reported that the regime put 54 people to death in May, with 15 of the executions carried out publicly.

The international community needs to call for an end to this kind of barbarism and highlight more broadly the deteriorating human rights situation in Iran.

In response to Iran's brazen attempts to intimidate and terrorize its own people, United Against Nuclear Iran has launched a Cranes Campaign. The goal is to educate crane manufacturers worldwide about the Iranian regime's clear misuse of their products and how such use can tarnish their brand image. We know that these companies — including the Swiss company Liebherr, China's XCMG and the Japanese firms Tadano and UNIC — do not in any way condone the use of their cranes to stage public executions. That is why they should take the principled stand of renouncing their business ties with the regime until Iran becomes a civilized member of the international community. Already, some companies are doing just that. U.S. construction manufacturers Terex Corp. and Caterpillar and Japan's Komatsu have all ended their business ties with Iran.

Severing business dealings sends an unequivocal message to leaders in Iran that the international community finds their activities abhorrent. But that is just a start. Governments from around the world need to scrutinize the worsening human rights situation and call Iran to account.

It's no coincidence that Iran's increased staging of public executions came at the same time protest movements were gaining steam throughout the Middle East. What better way to keep Iranians from having "dangerous ideas" like those of their neighbors? And it should come as little surprise that Iran is now aiding other governments in the region, notably Syria, in their efforts to suppress and quash domestic uprisings.

The lesson Iran learned from the uprisings of 2009 — and the one it is trying to impart to other leaders in the region — is that the way to quash peaceful dissent is through a public display of brute force, terror, intimidation and humiliation. The proper response to that from the international community must be resolute and firm: Iran's behavior is unacceptable and far outside the boundaries of civilized society. Civilized nations, and the businesses based in them, should never be complicit.

Mark D. Wallace is president of United Against Nuclear Iran. He served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, representative for U.N. management and reform.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-wallace-cranes-iran-20110706,0,4347272,print.story

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A juvenile justice system that's adrift

The federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention has real potential but has been left leaderless.

July 6, 2011

These are interesting times for those who work in the field of juvenile justice. In many states, lawmakers and voters are turning away from the 1990s model of treating youth offenders like adults and locking them up in adult prisons. Influential conservatives have banded together to support constructive and cost-effective alternatives to lengthy sentences. Across the nation, juvenile crime rates are falling, giving states some time and breathing room to restructure delinquency programs. Momentum is building for meaningful and cost-saving reform. All that's lacking is national focus and strong leadership.

California's example shows what happens when that leadership goes missing. Draconian laws put into place in the last 20 years still result in too many youth offenders here being sentenced and imprisoned as adults. Our prisons are bursting, the failing Juvenile Justice Division of the state corrections department has turned over much of its mission to counties, and Los Angeles County's troubled Probation Department is operating under a federal consent decree while critics are calling for even broader scrutiny. What this state and many others need at just this time is effective and creative support from the federal office that for many years sorted through policies, promoted best practices and offered research and technical assistance. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention could help states and counties sort through what works and what doesn't — and then advocate for legislation and funding to continue reducing juvenile delinquency.

Instead, the office has been left leaderless. Halfway through his term, President Obama has yet to nominate an administrator for the federal office that once reliably developed national policies and priorities. It is one of only two Department of Justice nominations the president has yet to make. As a result, the office has drifted from its mission while letting states fend for themselves, spending too much money on incarceration of juveniles and on ineffective programs.

The federal government should not be expected to take over the states' primary role in juvenile justice. But beginning in 1974, when Congress adopted the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, Washington has played a crucial role in helping states push their response to youth crime out of the dark ages. Now the act has lapsed, and without a leader at the office, bills to reauthorize it have gone nowhere. Federal funding for juvenile justice programs has dropped precipitously, and states have suffered as a consequence.

It's well past time for Obama to name a leader for the office. He should act now, before more precious time is lost and more young offenders become set in their ways and add new burdens and costs to state justice systems.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-juvenile-20110706,0,5785789,print.story

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From Google News

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Federal Fingerprint Sharing Program Meets Resistance

Can state and local governments opt out of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) controversial Secure Communities program?

The question seems straightforward enough. Yet more than two years after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials launched the fingerprint-sharing program, some local government officials are still confused about their rights to opt out.

Secure Communities is an automated fingerprint data-sharing program between local law enforcement offices and federal immigration enforcement agencies. Despite recent DHS claims that the program is mandatory, many elected officials refuse to participate and continue to ask for an out. Most recently, Providence, R.I., Public Safety Commissioner Steven Pare asked the federal government to excuse his city from the program. One month later, Pare told the Providence Journal that he was still waiting for a response.

Christopher Zimmerman, board chairman of Arlington County, Va., said the DHS “has had difficulty giving us straight answers. One official would say this is a voluntary program for local communities, while another was saying they were working to make it mandatory.”

Whether or not the program is eventually deemed successful at removing the most dangerous criminal aliens from the United States, the DHS has had trouble with the intergovernmental and public information aspect of rolling it out. ICE public information officials failed to respond to requests for more information by Government Technology's deadline.

Internal DHS e-mails released in February 2011 following a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, Center for Constitutional Rights and Cardozo Immigration Justice Clinic show disagreement within the agency about whether state and local governments could refuse to participate. And in a September 2010 letter to Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano described how local agencies could choose “not to be activated in the Secure Communities deployment plan.” Yet ICE officials later explained that communities could only opt out of receiving detained immigrant information from ICE, but not from sharing it. Since the program was launched in 2008, several U.S. communities with large immigrant populations, including Washington, D.C.; Arlington County; and Santa Clara, Calif.; have sought to opt out fearing the program would be used to deport individuals with minor offenses, or none at all, and that it would involve local officials in immigration enforcement.

“This is just one piece of a bigger issue,” Zimmerman said. “We have a very diverse population. One in four Arlington County residents were born in another country. The big issue for us is not alienating a large part of our community.”

He added that the county has a great community-policing program and a relatively low crime rate because public safety officials have built a sense of trust. “If someone sees a crime, we want him or her to tell the police, and not be afraid of being deported or of seeing a family member deported,” Zimmerman said. “This is creating a climate of fear in the community and it is a significant problem.”

How It Works

Traditionally after individuals are charged with a crime and booked, their fingerprints were checked for criminal history against the Department of Justice's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS). With Secure Communities, fingerprints submitted through the state to the FBI are automatically checked against both the FBI criminal history records in IAFIS and the biometrics-based immigration records in the DHS Automated Biometric Identification System.

If a fingerprint match is found in the DHS system, the automated process notifies ICE, and ICE determines if immigration enforcement action is required, considering the alien's status, severity of the crime and the person's criminal history. Priority for deportation is placed on aliens convicted for major drug offenses, murder, rape and kidnapping.

As of early June, the biometric information sharing capability was activated in 1,379 jurisdictions in 43 states. By 2013, ICE plans to use this capability nationwide.

Since October 2008, more than 62,500 aliens convicted of a crime have been deported. Yet one in four people deported through the program have not been convicted of any crime, said Lynn Tramonte, deputy director of America's Voice, an advocacy group seeking to transform what it calls a dysfunctional immigration system. “The problem is that this casts too wide a net,” she added. “It creates real fear of the police among the immigrant community. Even victims of crimes such as domestic violence are afraid to report it for fear of seeing a relative deported.”

Tramonte said the federal government has made it impossible for local jurisdictions to opt out — they aren't going to stop sending fingerprints to the FBI. “The question is, why is the federal government at war with state and local police?” said Tramonte. “They didn't design this system with enough consultation with law enforcement, and that is why [some] sheriffs don't want to implement it.”

In September 2010, the Arlington County Board passed a unanimous resolution to opt out of Secure Communities. Some public statements, however, indicated that the county wasn't allowed to do so. “We said we want to see in writing that it is mandatory,” Zimmerman said.

On March 1, 2011, David Venturella, the assistant director of ICE, responded with a letter saying that the information sharing happens on the federal level. “The only way for a jurisdiction to ‘not participate' is to choose not to receive the law enforcement and immigration identity information that is available as part of the federal biometric information sharing capability,” he wrote. “ICE receives the results, whether or not a jurisdiction opts to receive the results.”

While acknowledging Arlington County's concern about the effects of Secure Communities on immigrant communities, Venturella said, “ICE has not received any formal complaints or allegations of racial profiling as a result of Secure Communities. Furthermore, ICE is committed to protecting civil rights and civil liberties and prioritizing the enforcement of immigration law in a manner that best promotes public safety, border security and the integrity of the immigration system.”

Lance Clem, spokesman for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, explained that it would be very risky for a county to opt out of the information-sharing system. “Not only does it check for arrest warrants, but it also confirms the identity of the person,” he said.

Secure Communities is controversial in Colorado, with many advocacy groups urging the state not to participate. Initially former Gov. Bill Ritter held out for concessions that varied from ICE's standard memorandum of agreement (MOA) with states. For instance, he wanted domestic violence cases to be exempt, to avoid having a chilling effect on reporting of those crimes. He also wanted records kept about the number of people deported.

“The gist of that agreement was that there would be certain kinds of periodic reporting about the types of crimes that people were committing and what types of warrants they had out to see whether the concerns raised by advocacy groups would be borne out or not,” Clem said. “It is too early yet to determine that.”

In Colorado, ICE is gradually rolling out Secure Communities county by county. “That really has to do with their resource levels,” Clem said. “ICE may not have the personnel to respond to retrieve aliens in all parts of the state yet.”

Although ICE has tried to quell resistance, local and state officials continue to look for ways to work around it. For instance, officials in Chicago and Cook County, Ill., have cited so-called “sanctuary ordinances” that prohibit local officials from involvement in immigration enforcement.

In California, state Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, a San Francisco democrat, introduced a bill (AB 1081) in February that seeks to change the state's MOA with ICE in several ways, including:

Santa Clara County, Calif., expressed frustration on its Web portal: “Federal Officials Say They Will Continue Operating the Secure Communities Program in the County's Jail Against the County's Will.”

Santa Clara County has a long-standing policy of not entangling immigration enforcement with local policing, county officials said. Juniper Downs, an attorney for Santa Clara County, said the county has created a civil detainee task force to recommend policies about how the county should respond to ICE requests to detain individuals. “We are hoping to find a middle ground and take into account the interests of public safety first,” she added.

One strategy for the handful of states that aren't already participating may be to avoid signing the MOA with ICE, according to Jessica Karp, staff attorney for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. Her organization sent a letter in March to Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts urging him not to approve the MOA. The letter noted that Washington state and the District of Columbia have not signed the MOA and so far have not been activated into the program.

“The focus has changed to the state level,” Karp said. “Local law enforcement, immigration advocacy groups and groups working on domestic violence issues will all continue to push for change.”

Arlington County has devoted an entire Web page to conveying that it is not changing its posture toward the immigrant community. “The main thing we are trying to do is minimize the damage caused by this program. We want immigrants to view us as on their side — as allies and not enemies,” Zimmerman said. “We don't want to create an environment in which we are turning all of our law enforcement people into agents rooting out illegal immigrants.”

David Raths is a regular contributor to Government Technology. He's also senior contributing editor of Healthcare Informatics magazine.

http://www.govtech.com/public-safety/Federal-Fingerprint-Sharing-Program-Meets-Resistance.html

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Fairhope utilizes crime mapping service

FAIRHOPE, Ala. (WALA) - Crime that occurs within the city limits and police jurisdiction of Fairhope is available for review by citizens on the Community Policing and Neighborhood Crime Statistics website .

Once on the website, visitors can search for crime data by entering a specific address or by simply entering "Fairhope, AL" in the search box.

Visitors can narrow the search by selecting the "Date Range" tab and choosing a beginning and ending point for the query. The Records Management System, where the website retrieves its information, was established on February 9, 2011, and it is updated daily at 2:30 a.m.

Additionally, the website features an "Incident Layers" tab which allows visitors to narrow down the types of crimes they want to view. However, some calls received by the police department, such as sexual assaults, domestic violence and incidents involving juveniles, will not be displayed.

The Fairhope Police Department noted that the website clearly shows that most of the crime in Fairhope involves ease of opportunity for the perpetrator. For example, almost all of the residential burglaries and theft from vehicles in Fairhope occurred because the doors were unlocked.

CrimeReports.com is owned by Public Engines, Inc. and, according to its website, works with thousands of law-enforcement agencies to help reduce, prevent and solve crime. CrimeReports tools include a public crime map, alert messaging, annonymous tipping and data analytics.

Click here to visit CrimeReports online.

http://www.fox10tv.com/dpp/news/local_news/baldwin_county/fairhope-utilizes-crime-mapping-service

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From the White House

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What You Can Do to Support Military Families

This morning, the First Lady sent the following message to the White House email list, wishing them a Happy Independence Day and encouraging all Americans to honor our brave men and women in uniform by volunteering to give back to the military families who sacrifice so much to keep us safe.

If you didn't get the email, be sure to sign up for the White House email list.

Good morning,

This Independence Day, I hope you'll join me and my family in recognizing both our brave men and women in uniform and their families for everything they do to protect our country and our way of life.

We know that when our troops are called to serve, their families serve right along with them. For military kids, that means stepping up to help with the housework and putting on a brave face through all those missed holidays, bedtimes and ballet recitals. For military spouses, it means pulling double-duty, doing the work of both parents, often while juggling a full-time job or trying to get an education.

That's why, a few months ago, Dr. Jill Biden and I started Joining Forces, a nationwide campaign to recognize, honor, and serve our military families. Our troops give so much to this country and they ask us for just one thing in return: to take care of their families while they're gone. So we've put out a call to action. We're urging all Americans to ask themselves one question: What can I do to give back to these families that have given so much?

To answer that question you can go to JoiningForces.gov and learn more about how you can get involved. And you can get started right now through Operation Honor Card by pledging to spend a certain number of hours serving military families in your community.

Our motto for Joining Forces is very simple: Everyone can do something. We've met folks in every corner of the country who are stepping up and helping out in their own small ways in their neighborhoods and in their communities. They're popping over to rake the leaves, or bringing a family a home-cooked meal, or offering to babysit. And I know that if we each do whatever we can, if we all join forces, we can show military families across this country that we have them in our hearts, we have them in our prayers, and we always have their backs.

Happy Independence Day!

Sincerely,

First Lady Michelle Obama

P.S. Today, my husband and I will welcome troops and their families from across the country to the White House for a special USO concert and a great view of the fireworks on the National Mall. You can watch the whole thing live on WhiteHouse.gov/live starting at 7 p.m. EDT.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/07/04/what-you-can-do-support-military-families

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