Hi, I'm Ben Parker from the Bullwork. Welcome to Command Post on the Bullwork takes feed.

I'm joined as always by Broadwater Contributor retired Lieutenant General Mark Hurtling.

General, I'll argue me this morning.

Thank you, Ben. I'm great this morning. And we have a very special guest, which I'll allow you to introduce in just a second.

But before we do, I've got to give you a shout out if I can't. People don't

know this, but Ben is my editor for all the works we put out, and he takes choppy sentences and

turns them into prose, number one. But secondly, he's also a fine journalist and reporter himself

and a real smart guy because yesterday he actually broke a story

that had to do with the president putting his picture on passports. And Ben, you were the first

guy to break that story, even though the White House thwarted you and gave the story to Fox

when they told you to wait for a while. So congratulations on that huge scoop. It was very well done. And a great article, too. You should read it and everyone should read it in the Bullwark. Thank you so much. Yeah, that was a group effort by a lot of us here at the Bullwork. A lot of people contributed to that. And, you know, it's the importance of independent media. We're trying to actually report the

news even when the White House wants to give away our best stuff. Okay, I will say right before I

introduce our guest, we are aware that right now, Defense Secretary Pete Heggseth is testifying

before Congress. We have people watching it. Our great producer, Matt, other people are keeping an

eye on it.

If something crazy happens, we will talk about it immediately. So stay here. Something breaks.

But we have a really important conversation to get to. So I'm very happy to introduce Jacqueline Smith,

who up until yesterday was the ombudsman for Stars and Stripes, the newspaper that is supposed to be

independent. It is the military's own newspaper. Jacqueline, thanks for joining us. I want to ask you

a bunch of background questions for people who may not have heard of Stars and Stripes before. So start us off. What exactly is it?

The Stars and Tribes is the newspaper for the daily newspaper for the military community.

And its roots go all the way back to the Civil War.

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