Motivational speaking…some inspiring shit…I think it’s time we excused ourselves from the table

Posted by Al Swearengen as Military, Video at 1:50 AM GMT+4

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(TP) President Bush denied knowledge of the contract, saying that he “knew nothing about the deal” and was “concerned”:

I knew nothing about the deal. I need to know exactly how it happened. To the extent that it does undermine the ability for the government to come up with an oil revenue sharing plan that unifies the country, obviously if it undermines it I’m concerned.

However, the documents released by the Oversight Committee today include ample evidence that officials in the State Department and Commerce Department “knew about Hunt Oil’s interest in the Kurdish region months before the contract was executed”:

- Hunt sent two letters to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board “making clear his intentions to pursue oil exploration in Kurdistan.”

- Hunt Oil’s general manager informed the Regional Reconstruction Team (RRT) that “Hunt is expecting to sign an exploration contract,” a warning that was sent to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and to the State Department.

- Hunt Oil officials met with the RRT to inquire about U.S. policy towards oil contracts with the KRG, and were told that the “U.S. has no policy, for nor against.”

- In an internal company e-mail, Hunt’s general manager said that there was “no communication” from the State Department that Hunt should not make the deal, despite “ample opportunity to do so.”

This isn’t the first time the Bush administration has helped out the billionaire Hunt. In 2006, a proposed border fence in Texas “abruptly ended” right before Hunt’s property.

Posted by Al Swearengen as History, Military at 11:49 AM GMT+4

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How about this?

Posted by Al Swearengen as Military, politics at 10:07 PM GMT+4

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As much of this as they can afford to pay for!

компютри втора употреба

Posted by site admin as Al Swearengen, Military, politics at 12:45 PM GMT+4

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You volunteered for the military, so eat shit and be thankful for it! This guy is arguing that since a teenager volunteered for the Army, it means they really want to be a soldier for the rest of their life…right…no dead-enders here, just “professional soldiers”…it doesn’t get any more delusional than this:

Posted by Al Swearengen as Military, Video, politics at 9:56 PM GMT+4

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Senator Voinovich A big moment…

Posted by Al Swearengen as History, Military, Video, politics at 10:55 PM GMT+4

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Scott Horton:

Yet the smoke from this firestorm has been everywhere. Why did Admiral James Fallon suddenly resign following the publication of a portrait piece on him in Esquire? The word spread about the media, which covered this, as usually, dismissively as “another personnel flap.” In their reporting, it had something to do with the CENTCOM commander’s opposition to launching a new war against Iran.

When I tested this with my Pentagon sources, I was told “wrong.” It is true, they said, that Fallon was opposed to war in Iran, and his public statements had produced friction, but the real source of tension had to do with Iraq policy, not Iran policy. Apparently it had to do with implementation of the existing plan for a draw down of forces. Fallon and most of the Pentagon brass, they told me, were strongly in support of keeping rigorously to plan. The politicos in the White House wanted to keep the surge force in place. And naturally, General Petraeus out in Baghdad espoused whatever view the White House took.

Posted by Al Swearengen as Military at 4:32 PM GMT+4

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Maureen Dowd: Bush, who used his family connections to avoid Vietnam, told troops serving in Afghanistan on Thursday that he is “a little envious” of their adventure there, saying it was “in some ways romantic.”

(left) my alma matter

Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, Military at 3:18 PM GMT+4

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Being a smart ass while in the military…it’s a right of passage. 

Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, Military at 8:01 PM GMT+4

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“…Dwarf thieves had infested Swedish buses,⁹ Lithuania was pondering changing its name,¹⁰ and a plot by retired Turkish Army officers to kill Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk was foiled. ¹¹ Police in Malda, India, were battling avian flu by conducting a poultry massacre. “We have planned to collect ‘backyard chickens’ from the houses in the evening and kill all of them late at night,” said the district’s deputy director of animal-resources development, N. K. Shit.¹² George Piro, the FBI field agent who interrogated Saddam Hussein, recalled his last meeting with the Iraqi dictator, when the two smoked cigars and Saddam kissed Piro on the cheek three times. “It made me feel,” he said, “somewhat awkward.” (by Christian Lorentzen)

Scott Horton is without a doubt my favorite writer at the moment. Harper’s online has his work up for free on the site’s front page. You can find out why John Yoo hasn’t come over for dinner lately. Keynesian economics, Leo Strauss, J$hn Ashcr$ft, Afghanistan, “Blitzwasser” or hot-water incident (so named for the kettles of boiling water that the citizens threw at federal tax collectors), Don Siegelman…

Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, Economics, History, Justice, Military, politics at 11:25 PM GMT+4

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Al Swearengen on 2/23/2006:

“Iraq Vet Mutilates Wife” – Get ready America, the war’s not over when these guys leave Iraq. Typical of youngsters who sign up while suffering from a mental disorder commonly known as ‘outrageous stupidity’…Marry a woman who, like yourself, just entered legal adulthood, then take off for a 9 month horror show in Iraq. Combine this with a smart mouth and (perhaps) a man on the side, it can trigger something within this wounded, emotionally disturbed, 19 year old, “battle-hardened” trained killer…like, memories of a time not long past when someone running their mouth could be easily silenced in a number of different ways.”

We know that veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been committing suicide at higher rates, and that in an effort to maintain troop levels, the Army has been intimidating soldiers seeking treatment for post traumatic stress and other mental health issues, then separating those who fail to ’suck it up and drive on’ without medical benefits. The Army defends its poor government from all these gold-digging fakers by declaring that the soldier’s brain damage was an undeclared condition they developed before enlisting. In the air-conditioned Pentagon, our Army’s top generals assure us that the numbers look good – no doubt the product of this internal campaign of terror, while on the front end ramping up (exponentiating) the number of “volunteers” who meet their recruiter in prison.

It is a numbers game. Like police having to turn murder into manslaughter for the bosses, wounded soldiers are considered full strength. This sort of policy helps to explain why suicide numbers for both active duty and veterans keep rising. Then there’s the job itself, a bloody ordeal experienced in as many fifteen month deployments as one’s luck allows. Come home all fucked up, be without the support of this country you just put your life on the line for, and try to hold on. Along with the amount of terrorists we have created since 2003, I wonder how many Americans have been turned into psychopathic criminals along the way. How many McVeighs have the Army and this loser already produced?

“Killings After Combat 1/13/08 – NEW YORK – At least 121 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans have committed a killing or been charged in one in the United States after returning from combat, The New York Times reported Sunday. The newspaper said it also logged 349 homicides involving all active-duty military personnel and new veterans in the six years since military action began in Afghanistan, and later Iraq. That represents an 89-percent increase over the previous six-year period, the newspaper said. About three-quarters of those homicides involved Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, the newspaper said. The report did not illuminate the exact relationship between those cases and the 121 killings also mentioned in the report.

The newspaper said its research involved searching local news reports, examining police, court and military records and interviewing defendants, their lawyers and families, victims’ families and military and law enforcement officials…The 121 killings ranged from shootings and stabbings to bathtub drownings and fatal car crashes resulting from drunken driving, the newspaper said. All but one of those implicated was male. About a third of the victims were girlfriends or relatives, including a 2-year-old girl slain by her 20-year-old father while he was recovering from wounds sustained in Iraq. A quarter of the victims were military personnel. One was stabbed and set afire by fellow soldiers a day after they all returned from Iraq.

Compared with what this former military interrogator described in March of 2007, it’s pretty clear that Iraq just isn’t a “by the book” type of gig:

Confessions of a Torturer It was bad, in particular the First Recon they’re sort of like marine special forces, an elite unit [attached to the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, known as 24th MEU]. Every time they went on a raid it didn’t matter who they were bringing back, they would just fuck these guys up. Old men, 15-year-old kids, they all came with bruises and broken bones. One guy came with a blister on the back of his leg. It was big, it was horrible, a burn blister. They’d made him sit on the exhaust pipe of a running truck.

Watch Out!

Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, Military at 12:58 AM GMT+4

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by Sebastian Junger, published in Vanity Fair – February 2002

Afghanistan’s master guerrilla commander, Ahmed Shah Massoud, was assassinated by suspected al-Qaeda suicide bombers just two days before September 11. But his Northern Alliance coalition became the U.S.’s most important weapon against the Taliban in a war that combined 19th-century slaughter and 21st-century technology. As alliance soldiers marched on Kabul—with a massed-infantry assault amid the deadly shadows of B-52 bombers—the author saw Massoud’s legacy revealed, in the Afghans’ hatred of foreigners fighting for the Taliban, in their readiness to die for freedom, and even, poignantly, in one man’s act of mercy.

~~~

An unnatural fluttering of the plastic over our windows woke me. It sucked in and snapped back three times, as if the whole world were out of breath, and then it lay quiet.

A gray light leaked into the room. Dogs were barking somewhere across the fields. I got up and pulled on my clothes and climbed onto the mud roof of the house we were staying in. The moon was midway in the sky, waning toward Ramadan, and the east was shot with red. A single B-52 bomber was making its way silently across the sky at 30,000 feet, laying four thin contrails out behind. It continued past me and then made a perfect arc far to the south, where the front lines were.

I couldn’t hear the bombs—they were 20 miles away—but I could feel them: four distinct pressure waves in the air that bumped past me and on up the valley. A few days earlier I’d talked to a mujahid who had fought the Russians in the 1980s. He described a Russian rocket hitting the mouth of a cave he was hiding in. The explosion itself didn’t touch him, he said, but the concussion had made his ears and eyes bleed for days. That was just a Russian rocket; these were 2,000-pound bombs.

Read the rest of this entry �

Posted by Al Swearengen as History, Military at 3:50 PM GMT+4

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Don’t let your beloved Bauer-heads catch wind of this fun fact…they might break out in a rage and start torturing your pets.

(HuffingtonPost) Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Ron Paul have little in common politically, except their opposition to the Iraq war. Both top a new list of presidential candidates receiving campaign contributions from people who work for the four branches of the military and National Guard, according to a study released Thursday by the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics. Obama, an Illinois senator, brought in more donations from this group than any White House contender from either party. The Democrat announced Wednesday his plan to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2008.

Posted by Al Swearengen as Military, politics at 11:26 PM GMT+4

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With the new schedule, I’m really behind on my research when it comes to this story right here. Have the Pentagon and VA been cooking the books? Why on earth would they feel compelled to do something like that?

Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, Military, Video at 11:24 PM GMT+4

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White House Press Secretary Dana Perino, the same one who admitted to not knowing what the Cuban Missile Crisis was, got a little bit more than she bargained for the other day. How do you think she handled it? Check out the look she shoots back at Helen at the end:

Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, Military, Video at 11:21 PM GMT+4

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This one was from last week, but seeing as how this guy is the minority leader in the senate, also in light of how Republican policies have led directly to the Walter Reed scandal and the decimation of our military (both active and otherwise), with Iraq taking a back seat in most campaign coverage I thought it was important to remind people of what their attitude towards the military has been throughout this war.

Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, Military, Video at 11:06 PM GMT+4

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Classic rerun:

Posted by Al Swearengen as Military, Video at 3:59 AM GMT+4

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Here’s something interesting.  Since the right went so far in attacking the man…I seem to remember the administration going with the patented, “We’ll let the generals on the ground decide how things are going.”  Ah, those wise, honest generals and their talk of progress.  Indeed, the military is sure to give it to us straight, just like Westmoreland did in Vietnam.  Anyways, since Murtha actually took part in that war, the chickenhawks had to stuff an extra cucumber into their pants before hitting the talk shows to tell all of us how the congressman really didn’t know anything about war or the military. 

Posted by Al Swearengen as Military at 3:48 PM GMT+4

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To help remember that by celebrating the service of our veterans, it doesn’t mean we’re celebrating war. Or…to help remember what good music plus MTV used to equal back in the day.

Posted by Al Swearengen as Military, Music, Video at 8:00 PM GMT+4

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Posted by Al Swearengen as Military at 3:17 PM GMT+4

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This is a compilation from a House committee hearing last week, courtesy of TPMmuckraker:

Posted by Al Swearengen as Justice, Military, Video at 1:32 AM GMT+4

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I love finding new military blogs and just reading for an hour or two some nights when I can.  Here’s a new one I found last night and read for a while, with the writing of a blogger named GI Kate – My American-Iraq Life.  This post I’m highlighting here is a sharp meditation on something a fellow war veteran wrote to her…how it brings him to tears to see “you women coming back dead or all fucked up (unable to love, addicted to war, etc)”… to which she immediately ponders “what the fuck did that mean?”   

(Excerpts from ‘unable to love and addicted to war?‘)  My friend and I spent a year in Iraq. While I was overseas, I saw nothing but sex. Sex between single soldiers, sex between soldiers who were married but on TYD (temporary year divorce), and females having sex with multiple people (before I have some stand-up male in the army jump down my throat, not all the males are appalling sex crazed scumbags…and the females aren’t all barracks whores). Maybe we were “unable to love” because love was made a mockery of. Love in the traditional sense did not exist…sex was the new love. There were no emotional strings attached…the wives and husbands back in the states were forgotten about…new love triangles began to form. Now there was war and sex.

…We were in a sea of people who were in relationships, who dragged their feet from day-to-day, who worked nine to five jobs…everyone was a blur. We seemed to move freely between them, attempting to just fall into place…there was no place for females like us. Everyday started out the same. We woke up to thoughts of Iraq, we wondered around hostile and resented everyone, we tried to mesh with our friends…we pretended to care about going out to bars and getting drunk and shopping…when the day came to an end, everything had been forgotten about…the jokes we laughed at, the people we interacted with…nothing registered. The only thoughts that made us feel alive, were the ones that were killing us…

Posted by Al Swearengen as Military at 12:38 AM GMT+4

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Amy Goodman is the host of this show, which can be seen and heard by going to the Democracy Now! website. Without fail, where the mainstream media fails to even attempt digging into a story, this show right here will make up the difference. What I like most is how useable the site is, so when I get into a certain story I can easily search and if sometime in the past an interview pertaining to it took place, I can always have the transcript and audio file downloaded to my PC within minutes.

I’ve read two of her books, which at least one of she co-wrote with her brother. I highly recommend both of them:

STATIC: GOVERNMENT LIARS, MEDIA CHEERLEADERS, AND THE PEOPLE WHO FIGHT BACK

The Exception to the Rulers : Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them

What got me thinking about Democracy Now! lately, has been this stupified glop glop in the press on scandals and Constitution-shredding that is packaged as something new, when in fact it is anything but. I’ll post a clip tomorrow that will provide a perfect example, having to do with Donald Rumsfeld’s management philosophy. He’d shoot off 60 or so “snowflakes” around the Pentagon every day, basically mucking up the works, as these things wouldn’t even cover something actionable, but could represent more of what was going on inside the old bastard’s head on a given day. As if he were having a debate with himself over the ins and outs of defending a personal failure by spreading out the misery far and wide, and trying out his political swirms on the department as a whole.

I got aggrivated mostly because this story was actually covered in Bob Woodward’s ‘State of Denial’ over a year ago. Anyone could read that book and see Rumsfeld for what he is, the infighter with little competence to lean on when it came to managing the defense department. Though for me it’s the series of books that have come out since then, mostly relying on released documents and interviews with people who wouldn’t have spoken up sooner, which go much further than a couple of snowflakes telling us what we already knew.

Donald Rumsfeld is a war criminal. By the standard set by our own laws and certainly the standard set by international law, he should find himself on trial at some point. Piecing a belief like this one together is something that takes place over a stretch of time, with hundreds of thousands of words read, and once in a while the crucial interview with someone in the know on a show like Goodman’s Democracy Now! opens up a doorway. It is a crucial function of our fake democracy, these shows that really focus on finding out the truth. They are few and far between.

Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, Justice, Military at 1:49 AM GMT+4

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I. (TPMmuckraker – Iraq Revokes All Contractor Immunity – Spencer Ackerman) “The metaphorical statue of L. Paul Bremer III has come crashing down. Today the Iraqi government formally revoked one of the Coalition Provisional Authority’s enduring vestiges — a decree of immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts for U.S. security contractors.“

II. (Think Progress) “In California, half of the equipment the National Guard needs is not in the state, either because it is deployed in Iraq or other parts of the world or because it hasn’t been funded, according to Lt. Col. John Siepmann. While the Guard is in good shape to handle small-scale incidents, “our concern is a catastrophic event,” he said. “You would see a less effective response (to a major incident),” he said.

At a press conference five months ago, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) echoed these concerns, stating, “A lot of equipment has gone to Iraq, and it doesn’t come back when the troops come back.” The Chronicle reported that the California National Guard was missing about $1 billion worth of equipment. Now, as 14 major wildfires rage across the state, those earlier warnings are materializing. While California currently has approximately 1,500 Guardsmen serving in Iraq, the strains on the disaster response teams are compounded by the missing personnel and equipment.“

III. (CNN – Turkish Planes Bomb Kurdish Rebels) “Turkish warplanes and helicopter gunships have been bombing Kurdish separatist positions in Turkey along the Iraqi-Turkish frontier amid continuing diplomatic efforts to avert a major cross-border incursion by Turkish military forces.“

Posted by Al Swearengen as Justice, Military, Words, politics at 11:48 AM GMT+4

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I.  Two Republican representatives, both of whom I think the worst of as a rule, seem to be battling against Cheney over the White House’s leaking of false information that indicates Israel struck a nuclear facility in Syria that was being built with the help of North Korea. Check this out:

(Raw Story – GOP Accusing White House of Leaking) In 2006, Larisa Alexandrovna reported for RAW STORY on Hoekstra’s approval of Vice President Cheney’s renewed use of former Iran-Contra middleman Manucher Ghorbanifar to help frustrate diplomatic talks between the US and Iran. A follow-up article by Alexandrovna revealed that Hoekstra himself had met with Ghorbanifar in the late spring or early summer of 2006 in a possible attempt to create “falsified intelligence” that could lead to war with Iran. Alexandrovna has also reported that the target of the Israeli airstrike was not a nuclear facility and, most recently, that sources in the intelligence community believe Vice President Cheney is behind the selective leaks concerning the incident.

One intelligence official told Alexandrovna, “The allegations that North Korea was helping to build a nuclear reactor have not been substantiated by US intelligence, but that hasn’t stopped Dick Cheney and his minions at the NSC, Elliot Abrams and Steve Hadley, from leaking the information [to the press], which appears to be misleading in the extreme.”

II.  After the bloggers (including myself and others) jumped all over the story about Senator Rockefeller’s love for the idea of granting immunity to telecom companies coinciding with a campaign bucks bonanza – the NYTimes finally covers it, on a Tuesday and thus far only online.

III.  “(Murray Weiss – NYPost) THE number of NYPD cops using drugs, stealing property – even from the dead – and committing other acts of corruption, including extorting sex from female suspects, spiked sharply last year, according to a confidential NYPD report.“

IV. (Raw Story) “The mayor of the Indian capital said Monday that authorities could not deal with the scourge of violent monkeys, blamed for the death of a top city official over the weekend. The danger posed by the estimated 10,000 monkeys that roam the city was brought home sharply on Sunday when deputy mayor S.S. Bajwa, 52, died after falling from his apartment while fighting a horde of wild simians. If the animals are caught, “we are under pressure to release them due to pressure from animal activists and from people due to religious reasons“

Posted by Al Swearengen as Justice, Military, politics at 12:32 AM GMT+4

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The scam has been exposed for quite a while now (VA Failing - Troops Suffer (2005), Born Under Punches, Walk It Off, 20,000 Soldiers Denied Healthcare), but the big money media won’t go after the story. There is a game being played with PTSD numbers, and the most egregious sin against our troops is the military’s tendency to write off PTSD as a “pre-existing condition” whenever it can. This leaves the veteran uncovered and at a serious disadvantage when it comes to achieving success as a civilian. It’s almost like the government consulted with the big money health insurance companies on how best to keep costs down.

So on a Friday we get two great stories on PTSD, with each of them covering a seperate aspect.

(Gregg Zoroya-USAToday: Veteran stress cases up sharply) The number of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans seeking treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder from the Department of Veterans Affairs jumped by nearly 20,000 — almost 70% — in the 12 months ending June 30, VA records show.
More than 100,000 combat veterans sought help for mental illness since the start of the war in Afghanistan in 2001, about one in seven of those who have left active duty since then, according to VA records collected through June. Almost half of those were PTSD cases.

The numbers do not include thousands treated at storefront Vet Centers operated by the department across the country. Nor do they include active-duty personnel diagnosed with the disorder or former servicemembers who have not sought VA treatment. About 1.5 million U.S. troops have served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Of those, 750,000 have left the military and are eligible for VA health care. The nearly 50,000 VA-documented PTSD cases far exceed the 30,000 military personnel that the Pentagon officially classifies as wounded in the conflicts. The discrepancy underscores the view by military and civilian health officials, such as Lt. Gen. James Campbell, director of the Army staff, that troops tend to ignore, hide or fail to recognize their mental health wounds until after their military service.

(Shankar Vedantam-WaPost: Most PTSD Treatments Not Proven Effective) The majority of treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder that are used to treat hundreds of thousands of veterans lack rigorous scientific evidence that they are effective, according to a report issued yesterday by a panel of the federal government’s top scientists.
“If a treatment that is not shown to be efficacious is nevertheless delivered to veterans, and if the treatment is relatively inert, even if it does not harm the veterans, it may demoralize the veteran,” said Richard McNally, a Harvard University psychologist and PTSD expert. “Providing treatments that do not have a good basis in evidence can result in people not improving, therefore getting demoralized and therefore not seeking treatment that can actually help them.”

But the panel failed to find evidence that any medication was effective in treating PTSD — this included the drugs Paxil and Zoloft, which have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat the disorder. “A very high percentage of people who have been diagnosed with PTSD are on medications,” said Larry Scott, the founder of the advocacy group VA Watchdog dot Org, which serves as an information clearinghouse for veterans.

Veterans are prescribed drugs in mass quantities. It is a way to quickly consider the patient as being “in treatment”, without having to devote a lot of man-hours doing any psychiatric heavy lifting. The FDA officials and whatever doctors who helped out in this regard, to facilitate the opening of a new market for their big money drug daddies, should be investigated. Nothing is getting better for our military. The voices are growing louder though.

With that in mind, let me remind everyone to check out the work of: Blue Man in a Red District – Army of Dude – Soldier Voices Forum – VideoVets – Iraq Slogger

Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, Military at 4:07 PM GMT+4

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(Since I’m devoting all of my writing energy to a project that cannot be shared publicly, I’ll be reruning some old ones and trying to post some more heady reading material from elsewhere along the way. Original posting)

The US military just can’t help themselves when it comes to troops being killed. They lied about Pat Tillman’s death, and here’s another example: “Contrary to U.S. military statements, four U.S. soldiers did not die repelling a sneak attack at the governor’s office in the Shiite holy city of Karbala last week. New information obtained by The Associated Press shows they were abducted and found dead or dying as far as 25 miles away.“ Perhaps it’s out of shame or embarassment, but there is something that plays into this urge to supress the truth rather than deal with what these events actually mean. Is it so unbelievable that our enemy could kidnap four of our soldiers, drive away, kill them and never be caught? Or is that fact something we can live with, as long as the public doesn’t hear about it? I think the latter is right on, and the sad truth is that any number of US soldiers could be kidnaped, killed and then dumped on the side of the road like these four were, and to the bosses it wouldn’t cause anything a swig of peptol bismol wouldn’t fix.

Dick Cheney would respond to it like this, “Oh yea? Well you can tell the group responsible for this that they can kidnap and kill whoever they want, because we’re not leaving!” To some people that sounds like evidence of strength, but to me it’s just further proof that these troops that die at this point in the war really represent nothing more than the cost of doing business. Their deaths are something we as a society, along with the majority of our government, pretend to care about in the same way that we pretend to care about people who got cancer because their water was contaminated by a company’s pollution. Truth of the matter is, as a whole we simply shrug it off and go on with our day. Of course, it would be crazy if Dick Cheney were to respond to an entire family with leukemia and breast cancer by saying, “You can kill this family and every other family on this block…you hear me chemicals? Go ahead and kill these kids, we humans aren’t going anywhere!”

The logical response would be to find out how to keep from poluting the drinking water, but people like the ones we have calling the shots at the moment don’t think on that level at all. In terms of their role as the protectors of the republic, they protect entities rather than people. The entities they protect will in turn take care of the people, so there’s nothing they have to worry about along those lines. So a problem with education or lack of health care or work can be fixed in a number of ways, and the prefered method is to have the military fighting a war at all times. It creates work on the back end as equipment and weapons are needed, and for society’s dead-enders and/or the fools who really believe in the concept of killing Arabs halfways across the world to protect their neighbor living in the suburbs of Phoenix, the front line is a good place to deposit most of what the government would have had to pay for during your life anyhow.

When you run the numbers, it’s certainly not as simple a business model as say, systematically raising the niccotene level in cigarettes, but with the ability to continue grinding up bodies and equipment, expending rounds of ammo at the pace we are without any power within government willing to put an end to it, the promise of continuous orders for vehicles, uniforms, weapons, body armor, etc. and the subsequent lifelong need for medication, therapy, surgery, medical equipment, etc. for the veterans…our private sector then finds itself flush with opportunities to ramp up production, spread some stock options around, and takeover the operations of its competition. Once these businesses are given enough time to consolidate, the price per item cost will lower, and even more money can be made.

The key ingredient of course is human bodies that can pull the trigger and be maimed and/or killed in the war. As long as there are troops wearing uniforms, the public can be told of their absolute heroism and how they’re our best and brightest, with the story line that the war is what allows you and I to have our freedom. A universal farce that works like a charm, as regardless of the circumstances of the war in question, the soldier is to be compared with those who defeated Germany and the Brittish, and any indication to the contrary, like evidence that the troops are not only far from our “best and brightest” but that they are also apt to exhibit behavior common amongst the uneducated thugery of inner city ghetos throughout the homeland, is sure to be confronted with a thunderous wave of condemnation that is so exact and overwhelming in it’s force, that whoever was making their living by providing commentary prior to that moment, will most likely never have the opportunity to do so afterwards.

This video (Iraqi soldiers beating detainees while US troops cheer) brought me back to a time I remember quite well, as it began for me not even a decade ago. You’re in a humvee with your fellow soldiers, part of a combat unit and what takes place inside our “hearts and minds” would never make it past network censors, let alone the level of decency that exists within most communities around the world. In fact if you were to pluck out a handfull of trained killers from any line unit in theatre today, and put them in front of an auditorium full of kids in the frame of mind they’re in on a daily basis, those kids would most likely be scarred for life, and if the birds-and-the-bees discussion had yet to take place, it would have to start that night at home in an uncomfortable way like, “Mommy, does your snatch smell like salmon or clam chowder?”

Hence the reason for officers and medals, as the face of this organization cannot include any of these people and still be taken seriously by the general public. That they’re heralded as something just below demigod within our media and the underlying culture is proof that there is in general, a very good business reason for highlighting the legend and ignoring most everything else. Which doesn’t explain why the military can’t just admit that four soldiers were overtaken by twice as many of the enemy, and driven away with before anyone even noticed they were gone. Perhaps this type of lie has more to do with the career of a few officers than anything else, as I’m sure the platoon leader and company commander of the unit those soldiers belonged to are kissing their careers bye-bye. Though how can you blame anyone for anything at this point? Afterall, Rumsfeld did say, “stuff happens”!

It’s a cost of doing business. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get in touch with my broker.

Update: Another video you need to watch – CBS News Report on the effort to secure a single street within Baghdad.

Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, Military at 1:01 AM GMT+4

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(Larry Kaplow, Rod Nordland, Mark Hosenball and Michael Hastings – Newsweek) The colonel was furious. “Can you believe it? They actually drew their weapons on U.S. soldiers.” He was describing a 2006 car accident, in which an SUV full of Blackwater operatives had crashed into a U.S. Army Humvee on a street in Baghdad’s Green Zone. The colonel, who was involved in a follow-up investigation and spoke on the condition he not be named, said the Blackwater guards disarmed the U.S. Army soldiers and made them lie on the ground at gunpoint until they could disentangle the SUV. His account was confirmed by the head of another private security company…Unlike nearly everyone else who enters the Green Zone, said an American soldier who guards a gate, Blackwater gunmen refuse to stop and clear their weapons of live ammunition once inside. One military contractor, who spoke anonymously for fear of retribution in his industry, recounted the story of a Blackwater operative who answered a Marine officer’s order to put his pistol on safety when entering a base post office by saying, “This is my safety,” and wiggling his trigger finger in the air. “Their attitude was, ‘We’re f—ing security; we don’t have to answer to anybody’.”

Nice…the free market in action over in Iraq. Alan Greenspan and Ayn Rand’s cadaver nod in approval.

A U.S. Embassy staffer, who did not have permission to speak on the record, said, “It’s a few bad eggs that seem to be spoiling the bunch.”

Why does that excuse sound so familiar?

Posted by Al Swearengen as Military at 12:06 AM GMT+4

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(from DailyKOS) “The Pentagon has informed thousands of American soldiers in Iraq that their Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was a pre-existing condition from before they ever joined the military. In other words, NO TREATMENT, NO INSURANCE, NO NOTHING!

More than 22,000 soldiers serving in Iraq have been kicked out of the US military entirely – booted from a war zone straight to the streets – for seeking treatment for the psychological effects of combat and brain injuries. Now, they’re jobless, without medical coverage, and in immediate need of medical treatment that Bush’s Pentagon/VA absolutely refuses to provide.”

Posted by Al Swearengen as Military at 10:14 PM GMT+4

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From Think Progress

You can sell [this approach]. It’s more logical. You can say to people, the American people, we’re only hitting those people that we think are trying to hit our boys and the coalition forces. And so that seems to be more sensible. Because the White House thinks they can actually pitch this, this would actually work. In other words, you can do a bombing and not have the world scream at us and also get the British on board.

During a secure videoconference that took place early this summer, the President told Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, that he was thinking of hitting Iranian targets across the border and that the British “were on board.” At that point, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice interjected that there was a need to proceed carefully, because of the ongoing diplomatic track. Bush ended by instructing Crocker to tell Iran to stop interfering in Iraq or it would face American retribution. (Al: Condoleezza Rice isn’t affecting anything here, just as she failed to affect anything significant during the Iraq war. If Bush is suddenly convinced that it is time to do something, if history is any indication of what will happen, she will turn into a bobblehead, and leak dissent here and there to the papers. It won’t be voiced emphatically during the run-up, and whatever mistakes are made, she will take on the task of defending the President and laying blame on people who don’t deserve it…ala George Tenet and the 16 words on uranium that appeared in Bush’s state of the union speech in 2003.)

The White House has even prepared a “Clinton did it too” defense for attacking Iran, according to Hersh. “If Democrats objected, the Administration could say, “Bill Clinton did the same thing; he conducted limited strikes in Afghanistan, the Sudan, and in Baghdad to protect American lives.”

Posted by Al Swearengen as Military, Video at 1:44 PM GMT+4

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