The Defense Department has inadequately protected from reprisals whistleblowers who have reported wrongdoing, according to an internal Pentagon report, and critics are calling for action to be taken against those who have been negligent.The report, dated May 2011, accuses the officials, who work in the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General, of persistent sloppiness and a systematic disregard for Pentagon rules meant to protect those who report fraud, abuses and the waste of taxpayer funds, according to a previously undisclosed copy. The report was obtained by the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group.
A three-person team of investigators, assigned to review the performance of the Directorate for Military Reprisal Investigations, concluded that in 2010, the directorate repeatedly turned aside evidence of serious punishments inflicted on those who had complained.The actions included threatened or actual discharges, demotions, firings, prosecutions and a mental health referral. At least one of the alleged reprisals was taken because the complainer had written to Congress, an act that Pentagon regulations say is a “protected communication” immune from retaliation. Some of the other whistleblowers had alleged discrimination, travel violations and “criminality,” the report states. Continue reading “Eagle: Pentagon report says Defense Department whistleblowers have been left vulnerable to reprisals”
Senior military leaders are recommending that the Pentagon’s two-year-old cyberwarfare unit be elevated to full combatant command status, sending a signal to adversaries that the U.S. military is serious about protecting its ability to operate in cyberspace, officials said.
Phi Beta Iota: Isolated successes not-with-standing, this is nuts. What we should be doing is closing down NORTHCOM, SOUTHCOM and AFRICOM, rejiggering CENTCOM to be the originally intended global rapid readiness command, and squeezing the Pentagon's balls very very tightly until they can a) account for every penny and b) shift to open source everything. DISA, NSA, and Cyber-Confuse remain disaster areas. What would be interesting is a new Whole of Government approach in which OMB's search for common solutions turned decisively toward open source everything, and Robert Steele's concept for restructuring the US IC, turning NSA and NGA into the National Processing Agency, came together.
Some readers have come to the erroneous conclusion that the Matrix consists of Republican Party disinformation as if there is no disinformation from the left. Others think that propaganda is the business of Obama and the Democrats. In fact, propaganda from the right, the left and the middle are all part of the disinformation fed to americans.
If I may give some examples: The other day Chuck Colson, one of the Nixon officials imprisoned for Watergate crimes, died. This gave NPR the opportunity to relive the Nixon horror.
What precisely was the Nixon horror? Essentially, there was no such thing. Watergate was about President Nixon lying about when he learned about the Watergate burglary.
When Nixon learned about the burglary, he did not act on it prior to his reelection, because he reasoned, rightly, that the Washington Post would blame him for the burglary, although he had nothing to do with it, in the hopes of preventing his reelection.
By going along with a cover-up, Nixon enabled the Washington Post to make an issue of the precise date on which Nixon learned of the burglary. White House tapes indicated that Nixon had learned of the burglary before he said he learned of it. So Nixon had permitted a cover-up and had to go, but what was the real reason?
What was the Watergate burglary? We don’t really know. A group of men including former CIA operatives were hired by the Committee to Re-elect the President to break into a Democratic campaign office in the Watergate complex. We don’t know the purpose of the burglary. Some claim it was to wire-tap the telephones in the belief that the Democratic Party was getting re-election money from communists in Cuba or elsewhere. Others claim that the burglars were looking for a list of call girls, that compromised a White House official, as his fiancee was allegedly one of the call girls.
Looking back from our time during which Bush and Obama have deep-sixed the US Constitution, violated numerous US and international laws, and behaved as if they were caesars unconstrained by any law or any morality, Nixon’s “crimes” appear so trivial as to be unremarkable. Yet, Nixon was driven from office and is regarded as a criminal.
Dozens of US and allied forces' military installations dot the region, from Oman, UAE and Kuwait to Turkey and Israel.
Doha, Qatar – US military bases continue to form a strategic envelope around Iran, although the American withdrawal from Iraq at the end of 2011 may have changed the regional balance somewhat towards Iran's favour. While US forces are scaling back in many parts of the globe due to budget cuts – and have begun a gradual depature from Afghanistan to be completed by 2014 – their international presence remains vast.
From an active-duty force of 1.4 million soldiers, the US has deployed some 350,000 troops to at least 130 foreign countries around the world. Some are at Cold War-era installations, but many are in or near combat zones in the Middle East. At more than 750 bases internationally, private contractors and third-country nationals also form a large percentage of the staff, in addition to military reservists and civilian employees of the Pentagon.
US military installations in the Middle East serve to keep an eye on Iran, but their regional footprint was significantly expanded well before Iran became the most publicly cited foreign “threat”.
There were three reasons why the US sought a presence across the Middle East, says Mehran Kamrava, Director of the Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in Qatar:
“Securing oil resources, guaranteeing the security of the state of Israel and combating threats to American interests” were the initial priorities of US military activity in the region prior to the first Gulf War, Kamrava says.
“Subsequently, direct military presence wasn't in the form of impositions, but the [security umbrella] was a conscious policy decision on the part of the Persian Gulf states.”
My analysis of DOD's latest “30 year” (not really) Aviation Plan is running at Time's Battleland Blog at http://battleland.blogs.time.com/2012/05/01/the-pentagons-million-dollar-aviation-plan/, and below. In my judgment, the overriding revelation in this document is of the incompetence and disingenuousness of the bureaucracy in DOD that wrote it. If you think documents like this, costing over $1 million to produce, add anything to oversight and understanding our defense problems, I hope to convince you otherwise.<
Readers who get to the very end of this e-mail will note a change in my signature block. The change is also announced in a new press release from POGO at http://www.pogo.org/press-room/winslow-wheeler.html.
PROCUREMENT The Pentagon's Million-Dollar Aviation Plan
By WINSLOW WHEELER
The Pentagon’s new, high-flying 30-year aircraft-buying blueprint – the Annual Aviation Inventory and Funding Plan Fiscal Years (FY) 2013-2042 – makes for depressing reading.
No, not because it predicts the loss of U.S. air superiority — its verbiage on that score is blithely reassuring—but because it evidences the Defense Department’s persistent refusal to acknowledge the overriding and fundamental air power issues. Bottom line — America’s combat aviation inventory and our air combat capability are:
– Decaying.
– Growing smaller and older.
– Becoming ever more costly.
The document starts out with wonkish assurances that the 30-year plan is fully consistent with the latest “strategic guidance” from the White House and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and it works hard to convince readers that all is well.
Phi Beta Iota: We cannot say it any plainer: any flag officer, any senior executive service officer now serving and putting up with all this fraud, waste, and abuse, LACKS INTEGRITY. From the Secretary of Defense to the Service Chiefs to the various “leaders” (more like over-promoted clerks), the Department of Defense sets the gold standard for fraud, waste, and abuse. They do no favors to those who die for their country–the infantry–both Army and Marine Corps–just 4% of the force–takes 80% of the casualties and receives 1% of the total budget. Hence, we must conclude that the persistence of this lack of integrity across the board among the Pentagon seniors is DESIRED by a Congress and a White House that themselves LACK INTEGRITY. It may be time to re-do Title 50 and Title 150–but first we have to find an honest Congress and an honest President. If General Flynn keeps his integrity as D/DIA, and perhaps finds a wing-man or two, then the first thing DIA could do is scrub the entire Pentagon budget in relation to the “strategic generalizations” first developed by the Marine Corps Intelligence Center (soon lost, as the Marines fell prey to the money wagon and lost their integrity as well).
The question is an absurd one except to those of us who have spent part of our lives exploring contradictions and mysteries posed by official narratives regarding events of that world-changing day. Increasingly, the question is becoming, “How many real persons died as a result of alleged events that occurred in connection with the destruction of buildings in New York City’s World Trade Center Complex on September 11, 2001?”
A logical tentative answer is provided by Mr. Simon Shack, the brilliant creator of SeptemberClues.info web site and supported by members of his CluesForum.info, two online resources that call into serious question reports of that day’s victims.
Shack’s sites initially postulated all alleged victims to be computer created fakes who never existed, based on absurdities of photoshopped and digitally morphed memorial images. Proofs presented on their Vicsim Report are overwhelmingly convincing when one takes sufficient time to carefully review its eighty pages.
Phi Beta Iota: There are three lines of thinking emergent on 9/11 that are gathering some momentum. The first is that the mainstream media were fully engaged in showing manipulated video enhanced with some computer simulation — this has not been investigated to our knowledge. The second is that the body count for 9/11 was fabricated. We would add the likelihood that the same force that pulverized all the concrete was also responsible for pulverizing most of the bodies within the buildings. The third, the most interesting, has actually begun to connect the dots among all the Zionists in NYC and neo-cons in Washington, D.C. We have no direct knowledge. We only know that the truth of the matter remains to be found.
An Army field manual published last week explains the Army's conduct of information collection activities in military operations.
“In this manual, the term ‘information collection' is introduced as the Army's replacement for ‘intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance' (also known as ISR),” the manual says.
“This publication clarifies how the Army plans, prepares, and executes information collection activities within or between echelons.”
“As the Army fields new formations and equipment with inherent and organic information collection capabilities, it needs a doctrinal foundation to ensure their proper integration and use to maximize their capabilities.”
