Category: Military

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Chuck Spinney: Democracy & Truth or Tyranny & Lies?

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, DoD, Gift Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Officers Call
Chuck Spinney

My close friend Mike Lofgren writes an important essay describing the nature of ‘truth' in the Orwellian echo chamber that is closing the American mind in the 21st Century.

Chuck Spinney
The Blaster

DECEMBER 20, 2011
by MIKE LOFGREN, Counterpunch

According to the Congressional Research Service, the United States has appropriated $806 billion for the direct cost of invading and occupying Iraq. Including debt service since 2003, that sum rises to approximately $1 trillion. The White House estimates the number of U.S. military wounded at 30,000; the web site icasualties.org states that U.S. military fatalities from the Iraq war now stand at 4484. It is impossible to estimate precisely the numbers of Iraqi civilian deaths, but they are frequently cited as being in excess of 100,000. There are now around two million internally displaced Iraqis in a country of 30 million inhabitants. As United States armed forces (but not up to 17,000 State Department employees, contractors and mercenaries) leave the country, Iraq is plunging into a sectarian and ethnically-fueled political crisis. Even if it survives that crisis and remains a unitary state, it will almost certainly be pulled closer to the orbit of Iran, our bogeyman du jour.

In view of the crippling costs both human and financial as well as the strategic and moral disaster the invasion of Iraq precipitated, what sort of verdict do you think our leaders – leaders representing a presidential administration ostensibly opposed to the invasion and promising hope and change – bother to offer us? While junketing in Turkey on December 17, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told the press the following:

“As difficult as [the Iraq war] was, I think the price has been worth it, to establish a stable government in a very important region of the world.”

One’s only reaction to this statement is to blink in disbelief and wonder: is Panetta that stupid, or does he think that we, the supposedly self-governing citizens of this country, are that stupid?

Read rest of article.

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Reference: US Veteran Suicides – 1000 Attempts Each Month, 18 Actual Deaths by Suicide Each Day

07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Corruption, DoD, Government, Military, Officers Call
12,000 Attempts a Year, 18 Deaths a Day

“Shh” Email: 1,000 Suicide Attempts per Month, 18 Suicides per Day

On April 21, the first day of trial, the now-infamous VA internal December 2007 email written by Dr. Ira Katz, the VA’s mental health director, was submitted as evidence. The email states that 12,000 veterans per year under VA care were attempting suicide. Widely circulated within the VA, the email, titled “Not for the CBS News Interview Request” told a tragic tale.

“Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities,” Katz wrote. The email concludes: “Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?”

In November Katz told CBS, “There is no epidemic in suicide in VA,” and that there were only 790 attempted suicides in all of 2007, a fraction of Katz’s estimate stated in the internal email. In the same email Katz wrote there “are about 18-suicides per day among America’s 25 million veterans.”

Update 18 December 2011 (CNN)

Tip of the Hat to Bill Golden at LinkedIn.

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Chuck Spinney: Real Cost vs Real Value of Drones? + RECAP

Corruption, Government, Intelligence (government), IO Impotency, Methods & Process, Military
Chuck Spinney

If we accept this unnamed official's argument at face value, then why is this program, and those like it, classified at the special access compartmented level.

Could it be that the object of the excessive secrecy is keep the cost and some of the performance data from the American people so that they do not know where their tax dollars are going? Of course this obvious question was of little interest to the NYT.

Official: US Limits Intel Value Of Drones

Associated Press, 18 December 2011

WASHINGTON (AP) — A U.S. official says Iran will find it hard to exploit any data and technology aboard the captured CIA stealth drone because of measures taken to limit the intelligence value of drones operating over hostile territory.

The official also said Saturday that despite Iran's latest claims to have hijacked the RQ-170 Sentinel and brought it down near the eastern Iranian city of Kashmar, the U.S. is convinced that the drone malfunctioned.

“The Iranians had nothing to do with it,” the official said.

Full Story Plus Past Posts on Drones Below the Line

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Real Cost vs Real Value of Drones? + RECAP”

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TEDxAmsterdam 2011 – General Peter van Uhm

04 Inter-State Conflict, 10 Security, DoD, Ethics, IO Deeds of Peace, Methods & Process, Military, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence, Strategy

Tip of the Hat to Berto Jongman.

Phi Beta Iota:  Below is a typical comment.  Sadly, for this to be true, INTEGRITY in government is required.  As we have seen from Dick Cheney's hijacking of the US Government — and Obama's continuation of the Bush-era “war as a racket” policies now including the murder and imprisonment of US citizens without due process — sometimes the government's monopoly on force is the basis for a failed state, not its anti-thesis.

Very inspiring talk, i listened in silence to him and that doesn’t happen often.

As an ex VN soldier i fully support the generals opinion.

Even after losing his own son in Afghanistan he still firmly believes in his ideals and knows how to express them on a way that is understandable and inspiring to allot of people, i can only say general van Uhm made me proud to be Dutch today, and proud i served in the Dutch armed forces.

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David Swanson: The Trial (or Torture?) of Bradley Manning

Civil Society, Corruption, Government, Law Enforcement, Military
David Swanson

The Trial of Bradley Manning — Rule of Law or Rule of Intimidation, Retaliation & Retribution

By Ann Wright

Yesterday, December 16, 2011, 40 supporters of Bradley Manning saw him in person in the military courtroom at Fort Meade, Maryland and another 60 saw him on a video feed from the court, the first time Manning has been seen by the public in 19 months.  Over 100 other supporters, including 50 from Occupy Wall Street who had bused down from New York City, were at the front gates of Fort Meade in solidarity with Manning.

. . . . .

The military’s treatment of Manning has reeked of intimidation and retaliation.

Until citizen activist protests six months ago in March, 2011, brought sufficient attention to the harsh conditions of his pre-trial confinement, the US military was treating  him as if he were beyond the scrutiny of the law — as if he were an “enemy combatant” in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib.

. . . . .

Despite the military’s mantra of having the best military legal system in the world, the past treatment of Manning—keeping him in solitary confinement, forcing him to stand naked while in pre-trial confinement and the lack of compliance with the norms of the military legal system of a “speedy” trial have added to the low points of Abu Gharib and Guantanamo in the history of military “justice.”

The federal courts have long established mechanism of dealing with classified information in national security cases.

The military’s contention that it took 19 months to figure out how to try him while protecting classified materials reeks of intimidation, retribution and retaliation.

About the Author:  Ann Wright is a retired US Army Reserve Colonel and a former US diplomat who resigned in 2003 in opposition to the Iraq war.  She is a member of Veterans for Peace and is on the Advisory Board of the Bradley Manning Support Network

Read full article.

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Chuck Spinney: Political Fluff on Iraq vs Real-World Appraisals

03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 05 Iran, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Corruption, Government, Military, Officers Call
Chuck Spinney

After running for President in 2008 on a platform that criticized Iraq as a “dumb war,” Barack Obama just declared America’s misbegotten Iraqi adventure to be an “extraordinary achievement” in a speech to soldiers at Fort Bragg. That declaration of success is not enough for Congressman Duncan Hunter, who took Obama to task, saying, “And even now, as president, he refuses to acknowledge that victory was achieved,”

Such is the self-referencing nonsense produced in contemporary American political discourse shaped by a perpetual election cycle that disconnects debate from the real world and stifles rational governance, but keeps the masses entertained and distracted, much like the circuses did for the Roman masses in the waning days of the Empire. With American politicians are arguing endlessly how great a victory we achieved in Iraq, a natural question remains unasked: What does the rest of the world — particularly the Arab world — thinks of our ‘success'?

Attached, FYI, are two thoughtful alternative points of view on this question.

The first headline is from Rami Khouri's.  He is a columnist for the Lebanese Daily Star and is syndicated by the prestigious Agence-Global. The second headline is from Patrick Cockburn's, writing in the Independent [UK].  He is one of the most well informed western reporters now writing about the Middle East.

Praise Tunisia, not the Iraqi nightmare

By Rami G. Khouri, Daily Star, 14 December 2012

The United States under President George W. Bush drew on a deep well of nonsense, lies and fantasy when it entered Iraq in 2003. President Barack Obama continued this bipartisan American tradition when he said Monday that the departure of American forces from Iraq left behind a country that can be a model for other aspiring democracies. On the other side of the Arab world on the same day, the Tunisian people elected a new president, providing a more credible example of how Arabs can aspire to become democratic without foreign armies destroying their national fabric.  Read more.

Wars without victory equal an America without influence

World View: For all its military might, the US has failed to get its way in Afghanistan and Iraq, severely denting the prestige of the world's only superpower
Patrick Cockburn, Independent, 12 December 2011

Phi Beta Iota:  Mr. Cockburn's article contains one major assumption, to wit that the US  Government will not attack Iran nor condone an Israeli attack on Iran.  We disagree.  Now more than ever, Israel is bent on attacking Iran and drawing the US in–the deployment of US/NATO troops all around Syria, the plans for major NATO air operations ostensibly against Syria (long billed, falsely, as an Iranian puppet state) all point to precisely the opposite: a cresendo joint US-Israel mega-attack on Iran and Syria together.

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Winslow Wheeler: Leon Panetta & F-35 in a Nose Dive

Corruption, Military
Winslow Wheeler

With his own words, Leon Panetta has shown that he is little more than a mouthpiece for keeping the defense budget at historically high levels and is incapable of coping with the coming era of modest (yes, modest) Pentagon budget reductions. Using DOD's budget history and the ongoing decay (not a typo) of our military forces at ever increasing spending levels as my perspective, I seek to explain in an essay that is running this morning at Time Magazine's Battleland blog. My thanks to journalist Mark Thompson for running this piece.

Is Leon Panetta the Right Man to be Secretary of Defense?

Winslow Wheeler

TIME Battlefield, December 13, 2011

Read  full post with graphics.

This morning, three publications reported more (and important) information about a report submitted to Acting Acquisition Czar Robert Kendall in November about the F-35.  This “Quick Look Report” was previously reported by Bloomberg News (Tony Capaccio).  Today's articles expand the coverage of the contents of the report.  These articles by Jason Sherman and colleagues at Inside Defense, Bill Sweetman of the Ares Defense Technology Blog, and Bob Cox at the Fort Worth Star Telegram are below.

F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Concurrency Quick Look Review

Concerns About JSF's Lethality, Survivability Triggered ‘Concurrency Risk' Review

JSF – What's Really Happening: Internal Pentagon report finds major problems with F-35 performance and components

Phi Beta Iota: A series of civilian and military leaders have willfully refused to be honest about the future of defense, to the point that we now have smaller older forces and we do not have what we need to implement anything even remotely like the 1998 “four forces after next.”  DoD is in total amoral melt-down, where the 4% of the force that has integrity takes 80% of the casualties and receives 1% of the total budget–and still does not have a hand-held weapon able to out-gun the Taliban.

See Also:

Continue reading “Winslow Wheeler: Leon Panetta & F-35 in a Nose Dive”