VA Pushing Pills and Getting Vets Hooked on Opiates

The VA is prescribing 270 percent more opiates to veterans than it was 12 years ago, sometimes pushing the drugs to known addicts who later overdose, writes Aaron Glantz.

This story aired on Reveal, a new public radio show from The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX.

Before dawn, a government van picked up paratrooper Jeffrey Waggoner for the five-hour drive to a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in southern Oregon. His orders: detox from a brutal addiction to painkillers.

He had only the clothes on his back, his watch, an MP3 player, and a two-page pain contract the army made him sign, a promise to get clean.

But instead of keeping Waggoner away from his vice, medical records show the VA hospital in Roseburg kept him so doped up that he could barely stay awake. Then, inexplicably, the VA released him for the weekend with a cocktail of 19 prescription medications, including 12 tablets of highly addictive oxycodone.

Three hours later, Waggoner, 32, was dead of a drug overdose, slumped in a heap in front of his room at the Sleep Inn motel.

Continue reading “Penguin: VA Pushing Pills and Getting Vets Hooked on Opiates”

2013/09/302013/09/30

4th Media: Washington’s Mujahideen Dissolve: Dissolving the Mercenary/Terrorists/Rebels CIA Club

Cultural Intelligence, Lessons, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence, Threats

Washington’s Mujahideen Dissolve: Dissolving the Mercenary/Terrorists/Rebels CIA Club

Western dialectics are beyond any doubt the pinnacle of human achievements. “Democracy” means “rule of corporations and oligarchs,”+ “Law” means “what civil servants need for their own profit”* while dictionaries define Ev·i·dence [noun] 1: False claim made by a government.

“Terrorists” are those fighting Western regimes; “freedom fighters” are those fighting for Western regimes. All others are slaves to be exploited by their governments.

The large image below belongs to the Ronald Reagan Library, where it is catalogued “President Reagan meeting with Afghan Freedom Fighters to discuss Soviet atrocities in Afghanistan. 2/2/83″ According to His Honorable Eminency, the President of the USA and its Colonies Reagan, the Afghani Mujahideen fighting against the illegitimate Soviet occupation were Freedom Fighters while their spinoff, the Taliban, were defined “terrorists” after they liberated their country.

Mercenaries in Syria

Mercenaries in Aleppo, Syria
Picture by Hamid Khatib, Reuters
The Reagan Doctrine: Sources of American Conduct in the Cold War’s Last Chapter

OK, this is easy to understand, Your Honor. By the way, who were the terrorists, the Apaches or the Anglos?

Western dialectics are the pinnacle of human achievements; no other culture had surpassed its treachery and indefatigable++ rape of humanity.

Continue reading “4th Media: Washington’s Mujahideen Dissolve: Dissolving the Mercenary/Terrorists/Rebels CIA Club”

2013/09/282013/09/29

Berto Jongman: Seymour Hersh on OBL Raid Story One Big Lie + Raid Meta-RECAP

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, Military, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence

Seymour Hersh: Bin Laden Raid “One Big Lie”

Pulitzer-prize wining journalist slams “pathetic” US media for failing to challenge White House

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
September 27, 2013

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh says that the raid which killed Osama Bin Laden in 2011 is “one big lie” and that “not one word” of the Obama administration’s narrative on what happened is true.

In a wide-ranging interview published today by the Guardian, Hersh savages the US media for failing to challenge the White House on a whole host of issues, from NSA spying, to drone attacks, to aggression against Syria.

On the subject of the Navy Seal raid that supposedly resulted in the death of the Al-Qaeda terror leader, Hersh remarked, “Nothing’s been done about that story, it’s one big lie, not one word of it is true.”

Hersh added that the Obama administration habitually lies but they continue to do so because the press allows them to get away with it.

“It’s pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama],” Hersh told the Guardian.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Seymour Hersh on OBL Raid Story One Big Lie + Raid Meta-RECAP”

2013/09/272013/09/27

SchwartzReport: One Nun Against US IC — She Wins We Lose

07 Other Atrocities, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Officers Call

Click through to see the damning photos that support this report. I cannot find anything else about this, no one in the American corporate media has touched it. But it reminds me of the faked photos and testimony in the Kuwait invasion that led America to go in the short war begun by the first President Bush.

One Nun Puts Entire US Intel Community to Shame Over ‘Stage-managed' Syria Footage
MAHDI DARIUS NAZEMROAYA – RT (Russia)

The US intelligence community has been put to shame by the dedication and determination of a lone Christian nun. Her modest study of the videos of the Syrian chemical attack shows they were productions involving staged bodies.

Those who take the time to read the report by Mother Agnes and the International Support Team for Mussalaha in Syria (ISTEAMS) will realize that it disgraces the entire US intelligence community for endorsing video footage that is clearly dubious and not credible upon careful study by even a layperson.

Continue reading “SchwartzReport: One Nun Against US IC — She Wins We Lose”

2013/09/232013/09/23

Chuck Spinney: Sanctions — A Strategy For When You Are Out of Altitude, Airspeed, and Ideas With Andrew Cockburn’s “A Very Perfect Instrument: The Ferocity and Failure of America’s Sanction Apparatus”

Officers Call

Obama's climbdown in Syria, the election of a moderate Iranian president Hasan Rouhani, and the resurgence of Russian influence in the Middle East, have increased Israeli fears of a US accommodation with Iran. The Israelis, together with their wholly own neo-con subsidiaries in Congress, the thinktanks, and the mainstream media, are turning up the pressure for an intensification of the economic sanctions on Iran. Sanction are an act of belligerence, but do they work to reduce conflict?

Attached to this email in pdf format is a timely analysis of the ineffectiveness of sanctions. This important report, A Very Perfect Instrument: The ferocity and failures of America's sanction Apparatus (Harpers, Sept 2013, pp. 50-57), was written by my good friend Andrew Cockburn and is in the September issue of Harpers.

Andrew's essay can be thought of as a bookend to his equally searing analysis of the effects of the sanctions we imposed on Iraq between August 1990 and May 2003 (London Review of Books, July 2010).

As Andrew shows, there is an unthinking brutality implicit in the primitive OODA Loops governing a sanctions strategy. Sanctions are grounded on the crude idea of using slow strangulation as a means to impose one's will on an adversary. Sanctions not only affect the minds of the besieged, but as Andrews shows below, the punishment caused by the physical effects on the besieged blows back to debilitate the mental operations and the moral values of the besieger. He also shows that the corruption of the besieger's OODA loops is by no means a new phenomenon in the sordid history of sanctions. In 2010, Andrew summarized the effects of the Iraqi sanctions strategy on the besieger's mind (i.e., the United States) with the following passage:

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Sanctions — A Strategy For When You Are Out of Altitude, Airspeed, and Ideas With Andrew Cockburn's “A Very Perfect Instrument: The Ferocity and Failure of America's Sanction Apparatus””

2013/09/162013/09/16

Veterans Today: Kerry Was Wrong – Turkey Indicts Six Jihadists for Sarin — Not Whole Story But Good Start

02 Diplomacy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 08 Wild Cards, Ethics, Government, IO Impotency, Officers Call

Kerry Was Wrong

Turkish prosecutor indicts six jihadists for alleged attempts to acquire chemicals with intent to produce sarin

Does the truth really set you free? Do I care?

The Turkish Republican Prosecutor in Adana has issued a 132-page indictment, alleging that six members of the al-Qaeda-aligned al-Nusra Front and Ahrar ash-Sham – one Syrian and five Turks – tried to acquire chemicals with the intent to produce the chemical weapon sarin.

The Turkish newspaper Radikal reports that the suspects were under surveillance by Turkish police after they received information that the al-Nusra members tried to acquire two government-regulated military-grade chemical substances.

11 people were arrested in their safe house in the city of Adana in southeastern Turkey on May 23, 2013, after they had acquired some of the chemicals.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Veterans Today: Kerry Was Wrong – Turkey Indicts Six Jihadists for Sarin — Not Whole Story But Good Start”

2013/09/16

Berto Jongman: Eric Garland on 20th Century Myths Driving US Intervention

Ethics, Lessons, Officers Call

Myth 1 : America has to act.

Myth 2 : America's actions are benevolent.

Myth 3 : America can win wars.

The 20th century myths driving US intervention

The logic behind a possible US strike in Syria is anachronistic, writes author.

Eric Garland

Al Jazeera, 15 September 2013

In the past few weeks, I have fielded phone calls from exasperated young colleagues in Washington DC. As strategic thinkers, they are flabbergasted that the same cohort of leaders could possibly present a casus belli for Syria that is so risk-blind and mindless, lacking any evidence of a longer-term vision. More than once I have heard the phrase, ” How can it be that people with such authority could possibly still think this way after the last twelve years?”

Even if you aren't a young American policy analyst in DC, you might be equally bewildered how the United States could be considering yet another intervention in the Middle East with limited moral justification, flimsy legal cover, and no clear strategic endgame. There is a logic here to the proposals of Kerry, Power, McCain, Graham and company – but that logic is driven by the myths from another age. To understand the mentality of the current crop of US leaders as they claim the right to enter the Syrian civil war on behalf of morality, look to the myths that drive people who grew up in another time.

The tenacious 20th century myths of today's leaders

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Eric Garland on 20th Century Myths Driving US Intervention”