FOR FURTHER INFORMATION
Kevin B. Zeese
KBZeese at Gmail.com, 518-543-6920
Americans from Across the Political Spectrum Call for End to U.S. Militarism
Washington, DC: Putting aside political differences on other issues, Americans from across the political spectrum have sent a letter to the president and congress urging an end to U.S. militarism. The letter, spearheaded by Come Home America, cites a combination of events that present a “historic opportunity to redirect U.S. foreign policy down the pathways of peace, liberty, justice, respect for community, obedience to the rule of law and fiscal responsibility.” The full letter with all signers can be seen at www.ComeHomeAmerica.US.
Senior Congressional sources in Washington have disclosed to The Mail on Sunday that President Obama has told the Libyan rebels through intermediaries that a condition of continued support from the US is that they must hand over Megrahi if they enter Tripoli.
The historic leader of the Libyan 1969 revolution, symbol of Libyan resistance, king of kings of Africa, Imam of Muslims, teacher of the Third Universal Theory, gave a historic speech to around one fifth of the entire Libyan population gathered to show their love and defiance.
Pakistan’s military continues to nurture a broad range of militant groups as part of a three-decade strategy of using proxies against its neighbours and US forces in Afghanistan, a prominent former militant commander said.
Phi Beta Iota: The details are compelling. What this really means is that the CIA and the Department of Defense are either incredibly ignorant of Pakistani plans and intentions, or remarkably cavalier and corrupt. What appears clear is that this is a sucking chest wound in US “intelligence” and national “defense” going back thirty years and multiple generations of so-called leaders who have no real grasp of reality in Pakistan.
Following below are several headlines about the prospects for the Defense Budget. As an overarching summary, what you need to know is that, at the working level, the fiscal decrements are already impacting heavily. We simply do not have the resources to do the routine work necessary to steward the force and plan for the future. The division I work in is currently operating at less than 60 percent of the people we need and we are supposedly one of the elite places. Money for necessary travel has dried up for all but Generals and SES's and our capability to conduct necessary planning conferences has been formally terminated. So, at most optimistic and charitable characterization, the future looks dodgy.
Phi Beta Iota: Defense cuts will be at least 30% over the next ten years, and hopefully as much as 50%. What we have now is a circle of outright lies among all pertinent executive and legislative officials. An ethical Secretary of Defense would be identifying contracts, starting with most of what DARPA and the services are doing in the way of futures, and present a list to Congress of needed cuts irrespective of contract law, the US now being in a state of war and the exingencies of the situation mandating a legislative override of contract law. Salami slicing is the idiot's path to temporary relief. The entire US government is bloated and broken, not just the Department of Defense. This is not a system that can be repaired in the absence of intelligence and integrity. It needs to be replaced–or not even replaced, just routed around and starved to death.
Today in cyber threats: more than four million Windows PCs have been commandeered by a botnet that cybersecurity experts are calling nearly “indestructible.” Known as TDL-4 (it’s the fourth iteration of the malicious program), this particular little nuisance hides in places security software rarely checks and speaks with other infected machines and their overseers in a novel encrypted code. Some are calling it the most sophisticated threat out there today. Watch your back, Stuxnet.
Phi Beta Iota: Apart from the known fact that the US Government ignored documented warning from Winn Schwartau, Jim Anderson, Bill Caelli, and Robert Steele in 1994, what we have here is the culimination of fifteen years in which governments continue to operate as Industrial Era hierarchies, choosing secrecy to protect incompetence rather than multinational sharing to achieve resilience–they are as a result inept beyond belief. The cloud–given the plethora of proprietary and therefore generally insecure hardware and software–is not going to be cleaned up on the present course, where spam is 75% of all email despite the best (isolated) efforts of all concerned. M4IS2, anyone?
Released Wednesday by the sponsoring Watson Institute of Brown University, a new multi-author study of the costs of the post-9/11 wars is available. Most prominently, the study finds the appropriations thus far to have been between $2.3 and 2.7 trillion; with an additional $884 to $1,334 billion to already have been incurred for future costs for veterans and their families. This would make a total, incurred thus far, of from $3.2 Trillion to $4.0 trillion. (Find a summary of these costs at http://costsofwar.org/article/economic-cost-summary.) It is important to note that these are basically budget costs to the federal government, not the broader economic costs to the economy or other costs to state and local governments.
The study also addresses still other expenses, such as the human costs in terms of civilian dead, the wounded, refugees, and more.
There is certainly some you will find to disagree with, but it is clear that advocates of the various conflicts who pretend the costs have been only the $1 trillion that President Obama articulated last week are feeding the nation grotesquely inaccurate information. Others, like departing SecDef Gates, who pretend that DOD spending is not a major factor in the size of our deficit are not particularly skilled in “math,” an elementary skill for government types that Secretary Gates has chosen to deride and to leave to others to perform.
I participated in the Costs of War study; see my paper on the DOD . It makes two basic points on p. 14:
1) “… while [the Congressional Research Service] and others have done long, hard, and excellent work to capture the identifiable appropriations to the Pentagon for the Post-9/11 wars, the $1.2 trillion CRS has, for example, identified in current dollars is problematic, but the fault is not with CRS, CBO, or GAO. The available figures have gaping holes and problems in them because of the sloppy, inept and misleading accounting of the costs by the Defense Department and Congress.”
2) “The $667 billion in 2011 dollars ($617 billion in current dollars) appropriated to the Defense Department's base budget since 2001 as a result of the wars, while squandered, should be included in any comprehensive attempt to capture the total cost of the wars. These amounts would bring the total DOD costs of the wars to $1.98 Trillion in constant 2011 dollars and $1.82 trillion in current dollars.”
A Reuters story below summarizes the overall “Costs of War” study.
(Reuters) – When President Barack Obama cited cost as a reason to bring troops home from Afghanistan, he referred to a $1 trillion price tag for America's wars.
Staggering as it is, that figure grossly underestimates the total cost of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the U.S. Treasury and ignores more imposing costs yet to come, according to a study released on Wednesday.
The final bill will run at least $3.7 trillion and could reach as high as $4.4 trillion, according to the research project “Costs of War” by Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies.
Phi Beta Iota: Emphasis added above. Brown, like Rutgers, is a hotbed of left-leaning intellectuals who probably wonder how a Democratic President could have become a neo-fascist war-monger. The answer is simple: corruption has no ideology. It is pervasive. Interestingly, the wire services (AP, Reuters, AFP, Bloomberg on occasion) and Russian Television as well as Al Jazeera, are emerging from this period as examples of integrity in action.
The big deficit facing the U.S. is mostly Republican in origin, the Congressional Budget Office says. The Bush tax cuts alone have added $3 trillion in red ink, yet the party wants to double down on its failed policy.
By Mike Lofgren
June 26, 2011
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Polarization based on juvenile talk radio sloganeering is dragging this country to the cliff's edge. If neither the Democrats nor the party I have served for three decades is willing to act like adults, perhaps it's time for a party that is willing to step into the void.
