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By Ned Sublette
$18.45
By Ned Sublette
$16.47
$40
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By Marie Cocco — Back in 2006, the Iraq Study Group said that all U.S. combat brigades in Iraq should be out by now. They also warned that an escalation, or “surge,” “would not solve the fundamental cause of violence in Iraq.”
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By Joe Conason — John McCain says that when it comes to Iraq, Americans should look to the future, but that’s to be expected of such an enthusiastic supporter of the disaster.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Robert Scheer — That idiotic “what, me worry?” look just never leaves the man’s visage. Once again there was our president, presiding over disasters in part of his making and totally on his watch, grinning with an aplomb that suggested a serious disconnect between his worldview and existing reality.
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By Marie Cocco — The overdose of Reagan nostalgia to which we’ve been subjected during the Republican presidential primaries is as understandable as it is misplaced.
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Adm. William Fallon, head of the U.S. Central Command, resigned on Tuesday, explaining that his reputation as an obstacle to President Bush’s military designs had become too much of a distraction. Fallon was often reported to be a thorn in the side of the president and his other military advisers, a role both the admiral and administration officials strongly deny.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Aaron Glantz — More than any other candidate for president, John McCain should know that peace talks can be stronger and smarter than bombs, that withdrawing American soldiers can be the best way to achieve stability, and that the best way to protect American troops is to bring them home from the war zone.
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — As Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain twisted briefly in the wind kicked up by that New York Times story suggesting he had swapped political favors for the personal favors of an attractive lobbyist for the telecommunications industry, I kept waiting for the public policy punch line.
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Attention, China: The U.S. military will soon be staging a bit of sky theater in trying to shoot down an inoperative American intelligence satellite. So, what does this show of atmospheric pyrotechnics have to do with China? Read on.
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thewashingtonnote.com
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Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the purported mastermind behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and five other detainees at Guantanamo Bay are facing official charges from the Pentagon that could result in the death penalty.
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By Andy Borowitz — The satirist envisions a new front in the global war on terror, if only the terrorists would waste as much time on Facebook as Americans do.
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AP photo / Khalid Mohammed
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By Scott Ritter — The former U.N. weapons inspector examines the president’s claims about the “surge” and says what the media and Congress won’t: It is not a strategy, it is an escalation, one that will not prevent the coming collapse of Iraq. There are no solutions just waiting to be found, and the only sensible thing to do is leave. Now.
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By Aaron Glantz — When young American men and women sign up to serve in our military, the government makes them a basic promise: If they are wounded in the line of duty, they will get the care they need. But for far too many, that’s a promise that only exists on paper—even months after the news emerged about American vets’ shameful treatment at U.S. military facilities.
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A commission set up by Congress in 2005 to examine the readiness of National Guard and reserve units has found that they’re simply inadequate to the task of dealing with a major disaster in the United States. The commission blamed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the Pentagon’s assumption that training for those conflicts would somehow prepare troops for disaster relief at home.
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uiowa.edu
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Legendary whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg has written an Op-Ed shaming the American media for failing to report the shocking story of Sibel Edmonds. A former FBI translator who was recruited after 9/11, Edmonds has accused the agency of covering up evidence of a complex web of foreign governments, U.S. officials and nuclear secrets.
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politics-now.com
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Roger Morris, who served on the National Security Council staff under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, has written a fascinating history of the United States’ many interventions in Pakistan. It’s the sordid story of “the world’s longest running military despotism, and of America’s most generous and tragic patronage.”
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Remember those Iranian vessels that allegedly menaced U.S. warships in the Gulf, threatening explosions? Just a few days after the president issued stern warnings to Iran over the incident, the Pentagon now says the threats, which were spoken by someone without an Iranian accent, might not have come from the Iranians and might not have even been directed at the Americans.
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breitbart.tv
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Last Sunday’s alleged confrontation between five Iranian boats and a U.S. Navy vessel, the Hopper, in the Strait of Hormuz was not the dangerous confrontation American officials claimed it was, as evidenced by the somewhat confusing footage the Pentagon released Tuesday. In fact, according to a source in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, the video itself was “fabricated.”
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By Chris Hedges — The release of the National Intelligence Estimate concerning Iran’s nuclear status marks the latest in a series of assaults by the Pentagon and the intelligence community against the war posturing of the administration.
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arcent.army.mil
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Despite touting increased stability in the outer provinces as proof of the success of the “surge,” the U.S. military is about to abandon those regions altogether. The Pentagon’s new strategy for dealing with a reduction of forces in Iraq is essentially to pull back to Baghdad and hope for the best.
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defenseindustrydaily.com
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Roughly 20,000 soldiers who aren’t on the military’s list of combat wounded have signs of brain injury, according to an analysis of Army, Navy and Veterans Affairs data conducted by USA Today. The Pentagon’s official tally of troops who’ve suffered brain trauma in combat is 4,471—one-fifth the total gleaned from military records.
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James Harris and Josh Scheer —
Truthdig speaks with Sharon Weinberger, whose book “Imaginary Weapons” looks into why the Pentagon has spent billions of dollars on fantastical weapons programs, some of which defy the laws of physics.
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By Joe Conason — The Pentagon has launched a preventive strike against a target that military chiefs presumably regard as one of the most active current threats to U.S. and world security—namely, the office of the vice president of the United States.
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usafa.af.mil
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By David Antoon — Retired Air Force Col. David Antoon investigates the evangelical Christian takeover of the military, where proselytizing has become institutionalized and religious ideology threatens to supersede the values of the Constitution.
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The Pentagon is evaluating how it can streamline the process that allows recruits with criminal records to serve in the military. The proposed action is the latest in a series of cash bonuses and relaxed requirements that are meant to help the military cope with its recruitment problem. We can think of a much more effective measure to get young men and women to sign up for military service: End the war in Iraq.
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The Washington Post has obtained a number of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s “snowflakes,” curt memos fired off at a rate of up to 60 a day. The documents offer rare, unpolished insight into one of the principal architects of the Iraq war, who “argued that Muslims avoid ‘physical labor’ and wrote of the need to ‘keep elevating the threat,’ ‘link Iraq to Iran’ and develop ‘bumper sticker statements’ to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war.”
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AP photo / Junji Kurokawa
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By Robert Scheer — Not to stoke any of the inane conspiracy theories running wild on the Internet, but if Osama bin Laden wasn’t on the payroll of Lockheed-Martin or some other large defense contractor, he deserves to have been. What a boondoggle 9/11 has been for the merchants of war, who this week announced yet another quarter of whopping profits made possible by George Bush’s pretending to fight terrorism by throwing money at outdated Cold War-style weapons systems.
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Truthdig speaks with Sharon Weinberger, whose book “Imaginary Weapons” looks into why the Pentagon has spent billions of dollars on fantastical weapons programs, some of which defy the laws of physics.
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Scott Ritter — The former intelligence officer and weapons inspector argues that the president’s recent World War III comment offers some rare insight into the highly secretive world of George W. Bush’s White House, where the leader of the free world gets advice from reckless neoconservatives, “war criminal” Dick Cheney and “God.”
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By Amy Goodman — John Lennon would have turned 67 years old last week had he not been murdered in 1980 by a mentally disturbed fan. On his birthday, Oct. 9, his widow, peace activist and artist Yoko Ono, realized a dream they shared.
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AP photo
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By Chris Hedges — The Bush administration has called for the respect of human rights in Burma, a pretty safe piece of posturing, but it remains silent as Egypt’s dictator, Gen. Hosni Mubarak, unleashes the largest crackdown on public opposition in over a decade. Our moral indignation over the shooting of monks masks the incestuous and growing alliance we have built in the so-called war on terror with some of the world’s most venal dictatorships.
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AP photo / LM Otero
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James Harris and Josh Scheer —
Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Philip Coyle knows a thing or two about the “staggering” amounts of money the U.S. funnels into the military-industrial complex, and why it is so difficult to stanch the profiteering.
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rawstory.com
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Last Friday, National Guard Spc. Ciara Durkin was found dead on her U.S. base in Afghanistan with a single gunshot wound in her head. Now, her family is looking for answers and wondering why the U.S. military isn’t offering details about the mysterious circumstances surrounding her death.
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AP photo / Jerome Delay
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As the U.S. government is learning much too late, democracy is not a one-size-fits-all application that can be lifted from one culture and grafted onto another. Here, UK reporter Ian Black from the Guardian Unlimited takes a look at what’s really going on politically and culturally in Iraq according to a prominent historian and his Iraqi contacts.
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Add another $50 billion to the tab the Bush administration is looking to run up in military costs for the ‘08 fiscal year, bringing the potential total to around $200 billion if this latest request goes through.
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By Marie Cocco — There is no set piece more emblematic of the tragic farce that is the American involvement in Iraq than the grotesque episode of Blackwater USA and the killing of civilians in Baghdad—at least nine and as many as 28—on Sunday.
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By Tom Engelhardt — There’s a lot of talk about religious fundamentalism these days, but how much do we really know about the brand of Christian fundamentalism that has developed in America since, and in response to, the Enlightenment? Author James Carroll holds forth on the subject in this interview with TomDispatch editor Tom Engelhardt.
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By Joe Conason — Following two days of carefully staged theatrics on Capitol Hill and cable television, the essential facts about Iraq remain unchanged. Despite the big charts and the blustering fanfare highlighted by Fox News, neither Gen. David H. Petraeus nor Ambassador Ryan Crocker could convincingly claim that the American military escalation in Iraq is achieving its original goals.
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video.on.nytimes.com
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Mourners, visitors and public figures converged in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania to observe the anniversary of Sept. 11 at or near the sites where the terrorist attacks took place six years ago.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The question of whether or not the “surge” is working is a distraction from the fact that fighting “them” over there makes us less safe at home. If the Democrats want to bring the troops home, they should repeat that mantra over and over.
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Opening his testimony before Congress on Monday with the insistence, “I wrote this testimony myself,” and adding that his Iraq progress report hadn’t been vetted in advance, Gen. David Petraeus trotted out figures and charts to argue that “the military objectives of the surge are, in large measure, being met.”
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DoD / Tech. Sgt. Andy Dunaway, USAF
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China has denied responsibility for a large raid on the Department of Defense’s computer network, attributing the accusation to a “Cold War mentality.” A senior U.S. official was quoted in the Financial Times as implicating the People’s Liberation Army in the attack, which forced the Pentagon to shut down its network for more than a week.
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Throughout the war, getting the troops the equipment they need to stay alive has been more of a goal than a reality. The latest example is the expected delivery shortfall of MRAPs—the specially designed armored vehicles that have proved particularly resistant to roadside bombs. The Pentagon had hoped to deliver 3,500 of the vehicles to Iraq, but it looks as if only 1,500 or so will make it there by year’s end.
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msnbc.com
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In an effort to combat ever dwindling enthusiasm among America’s youths for a career in the military, the Army is enlarging its recruitment staff, loosening age and criminal record restrictions and offering more cash bonuses, such as $45,000 tax-free to buy a house. Last year the Army spent $1 billion on bonuses and advertisements.
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AP Photo / John Moore
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How exactly do some 190,000 pistols and AK-47 rifles go missing? That’s the mystery the Pentagon is facing, according to the Government Accountability Office, which estimates that the U.S. military can’t account for 30 percent of the arms given to Iraqi security forces to help “spread democracy” since 2004.
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foxnews.com
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Defense Department documents handed over to the Associated Press under a Freedom of Information Act request raised the possibility that the “friendly-fire” death of soldier Pat Tillman, a former NFL player, was the result of an intentional act that amounted to a crime.
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According to data from the State and Defense departments, there are more than 180,000 civilian contractors on America’s payroll in Iraq. That’s about a surge’s worth more than the current troop count, and it doesn’t fully include private security contractors. The L.A. Times takes an exhaustive look at the “coalition of the billing.”
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detnews.com
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Although desertions from the Army have gone up, the military has apparently taken little interest. There is no active program for finding those who simply walk away, and when deserters are caught (usually they turn themselves in), most face merely a less than honorable discharge. According to the AP, just 5 percent of Army deserters were court-martialed in 2006.
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U.S. Army photo by Spc. Ben Brody
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At the core of the “surge” strategy is the notion that once U.S. troops clear a particularly hostile patch of Iraq, the Iraqi army and police will move in to maintain order. But senior American officers are now raising serious doubts about Iraqi forces’ ability to take over.
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Michael T. Klare —
What if wars of the future are fought just to run the machines that fight them? That’s just the alarmingly ironic point that Klare, author of “Blood and Oil,” takes on in this essay, sizing up the Pentagon’s huge energy expenditure—which will only increase exponentially if America’s imperialist globe-trotting continues. Note: Originally posted on TomDispatch.
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Further evidence that the U.S. military buildup in Iraq is failing to quell violence in the country came Wednesday with the release of a Pentagon report detailing the sobering statistics about widespread bloodshed in Baghdad and other areas.
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