Military Industrial Complex

Kucinich: Why is it we have Finite Resources for Health Care but Unlimited Money for War? | Press Release

Following a statement on the Floor of the House of Representative, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today made the following statement:

“Why is it we have finite resources for health care but unlimited money for war?

“The inequities in our economy are piling up: trillions for war, trillions for Wall Street and tens of billions for the insurance companies. Banks and other corporations are sitting on piles of cash of taxpayer’s money while firing workers, cutting pay and denying small businesses money to survive.

The Tragedy at Fort Hood
By Stephanie Westbrook

When I read of the tragedy at Fort Hood in my home state of Texas, where a soldier killed 13 of his fellow troops and wounded 30, I couldn't help thinking of my brief experience at the base.

It was the summer of 2006. I was in Crawford, Texas, home to Bush's ranch and Camp Casey, the activist camp out organized by Cindy Sheehan who lost her son in Iraq. It was the second year for Camp Casey. But this time, Bush had chosen to spend his holidays elsewhere, which left us with more free time.

Fort Hood, the largest army base in the U.S., where most soldiers heading off to war pass through, is an hour and a half from Crawford. We decided to go there to give information to members of the military. With us were veterans of the war in Iraq and we had leaflets from the GI Rights Hotline, an association that provides counseling to soldiers, including information on how to get out of the military.

Cynthia Papermaster's report on John Yoo follows:

First, a report on our Yoo action yesterday and YouTube of the rousing song "Tell John Yoo That Torture is a Crime." Our next Yoo protest is Wednesday, Nov. 18, 3 p.m. at the law school.

I'm beginning to get to know this guy John Yoo. Today Toby Blome and I went into his civil procedure class as soon as it ended. Toby beat her beautiful drum and I called him out for enabling torture. Yoo packed up his briefcase and as he was leaving we kept asking him when he was going to resign from teaching at UC. And I said you ARE going to be prosecuted, Mr. Yoo. He said "have a nice day." Toby followed him down the hall and up the stairs and he said to her "I'll never resign."

Pentagon pursuing new investigation into Bush propaganda program
By Brad Jacobson | Raw Story

[Read Part I, Part II and Part III of this series.]

The Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General is conducting a new investigation into a covert Bush administration Defense Department program that used retired military analysts to produce positive wartime news coverage.

Last May, the Inspector General’s office rescinded and repudiated a prior internal investigation’s report on the retired military analyst program, which had been issued by the Bush administration, because it “did not meet accepted quality standards for an Inspector General work product.” Yet in recent interviews with Raw Story, Pentagon officials who took part in the program were still defending it by referencing this invalidated report.

Gary Comerford, Inspector General spokesman for the Defense Department, told Raw Story last week that his office is conducting an investigation into the retired military analyst program and confirmed that the investigation began during the summer. Read more.

Tomgram: Nick Turse, In Afghanistan, the Pentagon Digs In | Tom Dispatch.com

In his latest TomDispatch post, Turse explores not the arguments in Washington for a widening war in Afghanistan, but the facts on the ground in that country where the Pentagon is already creating the infrastructure for a widening war and passing out massive construction contracts to private companies that are not due for completion until at least 2011....

In Iraq, structures like Balad Air Base or the ill-named Camp Victory just on the edge of Baghdad are so massive, so permanent-looking -- so clearly built for long-term occupation -- that it's still hard to imagine how the Pentagon will abandon them to the Iraqis.

2014 or Bust
The Pentagon's Building Boom in Afghanistan Indicates a Long War Ahead
By Nick Turse

In recent weeks, President Obama has been contemplating the future of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan. He has also been touting the effects of his policies at home, reporting that this year's Recovery Act not only saved jobs, but also was "the largest investment in infrastructure since [President Dwight] Eisenhower built the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s." At the same time, another much less publicized U.S.-taxpayer-funded infrastructure boom has been underway. This one in Afghanistan.

While Washington has put modest funding into civilian projects in Afghanistan this year -- ranging from small-scale power plants to "public latrines" to a meat market -- the real construction boom is military in nature. The Pentagon has been funneling stimulus-sized sums of money to defense contractors to markedly boost its military infrastructure in that country.

In fiscal year 2009, for example, the civilian U.S. Agency for International Development awarded $20 million in contracts for work in Afghanistan, while the U.S. Army alone awarded $2.2 billion -- $834 million of it for construction projects. In fact, according to Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, the Pentagon has spent "roughly $2.7 billion on construction over the past three fiscal years" in that country and, "if its request is approved as part of the fiscal 2010 defense appropriations bill, it would spend another $1.3 billion on more than 100 projects at 40 sites across the country, according to a Senate report on the legislation."

Bogged Down at Bagram Read more.

The Tortured Logic Continues
By Amy Goodman | Truthdig

“Extraordinary rendition” is White House-speak for kidnapping. Just ask Maher Arar. He’s a Canadian citizen who was “rendered” by the U.S. to Syria, where he was tortured for almost a year.

Just this week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York City, dismissed Arar’s case against the government officials (including FBI Director Robert Mueller, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and former Attorney General John Ashcroft) who allegedly conspired to have him kidnapped and tortured. Arar is safe now, recovering in Canada with his family. But the decision sends a signal to the Obama administration that there will be no judicial intervention to halt the cruel excesses of the Bush-era “Global War on Terror,” including extraordinary rendition, torture and the use of the “state secrets privilege” to hide these crimes.

Arar’s life-altering odyssey is one of the best known and best investigated of those victimized by U.S. extraordinary rendition. After vacationing with his family in Tunisia, Arar attempted to fly home to Canada. On Sept. 26, 2002, while changing planes at JFK Airport, Arar was pulled aside for questioning. He was fingerprinted and searched by the FBI and the New York Police Department. He asked for a lawyer and was told he had no rights. He was then taken to another location and subjected to two days of aggressive interrogations, with no access to phone, food or a lawyer. He was asked about his membership with various terrorist groups, about Osama bin Laden, Iraq, Palestine and more. Shackled, he was then moved to a maximum-security federal detention center in Brooklyn, strip-searched and threatened with deportation to Syria. Read more.

Seven Activists Faced Trial in Philadelphia but Charges are DISMISSED!
By Elaine Brower | Op Ed News

On Monday, November 2nd, seven defendants, flanked by their eye-witnesses and friends, appeared at Philadelphia Municipal Court for trial based on arrests at the “Army Experience Center” on May 2nd of this year. The charges against us stemmed from a protest which began at St. Stevens Church, and followed by a lively and raucous march to the Franklin Mills Mall where the “AEC” is housed. Escorted by Philly Civil Affairs police, and some local PD, hundreds of people gathered outside the storefront violent video gaming center aimed at pre-teen military recruitment, and voiced their dissent.

The hundreds that joined together shouted and chanted “SHUT DOWN THE AEC” and “WAR IS NOT A GAME!” and were determined to stop any of the youngsters trying to enter the center to spend their time playing war games on our tax dollars. Oddly enough, those of us who were arrested, placed ourselves in a silent vigil in front of the AEC, wearing death masks in all black clothing, and hanging around our necks were the names of the dead soldiers and Iraqis killed since the illegal and immoral invasion of that country. Read more.

Italy Convicts 23 Americans for C.I.A. Renditions
Armando Spataro, a prosecutor shown in Milan on Wednesday, achieved the first convictions involving the American practice of rendition, a significant symbolic victory.
By Rachel Donadio | NY Times

In a landmark ruling, an Italian judge on Wednesday convicted a base chief for the Central Intelligence Agency and 22 other Americans, almost all C.I.A. operatives, of kidnapping a Muslim cleric from the streets of Milan in 2003.

The case was a huge symbolic victory for Italian prosecutors, who drew the first convictions involving the American practice of rendition, in which terrorism suspects are captured in one country and taken for questioning in another, often one more open to coercive interrogation techniques.

Critics of the Bush administration have long hailed the case as a repudiation of the tactics it used to fight terrorism. And the fact that Italy would actually convict intelligence agents of an allied country was seen as a bold move that could set a precedent in other cases. Read more.

I'm with Bruce Gagnon for events in Maine and here's something from his blog.

A Review of the FBI's Involvement in and Observations of Detainee Interrogations in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraq (Revised)

Grab a beverage of your choice - it's 441 pages long.

America the Betrayed
By Richard Cook

...Whitman a hero to the Beatniks of the 1950s who tried to rediscover an authentic American voice in the streets and on the roads and highways of this great land. The spirit of Whitman was surely present through the rebellion of the 1960s, when America’s young men and women rose up and fought the Establishment to stop the Vietnam War and bring civil rights to racial minorities.

The Establishment fought back with a vengeance and, through the most egregious betrayal in history, reduced the world’s greatest industrial democracy to the pathetic shadow of its former self we are today.

The first thing the Establishment did was destroy the industrial job base by shipping millions of good jobs to China and other Third World nations, where slave laborers could be forced to churn out consumer products at a fraction of the cost of similar work done by American workers. Read more.

ScienceDaily (Nov. 4, 2009) — Nearly half of all American children will reside in a household receiving food stamps at some point between the ages of 1 and 20, according to a report in the November issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

EXCLUSIVE: Convicted CIA Spy Says "We Broke the Law"
Sabrina deSousa Says U.S. "Betrayed" Her and Others Found Guilty in Kidnapping of Muslim Cleric in Italy
By Matthew Cole, Avni Patel, and Brian Ross | ABC News

"Everything I did was approved back in Washington," she said. deSousa says she was on a ski trip on the actual day of the kidnapping....A State Department spokesman said the Obama administration was "disappointed" by the verdict.

One of the 23 Americans convicted today by an Italian court says the United States "broke the law" in the CIA kidnapping of a Muslim cleric Abu Omar in Milan in 2003.

"And we are paying for the mistakes right now, whoever authorized and approved this," said former CIA officer Sabrina deSousa in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC's World News with Charles Gibson.

DeSousa says the U.S. "abandoned and betrayed" her and the others who were put on trial for the kidnapping. She was sentenced in absentia to five years in prison.

Representative Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), a member of the House Intelligence Committee told ABC News that the trial was a disaster for CIA officers like DeSousa on the frontline.

"I think these people have been put out there. They've been hung out to dry. They're taking the fall potentially for a decision that was made by their superiors in our agencies. It's the wrong place to go." Read more.

Screaming Eagles Coming Home To Roost
By Bruce Gagnon |
Organizing Notes

While I was recently in South Korea I had the sad opportunity to have several of these F-15 "Eagles" screaming over my head when I was touring the end of the runway at the US Air Force Base at Kunsan with local activists. I reported in my blog at the time that in addition to the ear shattering noise, I felt my entire insides reverberate and I know that constant exposure to those sounds cannot be healthy for humans or any other living creature.

The South Koreans, and the Japanese in Okinawa who are now suing to close a similar US base there, have to live with this every single day of their lives. Same goes for the people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other places around the world where the US empire is operating.

Now they want to fly these damn things here in Maine at 500 feet. Read more.

Heeding George Kennan's Wise Advice
By Ray McGovern | November 3, 2009

I can’t remember how many times I have said that the U.S. military adventure in Afghanistan is a fool’s errand.

The reaction I frequently encounter includes some variant of, “How can you blithely acquiesce in the chaos that will inevitably ensue if we and our NATO allies withdraw our troops?” While the “inevitable chaos” part is open to doubt, the question itself is a fair one.

By way of full disclosure, my answer is based largely on the fact that I asked the equivalent question 43 years ago regarding a place named Vietnam. Been there; done that.

As a young Army infantry/intelligence officer turned junior CIA analyst in 1963, I was given responsibility for reporting on Soviet policy toward China and Southeast Asia and was just beginning to get a feel for the complexities. My degrees were in Russian studies; I knew something about Communist expansion, but very little about Vietnam.

I should have listened to my brother Joe at Princeton, who tried to help me see that it was mainly a civil war in Vietnam, that the Vietnamese had ample reason to hate both the Russians and Chinese (and now us), and that the “domino effect” was a canard.

Joe was openly impatient to find me such a slow learner — so susceptible to the Red-menace fear mongering of the time.

Enter George Kennan

By Valerio Volpi

The Roots of Contemporary Imperialism argues that the presence of
George W. Bush and the issues that accompanied his presidency, such as
popular repression and business domination, are not the result of an
authoritarian regression of U.S. politics but rather represent the
continuation of an approach that came into existence during the age of the
Founding Fathers. The creation of the federal presidential republic, whose
main purpose was not as much to preserve the balance of power between
the various branches of government as to hinder any radical changes in
society, shows how the Fathers' main concern was not people's freedom
but to devise constitutional mechanisms intended to defend the properties,
wealth, and privileges of economic elites. In the author's view, Barack
Obama's recent election as the nominee of one of the two wings of the
single "business party," despite the rhetoric about "change" and "hope,"

The Rachel Maddow Show covered the meeting of the mercenary trade group, the International Peace Operations Association. In this segment, I suggest a new, softer name for the organization… VIDEO.