Not Funny
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Crime, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
“The issue is not whether the Iraqi people will greet U.S. soldiers as their liberators, but what will they do six months after that.
I find it naive and disingenuous to claim that you can create democracy in Iraq any time soon.
The administration has already assured us that the U.S. will not stay there for very long, and, if that is the case, then the goal of establishing a constitutional system in Iraq is a joke.”
– Gen. William Odom, February 2003
The late Gen. Odom was my most-favorite commentator on the whole messed-up adventure in Iraq — he pulled no punches and was a welcome sight on PBS.
Of course, the network and cable news outlets wouldn’t touch him with a 10-foot pole — they had the Pentagon’s generals to provide biased-color commentary on the Iraqi business.
Odom called the real deal: “The invasion of Iraq I believe will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history.”
An ugly joke with one long, asshole-of-a-punchline.
(Illustration found here).
The latest bit of shit to come out of Iraq — beyond President Obama’s phoney-baloney announcement that ‘all’ US troops will be out of that destroyed country by this year’s end — is a report from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) on another disaster within the greater disaster.
The lede graph in the CNN story tells the tale:
As the U.S. military heads towards the exits in Iraq, a new report released Sunday on a major reconstruction project there reads like a critique of the war in general — poorly planned, unexpectedly costly, years behind schedule and with an uncertain future.
The project in question is the Fallujah Waste Water System, an operation that should have raised alarms at its very conception, but back in those days, no one with any sense at all was in charge.
Another example of wasted lives and treasure — the system was supposed to handle 100,000 Iraqi homes, but up to last month, only 6,000 have been connected, and the project was suppose to cost $35 million, but now its cost is $100 million with no end in sight.
In fact:
“In the end, it would be dubious to conclude that this project helped stabilize the city, enhanced the local citizenry’s faith in government, built local service capacity, won hearts or minds, or stimulated the economy.”
“Coupled with the fact that the outcome achieved was a wastewater treatment system operating at levels far below what was anticipated, it is difficult to conclude that the project was worth the $100 million investment and the many lives lost.”
Gen. Odom would turn over in his grave with shame.
As the so-called last of US troops get ready to depart, they will leave in their wake a country that’s not only dangerous, but completely screwed.
Also included in that SIGIR report was comments from Lt. Gen. Babakir Zebari, Iraq’s defense chief, who says that the Iraqi military won’t be able to operate on its own until sometime between 2020 and 2024.
WTF!
Until then what happens?
Gen. Odom underestimated the horror — beyond the US tragedy (4,481 GIs killed, more than 32,000 wounded, and more than 30 percent of all US armed forces have some form of PTSD) the death and destruction to the Iraqi nation is near impossible to grasp.
From The Nation last week:
The Brookings Institute estimates that 115,250 Iraqi civilians were killed during the war.
Iraq Body Count puts the figure at between 103,158 and 112,724 people.
Other estimates of excess deaths from the war, such as the Lancet survey and the Opinion Research Business survey, are substantially higher, but it is enough here to grapple with the most conservative estimates.
…
But that comparison understates how devastating the war has been to Iraq, because it ignores Iraqi combatants who’ve been killed, and neither does it address displaced persons.
By a conservative estimate, 3,700,000 Iraqis have been displaced from their homes by the war.
By way of comparison, a year after Hurricane Katrina, the population of a devastated New Orleans had shrunk by 378,000 people.
Or put another way, if you cleared every last person out of Los Angeles, you could fill the city back up to its current population with displaced Iraqis.
And further to inflame an out-of-control fire, 40 percent of Iraqi professionals have left the country since 2003, and Iraq had 34,000 physicians before the invasion, now have about 12,000.
A shitty life there, and it’s George Jr.’s fault — why isn’t he in jail?
The financial cost of the Iraqi war keeps piling up — for a never-ending dial, see Cost of War — the amount this morning is $801,234,070…and climbing by the second.
The Christian Science Monitor remembers this: When President George W. Bush launched the war, charging incorrectly that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the Pentagon estimated its cost at $50 billion to $60 billion. Economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey got in hot water at the White House when he guessed in public the war could cost as much as $200 billion.
Ha!
I’m not joking — If I was joking, it’d go something like this: Horse walks into a bar, bartender asks, “Why the long face?”
Toll of Endless War
Filed Under Bullshit, Just Plain War | Leave a Comment
“How can we let this happen? How is that acceptable in the United States of America? The answer is, it’s not. It’s an outrage. And it’s a betrayal — a betrayal — of the ideals that we ask our troops to risk their lives for.”
– Presidential candidate, Barack Obama, April 2008, reacting to the suicide of an 89-year-old WWII veteran
War is nowhere fun.
In this so-called modern age, however, war is everywhere — more of a world at war then even the two named world wars, and US GIs are getting the shit end of the stick.
And from noted war correspondent Richard Engel on NPR last month: “And I’ve seen battles like this on little outposts in other parts of Afghanistan and when you add them up, [you ask] ‘Why? What are these amounting to?’”
Yes, the $1.2 trillion question.
Right now, there’s about 40,000 troops still in Iraq and more than 90,000 in Afghanistan, and although the US is supposed to be out of Iraq by this December, it’s still up in the air about how many will remain, while apparently we’ll be involved in the Afghan horror for years to come.
(Illustration found here).
Not only are these war zones horrible, these GIs are bring the horror home with them.
Although 96 percent of soldiers are proud of their service, the trauma will remain with them seemingly forever.
In a study by Veterans for Common Sense, nearly 20 percent of the more than 2 million troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from mental health conditions, and the situation won’t get better for a long while.
From McClatchy Newspapers:
“A large number of people serving overseas have mental health impacts, and more and more are coming home,” said Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. “I am deeply concerned that we are not ready.”
The Department of Veterans Affairs, which is trying to grapple with the wave of new and damaged veterans, has been under considerable stress.
In a related development this week, an internal VA survey requested by Murray’s committee found that its staff doesn’t think it has the resources to handle the growing demand from new veterans for mental health services.
Paul Sullivan, the executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, said that in 2003, the government expected that the VA would see about 50,000 new patients from both wars.
With nearly three-quarters of a million Iraq and Afghanistan veterans already in the VA system, he said, the long-term estimate was “ominous.”
“More than 1 million total patients from the wars by the end of 2013,” Sullivan predicted.
And some terrible stats:
Of the 109,000 casualties since combat in Iraq and Afghanistan began, 6,200 troops have been killed.
Among those were 298 war-zone suicides, according to the study.
Overall, it reported 2,300 active-duty suicides since 2001.
Suicides have been a persistent problem, underscoring the stress that 10 years of war have placed on the troops as a result of multiple deployments.
In 2009, suicides exceeded deaths in combat.
The study said that nearly 1 million troops — 42 percent of all service members sent to the combat zones — have been deployed at least twice.
And these wars appear nowhere at an end.
A new Pew Research poll reports a third of US military think all this war mongering is not worth it and we should get our ass out of foreign shit and focus more on shit at home.
From the UK’s The Guardian:
One in three US veterans of the post-9/11 military believes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not worth fighting, and a majority think that, after 10 years of combat, America should be focusing less on foreign affairs and more on domestic problems, according to an opinion poll.
…
The Pew survey found that veterans were ambivalent about the net value of the wars, although they were generally positive about Afghanistan, which has been a more protracted but less deadly conflict for US forces.
One in three veterans said neither war was worth the sacrifice; a view shared by 45 percent of the public polled.
Some 50 percent of veterans said the campaign in Afghanistan had been worthwhile; 41 percent of civilians agreed.
Among veterans, 44 percent said the war in Iraq was necessary; 36 percent of civilians shared that view.
Of the former service members who were seriously wounded or knew someone who was killed or seriously wounded, 48 percent said the war in Iraq was worth fighting, compared with 36 percent of those with no personal exposure to casualties.
Exposure to casualties had an even larger impact on attitudes toward the war in Afghanistan.
Some 55 percent of those exposed to casualties said the military campaign in Afghanistan had been worth the cost to the US, whereas 40 percent of those who were not exposed to casualties held that view.
And the survey also touched upon US civilian outlooks on the military:
Pew said its survey results found “isolationist inclinations” among the war veterans.
About six in 10 said the US should pay less attention to problems overseas and instead concentrate on issues at home.
In a survey it conducted earlier this year, a similar share of the public agreed.
The results also reflected what many view as a troublesome cultural gap between the military and the public.
Although numerous polls have shown that Americans hold troops in high regard, the respondents in the Pew research admitted to a lack of understanding of what military life entails.
Only 27 percent of adult civilians said the public understood the problems facing those in uniform, while the proportion of veterans who said so was even lower at 21 percent.
The toll of war on the homeland for generations to come.
And somebody should ask Obama about the political reality of his use of the word, betrayal.
Just Plain Gall vs Unmitigated Gall
Filed Under Bullshit, Crime, history, Lying, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
In the last few years there’s been a momentous outburst of gall — the audacity of some people to bullshit despite incredible evidence to the contrary — which has touched just about every aspect of US life, especially in politics.
Two such unrelated examples occurred this past weekend, one involved GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry and the other concerned the former US vice president, The Dick.
(Illustration found here).
Due to a tilted MSM, this gall bullshit is allowed to be played out on the media wires without so much as a ‘Hey, wait a minute,” and certainly no saying ‘that’s a lie.’
A public lambasted by continuous crap comes to believe the crap is real — this caused by some like the Tea Party nit-twits who just don’t give a shit.
In the Perry case, the story is race.
Born and raised in the US Deep South (don’t hold that against me), I understand the culture of racism as a normal byproduct of ordinary life — I got outta there as soon as I could.
And with my own children’s upbringing (a single parent, I raised five kids near-about alone), there were two words that were never heard or spoken in my household on threat of great bodily harm — one was the combination of god and damn together, and the other, the “n” word for African-Americans.
The kids would sometimes blurt out the first one in anger (much to my consternation, and to their credit, they’d apologize, or at least look sheepish), but never, ever used the second.
Of course, all other words were fair game — we could make the late George Carlin blush.
Anyway, the thing on Perry arrived Sunday via a story in the Washington Post:
In the early years of his political career, Rick Perry began hosting fellow lawmakers, friends and supporters at his family’s secluded West Texas hunting camp, a place known by the name painted in block letters across a large, flat rock standing upright at its gated entrance.
“Niggerhead,” it read.
Ranchers who once grazed cattle on the 1,070-acre parcel on the Clear Fork of the Brazos River called it by that name well before Perry and his father, Ray, began hunting there in the early 1980s.
There is no definitive account of when the rock first appeared on the property.
In an earlier time, the name on the rock was often given to mountains and creeks and rock outcroppings across the country.
Over the years, civil rights groups and government agencies have had some success changing those and other racially offensive names that dotted the nation’s maps.
But the name of this particular parcel did not change for years after it became associated with Rick Perry, first as a private citizen, then as a state official and finally as Texas governor.
Some locals still call it that. As recently as this summer, the slablike rock — lying flat, the name still faintly visible beneath a coat of white paint — remained by the gated entrance to the camp.
When asked last week, Perry said the word on the rock is an “offensive name that has no place in the modern world.”
Perry claims the rock was painted over near immediately.
Others differ:
“I remember the first time I went through that pasture and saw that,” said Ronnie Brooks, a retired game warden who began working in the region in 1981 and who said he guided three or four turkey shoots for Rick Perry when Perry was a state legislator between 1985 and 1990. “. . . It kind of offended me, truthfully.”
…
Another local who visited the property with Perry and the legislators in those years recalled seeing the rock with the name clearly visible.
“I thought, ‘This is going to embarrass Rick some day,’ ” said this person, who did not want to be named, fearing negative consequences from speaking on the subject.
The Perry camp pushed back: “A number of claims made in the story are incorrect, inconsistent, and anonymous, including the implication that Rick Perry brought groups to the lease when the word on the rock was still visible. The one consistent fact in the story is that the word on a rock was painted over and obscured many years ago.”
Right, and a minor example of gall as explained by this from the Post story:
Mae Lou Yeldell, who is black and has lived in Haskell County for 70 years, recalled a gas station refusing to sell her father fuel when he drove the family through Throckmorton in the 1950s. She said it was not uncommon in the 1950s and ’60s for whites to greet blacks with, “Morning, nigger!”
“I heard that so much it’s like a broken record,” said Yeldell, who had never heard of the hunting spot by the river.
Even in my red-neck of the Alabama woods I never heard such ugly racial shit as the above.
Hence use of simple gall in repudiating the whole thing.
However, unmitigated gall was displayed this weekend by The Dick.
On CNN yesterday (via Raw Story), The Dick offered praise for President Obama in the war on terror, but then demanded an apology from Obama not using the old bullshit phrase, “war on terror” and the old boy is still stung by Obama’s 2009 Cario speech.
“It matters a lot,” Cheney said. “In terms of the signals that are sent by the commander-in-chief with respect to the kind of efforts that are going to be used, what we expect our people to be doing.
He needs to be clear with what he’s doing, and he clearly is fighting a war.
I agree with the attacks.
But don’t get wrapped up in your underwear then trying to go back and validate the foolish things said in their campaign.”
…
“They need to call it what it is,” he said.
“When he goes to Cairo and in-effect says we walked away from ideals, we forgot our core principles and values on our (the Bush Administration’s) watch, that’s a big mistake.”
When (CNN moderator Candy) Crowley asked if he wanted an apology from Obama, Cheney said, “I would. Not for me, but I think for the Bush Administration and that he misspoke when he gave that speech two years ago.”
Cheney’s aughter Liz added: “I think he (Obama) did tremendous damage. I think he slandered the nation and I think he owes an apology to the American people.”
One almost has to do a double-take on that huge pile of bullshit.
The Dick and George Jr. are war criminals, no doubt and no amount of unmitigated gall will change that cold-hard fact.
Bad Eye on High — Seeking ‘Adversarial intent’
Filed Under Terror, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
“If this works out, we’ll have the ability to track people persistently across wide areas,” says Tim Faltemier, the lead biometrics researcher at Progeny Systems Corporation, which recently won one of the Army contracts.
“A guy can go under a bridge or inside a house. But when he comes out, we’ll know it was the same guy that went in.”
– Description of innovative drone technology, from Wired
(Illustration found here).
Even as the situation on the ground in Afghanistan is becoming worse — an uptick of nearly 40 percent more violence this year than in 2010 — the sky-ways above the war-spattered country has become alive with the whine of unmanned drones.
The conflict there, however, is getting bad, real bad: Three NATO soldiers were killed Wednesday in eastern Afghanistan, while nearly at the same time, eight Afghan policemen died in an ambush in the south, and all this horror in the wake of the US embassy attack in Kabul earlier this month, followed by the assassination of a former Afghan president who was trying to work with the Taliban on a peace plan.
No country for young or old men.
Emboldened by the successful slaughter in Afghanistan, the US reportedly are building new drone bases in Ethiopia and in the Seychelles, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean — all in secret, of course — to enable better attacks on insurgents in Somalia and Yemen.
Use of drones surged 134 percent in 2010 over the previous year, and President Obama has apparently made these machines the focal point for modern war — only five drone attacks in Pakistan during 2007, 36 in 2008 (most of those in the last half of that year) and in Obama’s first year in office, the tempo of such attacks in Pakistan increased 47 percent.
Despite all evidence to the total contrary, last summer, Obama’s chief counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan, blubbered “there hasn’t been a single collateral [civilian] death” in Pakistan and since drones are perfect, “exceptionally surgical and precise” and “do not put… innocent men, women and children in danger.”
Such bullshit — there’s been 236 attacks under Obama, one every four days.
And with drones, it’s quiet, easy killing with machines themselves making life-and-death decisions.
War has gone beyond human control:
And the machines being used to do the killing are also being enhanced, moving the United States one step closer to an apparent goal of constant low-intensity warfare capability worldwide.
The United States government is reportedly working to develop pilotless military drones that are fully automatic, identifying and destroying human targets on the ground without any intervention from an operator or pilot back in Nevada, and this is generating virtually no public outrage.
The drones would reportedly seek their targets based on facial-recognition software or other biometrics. The Defense Department planners have dubbed the technological leap “lethal autonomy,” meaning that the life-or-death decision can be made instantaneously and independently by the machine without any slowing down of the process due to a human being having to make a decision whether to fire or not.
The key words ‘generating virtually no public outrage‘ is where the US war effort is moving in an attempt to keep the Long War going even longer — out of sight, out of range.
And it’s topical — this week, the FBI arrested a 26-year-old US citizen on charges of “plotting an attack on the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol with a remote-controlled model aircraft” and although authorities claim there was no real danger, the ability of this guy armed with a physics degree to plan something like this might become common place in the near future.
So these unmanned drone future is kind of scary, even for US peoples.
From the Wire link above:
The Pentagon isn’t content to simply watch the enemies it knows it has, however.
The Army also wants to identify potentially hostile behavior and intent, in order to uncover clandestine foes.
Charles River Analytics is using its Army cash to build a so-called “Adversary Behavior Acquisition, Collection, Understanding, and Summarization (ABACUS)” tool.
The system would integrate data from informants’ tips, drone footage, and captured phone calls.
Then it would apply “a human behavior modeling and simulation engine” that would spit out “intent-based threat assessments of individuals and groups.”
In other words: This software could potentially find out which people are most likely to harbor ill will toward the U.S. military or its objectives.
Feeling nervous yet?
“The enemy goes to great lengths to hide his activities,” explains Modus Operandi, Inc., which won an Army contract to assemble “probabilistic algorithms th[at] determine the likelihood of adversarial intent.”
The company calls its system “Clear Heart.”
As in, the contents of your heart are now open for the Pentagon to see.
It may be the most unnerving detail in this whole unnerving story.
Not only watch your back, but watch your emotions.
A Fictional War
Filed Under Finance, history, Literary, Lying, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Even as Vermont drowns in its own water, the politics of war still plays on the airwaves, especially after The Dick Cheney made the rounds boasting of his new literary efforts in disengaging the truth from a lie.
Seemingly, the further away from the invasion of Iraq and closer to the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, we all get, the repulsive ugly of George Jr.’s term as a war president becomes even more apparent — the real question is why are these people not in jail.
In the newest wrinkle, an October 2002 letter from Tony Blair’s office reveals he and George Jr. were going into Iraq come hell or high water: A letter from Blair’s private secretary reveals that “we and the US would take action” without a new resolution by the UN security council if UN weapons inspectors showed Saddam had clearly breached an earlier resolution. In that case, he “would not have a second chance.”
(Illustration of Pablo Picasso’s ‘Head of a woman‘ found here).
On the letter from the UK’s The Guardian (the link above):
In a devastating passage, Rycroft (Blair’s secretary) added: “In other words, if for some reason [such as a French or Russian veto] there were no second resolution agreed … we and the US would take action.”
The Downing Street letter is particularly significant considering the government’s repeated emphasis in public at the time on the need for UN approval before any invasion of Iraq.
Another of that public to private bullshit.
Also from the UK yesterday, Baroness Manningham-Buller, former director general of the domestic security service, who retired in 2007, said Blair and his lackeys had been warned prior to any war action an Iraqi invasion was a major f*ck up.
Via The Telegraph:
In an interview with the Radio Times, Lady Manningham-Buller suggested that she argued at the time that the Government should focus on defeating al Qaida and winning the war in Afghanistan instead of attacking Saddam Hussein.
“Iraq did not present a threat to the UK,” she said.
“The service advised that it was likely to increase the domestic threat and that it was a distraction from the pursuit of al Qaida.
I understood the need to focus on Afghanistan.
Iraq was a distraction.”
She said it was “for others to decide” whether the Iraq war had a mistake but added: “Intelligence isn’t complete without the full picture and the full picture is all about doubt.
Otherwise, you go the way of George Bush.”
And The Dick.
In a realistic look at The Dick’s most-wonderful new book, ‘In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir,’ a column at antiwar.com by political activist, Medea Benjamin (Susan Benjamin), co-founder of Code Pink, explains the tome actually needs to be in a bookstore’s fiction section.
She lists 10 reasons why — most touching war crimes, torture and genocidal actions, but the #3 reason is financial:
War profiteering.
U.S. taxpayers shelled out about $3 trillion for the Bush-Cheney wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — a major factor in our nation’s present economic meltdown.
But Cheney and his cronies at Halliburton made out like bandits, getting billions in contracts for everything from feeding troops in Iraq to constructing the U.S. embassy in Afghanistan to building the infamous Guantanamo prison.
Cheney was CEO of Halliburton from 1995-2000, leaving for the VP position with a $20 million retirement package, plus millions in stock options and deferred salary.
Before the Iraq War began, Halliburton was 19th on the U.S. Army’s list of top contractors; with Cheney’s help, by 2003 it was number one — increasing the value of Cheney’s stocks by over 3,000 percent.
Big bucks for The Dick.
And in that vein, a couple of members of the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan penned an op/ed in Sunday’s Washington Post, claiming billions and billions of US bucks have been flushed down The Dick’s toilet of war.
A few enlightening snips:
At least one in every six dollars of U.S. spending for contracts and grants in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade, or more than $30 billion, has been wasted.
And at least that much could again turn into waste if the host governments are unable or unwilling to sustain U.S.-funded projects after our involvement ends.
…
Tens of billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted through poor planning, vague and shifting requirements, inadequate competition, substandard contract management and oversight, lax accountability, weak interagency coordination, and subpar performance or outright misconduct by some contractors and federal employees.
Both government and contractors need to do better.
…
The contractor workforce in Iraq and Afghanistan has at times exceeded 260,000 people and has sometimes outnumbered U.S. military forces in theater.
The roughly 1-to-1 ratio sustained over the years reflects a basic operating truth that Defense Department officials expressed in testimony to the commission: The United States cannot conduct large or prolonged military operations without contractor support.
…
Projects that are or may be unsustainable are a serious problem.
For instance, U.S. taxpayers spent $40 million on a prison that Iraq did not want and that was never finished.
U.S. taxpayers poured $300 million into a Kabul power plant that requires funding and technical expertise beyond the Afghan government’s capabilities.
Meanwhile, a federal official testified to the commission that an $11.4 billion program of facilities for the Afghan National Security Forces is “at risk” of unsustainability.
And that’s no fiction — after awhile that mounts up to some real money.