Military Industrial Complex

By Dave Lindorff

The officer rested his arm holding the stock of the assault rifle on the top of a log pile, and aimed directly between the target’s eyes. She was looking directly at him, unblinking, from 30 feet away, and exhibited no fear. “I hate doing this,” he muttered, before finally pulling the trigger.

A sharp “bang!” rang out, her head jerked up and then her whole body sagged to the ground, followed by some muscle jerks, and it was over.

The officer went over and checked the body, decided no second shot was needed to finish the job, and then walked back to his squad car, took out his phone, and called in the serial number of his rifle, reporting his firing of one round, as required by regulations.

Even the Washington Post sees a story here.

By Dave Lindorff

It’s fascinating to watch the long knives coming out for Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul, now that according to some mainstream polls he has become the front-running candidate in the Jan. 3 GOP caucus race in Iowa, and perhaps also in the first primary campaign in New Hampshire.

National security advisers to the Republican presidential candidates have ties to defense, homeland security and energy companies that have received at least $40 billion in federal contracts since 2008.

Five of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s 41 national security and foreign policy advisers have links to companies that last year alone received at least $7.9 billion in federal contracts, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Government analyst Christopher Flavelle. Of that, $7.3 billion came from the Department of Defense.

Romney and former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia, who are leading in the polls, have advisers who sit on the board of directors of BAE Systems Inc., which has received at least $37 billion in U.S. government contracts since 2008, the most of any of the companies with ties to Republican national security advisers.

William Schneider, an adviser to Gingrich, and Michael Chertoff, who counsels Romney, serve on the board of the U.S. subsidiary of BAE Systems Plc, Europe’s largest defense contractor. The American company makes the Army’s Bradley Fighting Vehicle and provides information technology systems to American intelligence agencies and repair services to the U.S. Navy.

READ THE REST AT BLOOMBERG.

By Dan DeWalt

Predator Odrona is about to sign a military authorization bill [Carl Levin's S-1867] that puts every one of us at risk of being detained by our own military. If the government decides that you are a terrorist threat, the military will be able to kidnap you and deny you the right to a trial or even the right to know why you're being held. 

This time of year is ideal for reflecting on the miracle of Christmas 1914, that famous temporary truce and friendship between opposing sides in the midst of a war. Here was a new type of slaughter confronted with a new type of humanism, the leading edges of two opposing trends.

An op-ed in the New York Times last week by Steven Pinker and Joshua Goldstein argues that peace, rather than war, was the dominant development, and that over the millennia, centuries, decades, and right up to this moment, "War Really Is Going Out of Style."

19 December 2011 - Almost two-thirds of countries asked by human rights groups about their involvement in extraordinary rendition flights have failed to comply with freedom of information requests – with European nations in particular accused of withholding evidence of the controversial CIA programme.

Legal action charity Reprieve and open government pressure group Access Info Europe made a total of 67 requests for flight data relating to the years 2002 through to 2006.

By John Grant

Ft. Meade -- Saturday, December 17th was Bradley Manning’s 24th birthday, and at least 300 supporters gathered outside Fort Meade, Maryland, where the military was in its second day of a preliminary hearing process that’s expected to take about a week. Manning worked in military intelligence and is alleged to have released military secrets to WikiLeaks, which released the material publicly.

December 14, 2011 - One by one, the Marines sat down, swore to tell the truth and began to give secret interviews discussing one of the most horrific episodes of America’s time in Iraq: the 2005 massacre by Marines of Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha.

“I mean, whether it’s a result of our action or other action, you know, discovering 20 bodies, throats slit, 20 bodies, you know, beheaded, 20 bodies here, 20 bodies there,” Col. Thomas Cariker, a commander in Anbar Province at the time, told investigators as he described the chaos of Iraq.

Ann Wright: Defense demanded hearing officer recuse himself as he allowed only two witnesses other than prosecution witnesses. 30 defense witnesses denied Hearing to begin again at 11:30

Charlottesville Right Now (Subscribe) Charlottesville Right Now: 12-14-11 David Swanson David Swanson joins Coy live on the program.

LISTEN.

By Dave Lindorff

By James A. Lucas, member, Veterans for Peace 

*The U.S. possesses about 7,500 nuclear warheads in various parts of the world.

*The U.S. is the only nation to ever use atomic/nuclear weapons, having
 dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and a second one on Nagasaki in 1945,
 killing about 200,000 people. President Truman lied to the American people by
 stating that those cities were military targets.

*The U.S. maintains about 1,000 military bases abroad.

*From 1945 to 2005 the U.S. tried to overthrow over 50 foreign governments.

*Since the end of the Second World War the U.S. has been involved in the
 assassinations of (or the planning of) 48 political leaders in 28 nations.

*As of 2005, American armed forces were deployed in over 100 countries.

*President Johnson escalated the Vietnam War by falsely claiming that our ships
 had been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin by South Vietnam ships.  About 3
 million Vietnamese and 50,000 Americans died in that war.

*Two million Iraqis and many Americans have died in two wars initiated by the
 U.S. against Iraq within 15 years.  The second war started because of the false
 claim by the U.S. government that Iraq had nuclear weapons.

RECENT U.S. ACTIONS TO EXTEND ITS REACH AROUND THE WORLD:

*Bombed Libya.

*Launched CIA drone attacks into Pakistan that have killed over 2,000 people.
 The U.S. has over 50 drone launching sites around the world.

*Announced the stationing of a contingent of about 200 military personnel in
 Australia as part of a plan to encircle China. That number will be increased.

*Established an Africa command (AFRICOM) to coordinate efforts to gain access
 to the natural resources on that continent and establish military bases there.
 Its headquarters is located in Germany, since no African nation will host it.

* In 2008 the U.S. 4th fleet was given the mission of patrolling the waters near
  South and Central America. Leaders in Cuba and Venezuela have objected.

In September 2011, participants in a conference on the Military Industrial Complex at 50 included Mayor Dave Norris, City Council Member Kristin Szakos, and then-candidate but now City Council Member-Elect Dede Smith. As the mayor pointed out at the time, that's a majority of a five-member council. We plan to attend the new council's first meeting on January 2, 2012, to request consideration and passage of a resolution. We have begun collecting signatures beneath this statement:

"I believe the City of Charlottesville should follow the example of the U.S. Conference of Mayors and pass a resolution supporting efforts to speed up the ending of current U.S. wars, and calling on Congress and the President to bring the war dollars home to meet vital human needs, promote job creation, rebuild our infrastructure, aid municipal and state governments, and develop a new economy based upon renewable, sustainable energy."

Please sign this statement online HERE.

Please print out and make copies of these forms for gathering signatures offline: PDF.

Please read and comment on this draft resolution to be proposed to City Council.

SPIEGEL:

Dmitry Rogozin, Russia's ambassador to NATO, wanted to push his American negotiating partner into a corner. "If space aliens were to completely disarm Iran," he asked, "would Washington continue with its plans to build a missile defense system in Poland?"

The defense shield is designed to intercept missiles from rogue states like Iran, the United States has repeatedly insisted. The conversation between the Russian ambassador and his US counterpart, which Rogozin told SPIEGEL about last week, took place in Washington behind closed doors on July 22. And the answer, given by President Barack Obama's undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, Ellen Tauscher, was reportedly unambiguous: Yes, she said. The plan has been decided upon and will be carried out.

Rogozin sees the response as conclusive evidence that the defense shield is effectively bulwark against Russia. "America is shifting the strategic balance to its advantage in that it wants to neutralize Russia's nuclear deterrence potential," the top-level diplomat said. "The Kremlin is fed up with being taken for fools by the Americans."

By Barry Eisler, FireDogLake

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta wants you to be scared.

In a letter to Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain, Panetta warned that after possible cuts in the military budget, “we would have the smallest ground force since 1940, the smallest number of ships since 1915, and the smallest Air Force in its history.”

Which would be pretty damn bad… if we wound up having to go to war with America’s 1940 army, 1915 navy, or some historical version of America’s Air Force. If we’re lucky, though, and don’t have to go to war with past incarnations of our military, Panetta’s comparison is logically nearly irrelevant. In fact, even the most massive cuts currently under consideration would return American military spending only to 2007 levels. So as long as we don’t have to go to war with our 2007 military, we should be okay.

If Panetta had been interested in logical relevance, though, he wouldn’t have referred to the past at all. He would have focused on the present, and in the present, we spend more on our military than the rest of the world spends combined. And we spend more than five times more on our military than the second biggest military spender, which is China (numbers 3 and 4 are France and the UK, American allies).

But Panetta doesn’t want you to know these numbers. If you did, you might laugh at him when he describes military cuts as meaning “doomsday” for America.

That’s right. According to Panetta, returning to 2007 military spending levels, and still spending about as much as the rest of the world combined — means doomsday for America. Shit, I’m laughing at him right now.

The rest of Panetta’s Very Scary Letter is equally misleading. “You cannot buy three quarters of a ship or a building,” he warns. Well, true, three quarters of a ship wouldn’t be very useful. I mean, it would be like three quarters of a bullet, or something! But you could settle for, I don’t know, say, nine out of the twelve new ships you wanted — three quarters overall. Either Panetta is too stupid to know this, or he’s hoping the public is too stupid to notice it for him.

The closest Panetta comes to anything specific about America’s defense needs is to note that cuts would be bad for contractors. At which point, you start to get a feel for what really drives him and who he really represents.

When a spokesperson for a cause invents arguments as irrelevant and scaremongering as Panetta’s, while ignoring relevant data and reasoned argument, you can safely conclude you are being bullshitted. It’s long past time that Americans understood the military is, among other things, a special interest, and reacted to its lobbyists’ Be Afraid! screeching accordingly.

UPDATE: Here’s a tweet in response, from George Little, Secretary Panetta’s spokesperson at the Pentagon:

@barryeisler Calling the US mil a special interest is insulting to those who risk their lives to protect your freedom to call them that.

Well, I could be wrong in suspecting an organization — any organization — with a trillion-dollar budget might have a few interests not necessarily consonant with those of the nation at large, but maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe the Pentagon is in fact composed of and run by men so selfless that they defy all rules of human nature and bureaucratic dynamics. Maybe criticizing the trillion-dollar military bureaucracy is the same as insulting individual soldiers. If so, criticizing the Pentagon would be bad form, and maybe even unpatriotic!

Or maybe Mr. Little came up with his clever little “how dare you insult the troops” dodge because he doesn’t have the wherewithal to respond to any of my substantive arguments. In which case, Mr. Little, I must regretfully conclude that you’re just as full of shit as your boss. I’m sure being the Pentagon Press Secretary and SecDef Spokesman has its perks, but wouldn’t you rather have some integrity?

This can't be good.

Imagine if we put these kinds of resources into planning possible scenarios for peace.

By Robert Johnson, Business Insider

The US military has some of the most advanced killing equipment in the world that allows it to invade almost wherever it likes at will.

We produce so much military equipment that inventories of military robots, M-16 assault rifles, helicopters, armored vehicles, and grenade launchers eventually start to pile up and it turns a lot of these weapons are going straight to American police forces to be used against US citizens.

Benjamin Carlson at The Daily reports on a little known endeavor called the "1033 Program" that gave more than $500 million of military gear to US police in 2011 alone.

1033 was passed by Congress in 1997 to help law-enforcement fight terrorism and drugs, but despite a 40 year low in violent crime, police are snapping up hardware like never before. While this years staggering  take topped the charts, next years orders are up 400 percent over the same period.

This upswing coincides with an increasingly military-like style of law-enforcement most recently seen in the Occupy Wall Street crackdowns.

Tim Lynch, director of the Cato Institute's project on criminal justice told The Daily, “The trend toward militarization was well under way before 9/11, but it’s the federal policy of making surplus military equipment available almost for free that has poured fuel on this fire.”

From The Daily:

Thanks to it, cops in Cobb County, Ga. — one of the wealthiest and most educated counties in the U.S. — now have an amphibious tank. The sheriff of Richland County, S.C., proudly acquired a machine-gun-equipped armored personnel carrier that he nicknamed “The Peacemaker.”

This comes on top of grants from the Department of Homeland Security that enable police departments to buy vehicles such as “BearCats” — 16,000-pound bulletproof trucks equipped with battering rams, gun ports, tear-gas dispensers and radiation detectors. To date, more than 500 of these tanklike vehicles have been sold by Lenco, its Massachusetts-based manufacturer, according to a report in the Orlando Sentinel. 

“It’s kind of had a corrupting influence on the culture of policing in America,” Lynch says. “The dynamic is that you have some officer go to the chief and say, people in next county have [military hardware], if we don’t take it some other city will. Then they acquire the equipment, they create a paramilitary unit, and everything seems fine.

“But then one or two years pass. They say, look we’ve got this equipment, this training and we haven’t been using it. That’s where it starts to creep into routine policing.”

By John Grant

Following a decade of military invasion and occupation in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, the United States is becoming the Rodney Dangerfield of empires: “We get no respect!”

The undisputed post-World War Two top dog in the world, on virtually every front the United States is more and more playing catch-up with two-faced, Clintonian shuttle diplomacy around the world and a  well-entrenched regime of secrecy and sophisticated public relations aimed at keeping the dismal story of decline out of the domestic mind-space.

Please take some time to look through the new website of the new National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy: www.studentprivacy.org

I've just joined the board because I believe a great deal of good can be done.

The National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy is a one-trick pony and that trick is the ASVAB Campaign. In short, we call for the universal selection of Option 8 for students taking the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB in high schools across the country, thereby prohibiting the automatic release of test data to military recruiting services.

Sounds pretty obscure and technical, I suppose.  But this is a relatively easy and proven model of denying the U.S. military what it needs in order to kill our young people by using them to kill others.  Namely, it denies the military the illegal right to violate the privacy of our young people in furthering its recruitment efforts.

The website provides a detailed discussion of the insidious nature of the military's testing regime and provides a way for activists like you to contribute to its demise. The ASVAB Career Exploration Program is a fraudulent, criminal DoD venture that deceives the American public and violates state laws designed to protect the privacy of youth.  We're going to bring it down with a disciplined, nuanced campaign that appeals to the most moderate of policymakers.

There's a tremendous amount of work to do.  For instance, 10,000 kids in 142 Arkansas high schools are required to take the ASVAB without parental consent, and all of their data is used to recruit them. "We've always done it that way and no one has ever complained," explained one school counselor.

Until now. 

We're organizing a national complaint and we're succeeding.  Across the country, the selection of ASVAB Option 8 has climbed from less than 1% in 2005 (our estimate) to 4.4% in 2007 to 8.6% in 2009 to 12.2% in 2010.  The new data we're expecting through our most recent FOIA will show a substantial increase in the percentage of students taking the test under Option 8, reflecting two states and several hundred more schools and school systems that have moved to protect student privacy.

The website contains the most recent test data so you can select your state and find high schools in your community that allow the Pentagon to test children.  You can also see how your state stacks up with the others, in terms of the numbers tested, those who are required to take the test, and the percentages of students who take the ASVAB under Option 8. 

In addition, the website describes the national campaign in detail. It provides links to information pertaining to ASVAB testing in Catholic schools, military documents relevant to the student testing program, and legislative resources.

Most importantly, the site provides a template letter for you to email to your state's superintendent of schools and school board members. Quite frequently, educational policy makers don't know the option exists to allow the testing while keeping results away from recruiters.  The letter sites the statistics released by USMEPCOM and calls for the universal selection of Option 8.  Contact us and we'll send you a letter already containing your state's statistics, etc. and the email addresses of officials. We're working to include that information on the site.

If you've read this far you probably see potential in this campaign.  Could you help us by contributing a few dollars? Support NCPSP  Also, could you forward this to others who you think might be in a position to financially support our work?  We want to raise funds to hire help. 

A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.   - Jack London

Making A Killing from sarasotafringefilms on Vimeo.