Tag: pentagon

Defense, State Departments Refusing To Cooperate On Examination Of Their Afghanistan Blunders, Auditor Says

The Pentagon and State Department are at war with an official government auditor, refusing to cooperate with a probe of how 20 years of missteps by top Washington brass led to Afghanistan being ceded to the ragtag Taliban despite $90 billion in U.S. funds, a government report revealed Monday.

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has been one of the most incisive watchdogs in Washington, keeping tabs on a foreign matter that was largely out of the public eye even as U.S. “experts” appeared to make one blunder after another. After numerous embarrassing reports, DOD and State are now refusing to cooperate with SIGAR, stating that it only has the authority to audit Afghanistan reconstruction–which ended when the U.S. pulled out.

In August 2021, President Joe Biden withdrew troops and contractors from the country overnight, without even telling Afghan soldiers on patrol. It left equipment behind, which the Taliban took and used for combat and propaganda, and some of the Afghan forces that the U.S. had trained to fight the Taliban themselves joined “extremist groups,” the report said.

Biden subsequently began allowing former Taliban employees to migrate to the U.S. under a refugee program billed as being for “interpreters,” while Russia and China moved in to Afghanistan to exploit its natural resources.

“We identified eight systemic factors that explain why, after 20 years and nearly $90 billion in U.S. security assistance, the [Afghan National Defense and Security Forces] was vulnerable to collapse in the first place,” SIGAR said.

In May 2022, SIGAR provided DOD and State with an interim report, but “DOD and State declined to review that interim draft, denied us access to their staff, and mostly declined to answer requests for information,” SIGAR wrote in its new report.

By this month, a cold war was emerging in the normally-mundane letters exchanging information between them.

“We offered to continue to meet regularly to further discuss the range of issues covered in the draft, but the author did not follow up,” S. Rebecca Zimmerman, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia, claimed February 16.

SIGAR responded: “DOD’s assertion that the author ‘never followed up’ on its offer to discuss the draft report is simply false. Moreover, DOD’s highlighting of ‘the efforts undertaken by DoD to cooperate with SIGAR’ should be viewed in the context of a history of extensive delays, missed deadlines, and incomplete answers to questions.”

“SIGAR strongly disagrees with DOD’s characterization of their engagement on this report. In fact, DOD only provided limited responses to SIGAR’s request for information (RFI) and missed every deadline for responding to SIGAR’s questions or for providing feedback to vetting drafts of this report,” it continued.

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NewsGuard Misinfo Watchdog: Contracts with DOD, WHO, Pfizer, Microsoft and AFT

NewsGuard is a self-appointed misinformation watchdog. It seems to be just one more way Americans are not allowed to think for themselves. Co-CEOs Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz claim it is the “librarian for the internet.” Set up specifically to rate online journalistic integrity, Brill states NewsGuard provides services that “explain to people something about the reliability and trustworthiness and background of those who are feeding them the news.” Eric Effron is the organization’s Editorial Director.

Brill is a Yale graduate and lawyer who has authored multiple best-selling books and was, among other things, CEO of Verified Identity Pass, Inc., the first U.S. biometric Voluntary Credentialing Program that went bankrupt in 2009. It was the parent company of CLEAR which went back online in 2010 and then went public in 2021.

According to MintPressNews, “Crovitz held a number of positions at Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, eventually becoming executive vice president of the former and the publisher of the latter before both were sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in 2007. He is also a board member of Business Insider, which has received over $30 million from Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos in recent years.”

Crovitz’s alliances might account for the organization’s favorable 100 ratings for WSJ and the Washington Post. He is also a contributor “to books published by the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation,” which are also favorably rated by NewsGuard.

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Department of Defense Panel: Prohibit Gun Sales to Troops Under Age 25

A panel commissioned by the Department of Defense (DOD), the Suicide Prevention and Response Independent Review Committee (SPRIRC), released a report Friday in which it suggested prohibiting gun sales to troops under the age of 25.

The panel recommended barring ammunition sales t0 those under the age of 25 as well.

FOX News reported SPRIRC’s findings, noting that the panel described prohibitions against gun purchases as a “high priority.”

SPRIRC is also pushing for a national database containing serial numbers of all guns sold on DOD property as well as a seven-day waiting period for DOD gun sales.

The panel’s report also calls for “a 4-day waiting period for ammunition purchases on DoD property to follow purchases and receipt of firearms purchased on DoD property.”

Dr. Craig Bryan, one of the SPRIRC panel members, said, “What we learned over the past year was that a significant percentage of on-base suicides involve firearms purchased on base at military exchanges, and so, yes, the motive behind this really is to, in essence, slow down access to firearms,” according to CBS News.

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Priorities: Defense Dept. Holds Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion “Summit” As Military Fentanyl Overdoses Surge

In an article entitled “‘You Can’t Fix the Problem If You’re in Denial:’ The Military’s Surge of Fentanyl Overdoses,” Military.com tells the story of Carole De Nola, whose son Ari McGuire, “a 23-year-old reconnaissance scout with Fort Bragg’s storied 82nd Airborne Division,” died of a fentanyl overdose.

[O]n a Friday night in August 2019, De Nola got a call from an Army officer: Her son was on life support in a Fayetteville, North Carolina, hospital. Ari’s heart had stopped beating while riding in an Uber, coming through the gate at Fort Bragg. An ambulance had managed to revive him, and Ari was induced into a coma upon arriving at the hospital.

De Nola, her husband Joseph, and the cantor from their synagogue had made the daylong trek from California to North Carolina to say goodbye to Ari. “When we got there, the doctor told us that there was nothing they could do. I’m sure that the whole hospital heard me screaming.”

Unfortunately, statistics show that Ari is not alone. His death was one of 332 fatal overdoses within the military, according to information newly released by the Pentagon on ODs between 2017 and 2021. That five-year period also saw 15,000 non-fatal ODs among the active-duty force. Fort Bragg is a known drug “hot spot“; “Thirty-four soldiers died at the base between 2017 and 2021; it also saw a 100% increase in drug crime over 2021. Those deaths account for more than 10% of the total fatalities reported by the military.”

Gil Cisneros, the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, stated in a letter accompanying the new fentanyl statistics that “[w]e share your concern that drug overdose is a serious problem and must be addressed.” But “De Nola said that she doesn’t feel that the military has done enough.” Others agree.

Alex Bennett, a professor at NYU’s School of Public Health who has led several studies addressing opioid-use among military veterans, stated that “what we have in the military is sort of an epidemic that’s not fully acknowledged.”

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How Does This Happen? U.S. Military Email Server Was Exposed for Two Weeks

Why is it that we can’t go more than a week without another Biden administration embarrassment?

On Tuesday, a top U.S. defense official verified to Fox News that a Department of Defense email server was left exposed for two weeks and that, as a result, internal emails were accessible without a password.

The exposed server was allegedly the result of a misconfiguration. Anyone who knew what the server’s IP address was could access the emails with a web browser.

“The server contained around three terabytes of military emails, with many related to the U.S. Special Operations Command, which is a military unit which conducts special operations,” Fox News reports. The emails on the server went back several years and contained personal information.

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Pentagon fixes glitch after tech researcher discovers unsecured email server with sensitive military info

An unsecured server that allowed for US military emails to be spilled across the web for weeks was repaired on Monday. 

The exposed server was hosted on Microsoft’s Azure government cloud, reports TechCrunch, “which uses servers that are physically separated from other commercial customers and as such can be used to share sensitive but unclassified government data.”

The server contained roughly three terabytes of military emails which may have pertained to US Special Operations Command. The site reports that a misconfiguration left the server “without a password,” which allowed the emails to be easily accessible by anyone with internet access with just a web browser, so long as the IP address was known.

One security researcher, Anurag Sen, found the server last weekend and gave the details to TechCrunch, which then alerted the US government.

The server contained sensitive military information and email messages which dated back “years.” One email included a filled-out questionnaire that federal employees use to seek security clearances. Those forms contain sensitive individual information before they are cleared to handle classified information.

The questionnaires hold a “significant amount of background information on security clearance holders valuable to foreign adversaries,” TechCrunch reports. 

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Defense Department DEI Chief Made Disparaging Remarks About White People on Twitter

Kelisa Wing is the chief diversity officer in the education wing at the Department of Defense. She is herself, currently on defense, over some things she wrote on Twitter about white people.

This story is an excellent reminder of just how embedded the ideology behind diversity, equity and inclusion is at every level of our government.

FOX News reports:

Defense Department DEI education official claims past racially-charged tweets were ‘private speech’

The chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer at the Department of Defense’s education wing defended herself against claims from lawmakers that she made “racially disparaging” statements, according to reports.

Fox News Digital reported in September 2022 that Kalisa Wing, the DEI chief at the Department of Defense Education Activity, or DODEA, which provides K-12 education to the DoD community in the U.S. and all over the world, wrote a series of disparaging posts about White people on Twitter.

In an interview with the Military Times, Wing said when she made the statements, she was not speaking on behalf of the DoDEA, but instead as an educator and private citizen.

“No, I did not make disparaging comments against White people,” she said. “I would never categorize an entire group of people to disparage them. I’m speaking now as a private individual, about my private free speech from July of 2022.”

Wing wrote in a series of tweets in June 2020, that have since been taken down, “I’m exhausted with these white folx in the [professional development] sessions.”

“[T]his lady actually had the CAUdacity to say that black people can be racist too… I had to stop the session and give Karen the BUSINESS… [W]e are not the majority, we don’t have power,” she continued.

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Pentagon Finally Stops Hiding Military Overdose Epidemic

THE U.S. ARMY Special Forces, better known as the Green Berets, has a serious problem with substance abuse and fatal drug overdoses. The same is true of the Army’s two most important infantry divisions: the 101st Airborne Division and the 82nd Airborne Division.

That’s the takeaway of data released by the Pentagon this week to a group of five U.S. senators, led by Massachusetts Sen. Edward Markey. Markey, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and others grew concerned about rising drug use in the military after reading a report in the September issue of Rolling Stone that at least 14 and as many as 30 American soldiers had died in 2020 and 2021 of overdoses at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Fort Bragg is the headquarters of the Special Forces, as well as the top-secret Joint Special Operations Command, the “black ops” component of the military.

The senators wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in late September requesting detailed statistics, going back five years, on accidental overdoses in the ranks. “We share your concern that drug overdose is a serious problem,” the Pentagon’s undersecretary for personnel and readiness wrote in response this week. “We must work to do better.”

A total of 15,293 American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines overdosed on illicit drugs from 2017 to 2022, according to a compendium of data and analysis enclosed with the letter. Of those, 332 cases were fatal.

Consistent with Rolling Stone’s recent reporting, the data showed a rising long-term trend, followed by a sharp spike in overdose deaths among active-duty military men in 2020 and 2021. Fentanyl was by far the biggest killer, accounting for more than half of the casualties. “The number of OD deaths involving fentanyl has more than doubled over the past five years,” the Pentagon disclosed.

“With hundreds of fatal overdoses reported on U.S. military bases in recent years,” Markey writes in a statement to Rolling Stone, “the toll is mounting. We can and must curb this tragic trend.”

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Whatever They Decide These UFOs Are, The Answer Will Be More US Militarism

US war planes have shot down three unidentified objects in North American airspace over the last three days, which is entirely without precedent.

On Sunday an octagon-shaped object was reportedly shot down over Lake Huron near the Canadian border after first being detected some 1,300 miles away over Montana on Saturday night. On Saturday a cylindrical object was reportedly shot down over Canada’s Yukon territory by an American F-22, and on Friday an object “about the size of a small car” was reportedly shot down after being detected over Alaska.

Unlike the Chinese balloon that was shot down earlier this month which the US claims was an instrument of espionage, as of this writing there’s still no solid consensus as to what these last three objects were or where they came from. While all three were found at high altitude like the balloon, the Pentagon is refusing to classify them as such, with the head of US Northern Command General Glen VanHerck going as far as to say it hadn’t yet been determined how these objects are even staying aloft.

“I’m not going to categorize them as balloons. We’re calling them objects for a reason,” VanHerck told the press on Sunday. “I’m not able to categorize how they stay aloft. It could be a gaseous type of balloon inside a structure or it could be some type of a propulsion system. But clearly, they’re — they’re able to stay aloft.”

VanHerck also made headlines for saying he couldn’t rule out extraterrestrial origin for the objects.

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