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Tag: perpetual war
Retired Generals Urge Military to ‘War-Game’ Against US Citizens
With the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 incursion into the United States Capitol less than a month away, three retired Army generals called on leaders to take preventive measures, including to “war game” a “post-election insurrection or coup” attempts.
“The potential for a total breakdown of the chain of command along partisan lines – from the top of the chain to squad level – is significant should another insurrection occur,” former Major Gen. Paul Eaton, former Brigadier Gen. Steven Anderson and former Major Gen. Antonio Tagubathe wrote in The Washington Post on Friday in an opinion column raising the disturbing prospect of the U.S. military training for a confrontation against fellow Americans.
The generals went on to write, “The idea of rogue units organizing among themselves to support the ‘rightful’ commander in chief cannot be dismissed.”
Their comments come in light of the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol by a mob mostly made up of supporters of then-President Donald Trump seeking to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election by disrupting the joint session of Congress assembled to count electoral votes that would formalize then-President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
The incursion proved deadly for five people, including Ashli Babbit, 35, who died from a gunshot wound after being shot by a Capitol police officer while trying to climb through a door inside the Capitol near the House chamber.
US Hid True Toll of Air Wars; Thousands of Dead Civilians, Many of Them Children
Thousands of previously hidden Pentagon documents show that the US air wars in the Middle East have been marked by “deeply flawed intelligence” and have killed thousands of civilians, many of them children, according to a shocking new report in the New York Times Saturday afternoon.
The 5-year Times investigation received more than 1,300 reports examining airstrikes in Iraq and Syria from September 2014 to January 2018, more than 5,400 pages in all. None of these records show any findings of wrongdoing on the actions of the US military.
The Times reporting confirms many of the previous reports by whistleblowers Daniel Hale, Chelsea Manning and others. On July 27, 2021, whistleblower Hale was sentenced to 45 months in federal prison for exposing the true civilian toll of the US drone program. “I am here because I stole something that was never mine to take — precious human life,” Hale said at his sentencing.
From the Times report:
The trove of documents — the military’s own confidential assessments of more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties, obtained by The New York Times — lays bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs.
The documents show, too, that despite the Pentagon’s highly codified system for examining civilian casualties, pledges of transparency and accountability have given way to opacity and impunity. In only a handful of cases were the assessments made public. Not a single record provided includes a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action. Fewer than a dozen condolence payments were made, even though many survivors were left with disabilities requiring expensive medical care. Documented efforts to identify root causes or lessons learned are rare.
The air campaign represents a fundamental transformation of warfare that took shape in the final years of the Obama administration, amid the deepening unpopularity of the forever wars that had claimed more than 6,000 American service members. The United States traded many of its boots on the ground for an arsenal of aircraft directed by controllers sitting at computers, often thousands of miles away. President Barack Obama called it “the most precise air campaign in history.”
Biden Considering Giving Ukraine Arms Meant for Former Afghan Govt
The Biden administration is considering redirecting military aid that would have gone to the now-defunct US-backed Afghan government to Ukraine, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
Citing unnamed US and Ukrainian officials, the Journal report said Ukraine is hoping to get the equipment. The weapons package would include Russian-made Mi-17 helicopters and other military equipment.
The National Security Council has yet to approve the plan, and the report comes right after Russia submitted security proposals to the US in a bid to ease tensions over Ukraine. If the US greenlights more weapons to Ukraine as Russia is pushing for talks, it would signal to Moscow that Washington is not that serious about diplomacy.
The report said Ukraine has also been lobbying Washington to provide surface-to-air weapons, such as stinger missiles. In November, CNN reported that the US was considering new military aid to Kyiv that included stingers and other missiles.
When Your Government Ends A War But Increases The Military Budget, You’re Being Scammed
The US Senate has passed its National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) military spending bill for the fiscal year of 2022, setting the budget at an astronomical $778 billion by a vote of 89 to 10. The bill has already been passed by the House, now requiring only the president’s signature. An amendment to cease facilitating Saudi Arabia’s atrocities in Yemen was stripped from the bill.
“The most controversial parts of the 2,100-page military spending bill were negotiated behind closed doors and passed the House mere hours after it was made public, meaning members of Congress couldn’t possibly have read the whole thing before casting their votes,” reads a Politico article on the bill’s passage by Lindsay Koshgarian, William Barber II and Liz Theoharis.
The US military had a budget of $14 billion for its scaled-down Afghanistan operations in the fiscal year of 2021, down from $17 billion in 2020. If the US military budget behaved normally, you’d expect it to come down by at least $14 billion in 2022 following the withdrawal of US troops and official end of the war in Afghanistan. Instead, this new $778 billion total budget is a five percent increase from the previous year.
“Months after US President Joe Biden’s administration pulled the last American troops out of Afghanistan as part of his promise to end the country’s ‘forever wars’, the United States Congress approved a $777.7bn defence budget, a five percent increase from last year,” Al Jazeera reports.
“For the last 20 years, we heard that the terrorist threat justified an ever-expanding budget for the Pentagon,” Win Without War executive director Stephen Miles told Al Jazeera. “As the war in Afghanistan has ended and attention has shifted towards China, we’re now hearing that that threat justifies it.”
15 lawmakers profiting from defense industry investments while running US defense policy
Fifteen lawmakers serving on House and Senate committees that shape U.S. military policy are profiting from investments in prominent defense contractors benefited by the very policies they influence, according to federal financial records analyzed by Business Insider this week.
Insider examined nearly 9,000 financial reports for every sitting member of Congress, as well as their top staffers, as part of a broader effort dubbed the Conflicted Congress project, which aims to identify possible conflicts of interest among lawmakers in Congress. Both Democrats and Republicans serving on the Armed Services committees have combined defense industry investments nearing $1 million as of 2020, and they’re continuing to invest and cash in.
Among the contractors that appeared in the committee members’ financial disclosures were Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co., Raytheon Technologies Corp., Honeywell, and General Electric. Each company is known for spending millions to lobby the federal government in an effort to win lucrative government contracts and shape public policy.
Following Debacles In Iraq And Afghanistan, Failed Interventionists Are Now Agitating For Wars In Ukraine And Taiwan
If you thought for one moment that the embarrassing multi-decade debacle in Afghanistan would lead to some soul-searching from the failed interventionists responsible for America’s 21st-century Vietnam, think again. Instead of taking a step back to understand exactly why and how their grandiose plans to use the mightiest military in history to impose a top-down, secular, Western-style democracy didn’t quite pan out, they’re doubling down on failure.
When you’re a hammer, everything is a nail, and when you’re a global interventionist, wars fix everything. This time, their target is Ukraine. And Taiwan. Because why start a war with Russia when you can start a war with Russia and a war with China?
According to the same foreign policy blob that brought us such hits as “Saddam Hussein is going to nuke us with all his WMDs” and “Donald Trump is totally getting blackmailed by Vladimir Putin over a magical sex tape,” America needs to prepare for war with Russia because Russia is allegedly massing troops on…its own border with Ukraine.
America’s porous border with Mexico, across which hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants have been flooding unimpeded since the day President Joe Biden took office, is apparently no big deal at all and not remotely worthy of an American military presence. But Ukraine’s border with Russia? To the failed foreign policy blob, that is priority numero uno.
The Russia-Ukraine border must be defended, with American blood and treasure, at all costs. And if you suggest that maybe America should fix America’s border first, it’s because you’re racist or something.
Republican Sen. Roger Wicker Threatens Nuclear War on Russia to Protect Ukraine
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) is threatening nuclear war against Russia in order to protect Ukraine from alleged Russian aggression.
Wicker appeared on “Your World with Neil Cavuto” on Fox News to make his deranged and psychotic proclamation.
“Well, military action could mean that we stand off with our ships in the Black Sea and reign destruction on Russian military capability. It could mean that we participate, and I would not rule that out, I would not rule out American troops on the ground. You know, we don’t rule out first-use nuclear action,” Wicker said.
It’s a racket…
Senate Skeptics Are Right: End Missile Sales To Saudi Arabia
In response to the proposed sale of U.S. missiles to Saudi Arabia, Senators Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders are leading a bipartisan effort to oppose the sale. This is still a fight of David and Goliath, as Congress has never successfully stopped an arms sale. It’s time for that to change.
While President Biden has pledged to end support for “offensive operations,” U.S. support for Saudi Arabia has continued under the guise of defense. There have been advances, namely a halt on new SDB smart-bomb sales. But the U.S. has relabeled, not halted, the support, which could end Saudi involvement in the Yemeni war altogether. The U.S. continues logistical support for Saudi warplanes and helicopters, the chief means through which the Saudis conduct their offensives.
Saudi Arabia’s territorial integrity isn’t threatened. The country is actively engaged in an offensive war of its own choosing, and the U.S. tipping the scales in Saudi Arabia’s favor just perpetuates that war. U.S. neutrality, by contrast, would bring Yemen closer to a negotiated peace. As Saudi Arabia has been forced to deal with diminished U.S. support since April, it has begun brandishing diplomacy instead of bombs.
Hellbound and Down 
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