Category Archives: Military

More #WomenInTheMilitary Equals More #Welfare Programs

Capt. Courtney Wilson was unhappy in her duties until the military “just threw resources at me,” she told Babbling Brooke, “news” anchor at CNN, a job description that entails promoting the notion that “We … want more women to enter the forces,” to quote Brooke Baldwin.

Waxed Wilson: [The military] stepped up and they gave me amazing resources there like do you want biofeedback, do you want to do yoga, medication, therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, just threw resources at me and I could not be happier with the service that I received. It absolutely — it gave me my life back.

BALDWIN: Wonderful. That’s wonderful. We know that and want more women to enter, you know, the forces. So I guess what would your message be to women wanting to sign up today?

WILSON: I would say, be authentic. I think that I spent way too much time caring about what other people thought and what type of leader they wanted me to be rather than understanding that I was competent and I was good and to just be myself. I wish that I had been more authentic.

BALDWIN: Quickly, I know you’re out now. What’s next for you?

WILSON: So I actually started my own fitness business. And I’m going to Babson College in Massachusetts to get my MBA. So hopefully open up a nonprofit gym that focuses on young women, and just getting them to understand the value of fitness and see how strong they are and lo for that to be led by female veterans.

BALDWIN: I love that idea. I love that idea.

WILSON: Thank you.

BALDWIN: Captain Wilson, thank you so much. Thank you so much for your service to this country …

HERE.

Personally, I won’t be happy until my tax dollars go toward more than just “biofeedback, yoga, medication, therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy” for the women in the military. What about dolphin therapy? I hope we bought Captain America a pet as well.

Defense Secretary #AshtonCarter’s #Iraq No-Brainer

Iran, Iraq, John McCain, Military, Nationhood, Pseudo-history, Republicans

John McCain will be rising on his hind legs when he hears what US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has just said. The rest of the War Party will be irate too–even more so than the Iraqi prime minister was (who is he these days? Ah: Haider al-AbadiIt)

What Defense Secretary Carter said is a no-brainer, really; such observations were routine when Bush 43 began swinging the wrecking ball in Iraq. But the War Party is ahistoric—the War party-line is to continue duping ditto-heads into believing that the sorry state of Iraq is Obama’s doing. Not on my watch (having been in the position to witness and document the last 13 years, summed up last week in “Iraq Liars & Deniers: we knew then what we know now”).

So what did Carter say this Memorial Day weekend (a timing armchair warrior Mark Levin is sure to mention)?

Carter said “the rout of Iraqi forces at the city of Ramadi showed they lacked the will to fight against Islamic State. Mr Carter told CNN’s State of the Union the Iraqis ‘vastly outnumbered’ the IS forces but chose to withdraw.” Via BBC News

“What apparently happened is the Iraqi forces just showed no will to fight. They were not outnumbered. In fact, they vastly outnumbered the opposing force.”
Describing the situation as “very concerning”, he added: “We can give them training, we can give them equipment – we obviously can’t give them the will to fight.”

In 2006 , the Hildebeest demanded to know when the “Iraqi government and the Iraqi Army would step up to the task?” “I have heard over and over again, ‘the government must do this, the Iraqi Army must do that’,” warbot Clinton complained (and I documented) to Gen. John P. Abizaid, then top American military commander in the Middle East. “Can you offer us more than the hope that the Iraqi government and the Iraqi Army will step up to the task?”

Watch Mrs. Clinton feign amnesia about that TODAY.

Since the 2003 invasion, the Iraqi military has fled before the opposition, whoever that was. The thing we call the Iraqi military has been unable and/or unwilling to fight the wars America wishes it to fight. It did, however, fight and win a war against Iran under Saddam.

#Langley Has The Last Word:#ForeignPolicy On The#CIA

Foreign Policy, Military, The State

A Foreign Policy essay makes the case that the CIA is, effectively, running American foreign policy. It concedes what seems obvious: Despite a budget of billions ($14.7 billion in 2013, “up from the $4.8 billion in 1994”), the agency “was notoriously wrong about Saddam Hussein’s alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, a cataclysmic mistake that eased the path to the Iraq War,” and it failed “to help detect or prevent the 9/11 plot.”

Some salient points:

* The agency has “a direct line to the White House for open-ended covert programs.”
* It has “explicit permission to use [drones] in larger areas of Pakistan than before.” “‘The CIA gets what it wants,’ Obama has told his aides.”
* “Through … machinations, the spy agency has managed to weaken or eliminate crucial counterweights to its own power.”
* “Since its creation in 1947, the CIA has steadily evolved from an agency devoted to its mission of spying on foreign governments to one whose current priority is tracking and killing individual militants in an increasing number of countries.”
* “… from drone strikes in the Middle East to the network of secret prisons around the world and the torture that occurred within their walls—[all] originated at Langley.”
* “… the agency had waded even more deeply into the dark world of assassinations by hiring outside contractors associated with Blackwater, a firm synonymous with abuses in Iraq, to kill individual militants on the ground.”
* “In Pakistan alone, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates, CIA drones killed as many as 960 civilians between June 2004 and April 2015, including up to 207 children.”
* The CIA’s has just about direct access to the White House. It “answers to no one except the president.”
* “… much of its workforce has been plugged into ‘the Ivy League, Eastern power structure of American politics.’ … its alumni are in key positions throughout the U.S. government.”
* Obama has embraced “the Bush-era CIA abuses,” this, presumably, includes torture, rendition, etc.

Since its creation in 1947, the CIA has steadily evolved from an agency devoted to its mission of spying on foreign governments to one whose current priority is tracking and killing individual militants in an increasing number of countries.

READ “Mission Unstoppable.”

Oh, Please: #SeymourHersh Is Old-School Reliable

Bush, Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, Intelligence, Journalism, Military

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Seymour M. Hersh is not only “a legendary investigative reporter,” known for his shoe-leather journalism; he’s positively old-school in his methods. Hersh’s London Review of Books “national-security” piece details “Pakistan’s involvement in the SEAL Team Six raid on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad.” The lengthy report would be quite humdrum had it not shattered the mythical thinking perpetuated by the elites about the US military, the commander-in-chief and his national security apparatus.

Who was it who said that, “The military is government; the military works like government; is financed like government and sports many of the same inherent malignancies of government…”?

And the military marches to the beat of government. No need to “pray to the military Moloch.”

This is not to say that the SEALS did not do the deed, only that “the Osama bin Laden assassination” had a few extra kinks to it. As I say, Hersh’s account sounds like business as usual: government SOP (standard operating procedure).

Hersh explained that, days after the May 2, 2011 SEAL operation, he told Remnick that his intelligence sources were saying Obama’s account was fiction. “I knew right away that there were problems with the story,” Hersh said.

If anything, the hyperbole being disgorged by the media and military’s professional myth-makers is more fantastic than Hersh’s report. Examples:

“The Hersh piece reads like Frank Underwood from House of Cards.”

“all wrong.”

“Sy Hersh is a far-left fantasist and conspiracy theorist.”

The Obama of the Obamacare hoax, the NSA, Fast and Furious, government-by-executive order; Libya, lawless immigration, on and on, and the Bush of WMD in Iraq, illegal, unlawful wars and similar spending: These stellar statists would never lie in the service of self-aggrandizement, now would they?! Perish the thought.

READ “The Killing of Osama bin Laden” by Seymour M. Hersh. As I say, it’s pretty unremarkable.