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jazzoLOG: Here Come Da Chief! |
Category: Rumors 8 comments 27 Jan 2007 @ 11:42 by jmarc : PrivateersInteresting history. {Link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privateer|Privateer}. 27 Jan 2007 @ 11:53 by Ken Larson @24.31.26.130 : ITS NOT THE CHIEF IT 'S THE TRIBE Your post has some excellent points. Here's some additional data: The Department of Defense, headquartered in the Pentagon, is one of the most massive organizations on the planet, with net annual operating costs of $635 billion, assets worth $1.3 trillion, liabilities of $1.9 trillion and more that 2.9 million military and civilian personnel as of fiscal year 2005. I am a 2 tour Vietnam Veteran who recently retired after 36 years of working in the Defense Industrial Complex on many of the weapons systems being used by our forces as we speak. It is difficult to convey the complexity of the way DOD works to someone who has not experienced it. This is a massive machine with so many departments and so much beaurocracy that no president, including Bush totally understands it. Presidents, Congressmen, Cabinet Members and Appointees project a knowledgeable demeanor but they are spouting what they are told by career people who never go away and who train their replacements carefully. These are military and civil servants with enormous collective power, armed with the Federal Acquisition Regulation, Defense Industrial Security Manuals, compartmentalized classification structures and "Rice Bowls" which are never mixed. Our society has slowly given this power structure its momentum which is constant and extraordinarily tough to bend. The cost to the average American is exhorbitant in terms of real dollars and bad decisions. Every major power structure member in the Pentagon's many Washington Offices and Field locations in the US and Overseas has a counterpart in Defense Industry Corporate America. That collective body has undergone major consolidation in the last 10 years. What used to be a broad base of competitive firms is now a few huge monoliths, such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and Boeing. Government oversight committees are carefully stroked. Sam Nunn and others who were around for years in military and policy oversight roles have been cajoled, given into on occasion but kept in the dark about the real status of things until it is too late to do anything but what the establishment wants. This still continues - with increasing high technology and potential for abuse. Please examine the following link to testimony given by Franklin C. Spinney before Congress in 2002. It provides very specific information from a whistle blower who is still blowing his whistle (Look him up in your browser and you get lots of feedback) Frank spent the same amount of time as I did in the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) but in government quarters. His job in government was a similar role to mine in defense companies. Frank's emphasis in this testimony is on the money the machine costs us. It is compelling and it is noteworthy that he was still a staff analyst at the Pentagon when he gave this speech. I still can't figure out how he got his superior's permission to say such blunt things. He was extremely highly respected and is now retired. http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/spinney_testimony_060402.htm The brick wall I often refer to is the Pentagon's own arrogance. It will implode by it's own volition, go broke, or so drastically let down the American people that it will fall in shambles. Rest assured the day of the implosion is coming. The machine is out of control. If you are interested in a view of the inside of the Pentagon procurement process from Vietnam to Iraq please check the posting on this blog entitled, "Odyssey of Armaments" http://rosecoveredglasses.blogspot.com/2006/11/odyssey-of-armaments.html On the same subject, you may also be interested in the following sites from the "Project On Government Oversight", observing it's 25th Anniversary and "Defense In the National Interest", insired by Franklin Spinney and contributed to by active/reserve, former, or retired military personnel. http://pogo.org/ {link:http://www.d-n-i.net/top_level/about_us.htm} &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Ken Larson is author of a book entitled "Odyssey of Armaments, My Journey Through the Defense Industrial Complex." An excerpt is online as the November 5, 2006 post at his blog which he linked above~~~ http://www.rosecoveredglasses.blogspot.com/ ---jazz 27 Jan 2007 @ 17:02 by Quinty @72.195.137.102 : Our CICCEO It took Bush some time, if you recall, to perfect his power walk, smoothing out his swagger to appear natural. Now it has become habit and he doesn't come forth any longer as if he forgot to take the coat hanger out of his jacket. But with such utterances as "I'm the decider" he still seems unclear about the differentiation between a CEO and a president. Though he probably greatly enjoys being Commander in Chief as well as CEO. So we have a new corporate title: the CICCEO. And speaking of "corporate.... " There have been others who loved military uniforms, who appeared quite ridiculous, with their absurd posturing: caudillos all. Oh, but I bash. Well, Bush is bashing the world pretty hard, isn't he? Tit for tat. 27 Jan 2007 @ 19:03 by quinty : Our Commander in Chief What is it about a man who isn't repelled by violence? A well known historian is writing a book about the foreign journalists who covered the Spanish Civil War. He sent me a couple of his books recently and I have read them. One is a biography (favorable, as it should be) of Juan Carlos, who did much to bring democracy to Spain. The other is a concise history of the Spanish Civil War. The cruelty and maddened violence which emerged in that war is - even seventy years later - shocking. Not so much because these events are history but because they unveil how cruel human beings can be. And that potential lingers on with us today. Costumes change but human nature rarely does. It can all happen all over again. Now we have a president whose style, message, approach to his presidency, harkens back upon our cruel nature. He doesn't appear to be at all daunted by violence except within the needs of his propaganda's purposes. Like all scoundrels he wants to look good. And he may even believe his own lies. By now President Bush has an enormous freight of guilt to carry. Nor has the question of whether or not President Bush has any conscience been neglected over these past few years of his "imperial" presidency. The trigger in his mind may have directed him to proceed, to prove he has been right all the time. He may be a desperate man swimming upstream. His struggle may only be an attempt to improve the elixer of his own ego. Has he reached a point where he only thinks of himself, or is he truly concerned with the welfare of the world? But violence, immense human suffering, terrible avoidable chances, none of this seems to block Bush from proceeding. The country cries out against the war. Nearly all his cool headed advisors, even from his own party, counsel him to pull out. That it's over and that the bloodshed - at least that which is caused by Americans and inflicted upon Americans - should end. But the prospect of *another* war, in Iran, looms before us. Israel appears to be a state which has lost its mind. The radical right leads there and their lobby persistently blocks any honest or truthful debate in the United States with the most abnormal and intellectually dishonest slanders and lies. We know the line. It's okay, of course, to criticize Israel. Israel has its faults, like any other country. But those who do criticize become - Anti Semites! Even such stalwart defenders of Israel as Jimmy Carter and Wesley Clark. A far rightwing Israel lobby has the US government and American society in a stranglehold, and they are not going to let go. So long, of course, as they can continue to succeed. So our president and this deathly ill state may be plotting to attack Iran. And they are not put off by violence, madness, bloodshed. George Bush feels no pain resulting from his wars. Until recently he has smiled above the bloodshed he has caused. Now he appears a little weary. Does that mean he finally can empathize? Probably not. Like all criminals it is only when he gets caught that he begins to suffer. The problem is, though, we will have to continue to suffer with him. 28 Jan 2007 @ 06:12 by jazzolog : Paul 'N George Cyberspace was buzzing yesterday between friends Paul Quintanilla, who's in Providence, and George Buddy as they compared and shared notes about the private army the White House has employed in Iraq, New Orleans, and now wants to institutionalize permanently. We may hit another Depression yet, but this ain't FDR's New Deal...although they'll probably try to spin it like that if Rove(r) thinks of it. What Quinty and Buddy were up to was documenting the numbers of "contractors" carrying guns Bush has hired with our taxes. Buddy, who lives in Harrisburg, first found the figure that roughly half the 100,000 paid contractors in Iraq alone are part of this militia, and paid an average of $1000 a day. He linked us here {link:http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.html?URI=http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/01/26/outsourcing-the-war/} to New York Times blogs, but they're available only to that paper's "select" group of readers...which means you have to pay a fee to participate. (I put up the link in case you are one of those people.) They then found the original article those numbers came from at a Thursday posting in the Los Angeles Times. The author is Jeremy Scahill, a fellow at the Nation Institute and author of the forthcoming "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army." That article is here {link:http://www.latimes.com:80/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-scahill25jan25,0,4485578.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions} Scahill also references and quotes "the decider" from the State of the Union about setting up his "Civilian Reserve Corps." And oh yes, let me refer you to George Buddy's blog, where he posted all this as an entry yesterday~~~ http://gbuddy.blogspot.com/ Here's the LA Times article~~~ Our mercenaries in Iraq The president relies on thousands of private soldiers with little oversight, a disturbing example of the military-industrial complex. By Jeremy Scahill January 25, 2007 As President Bush took the podium to deliver his State of the Union address Tuesday, there were five American families receiving news that has become all too common: Their loved ones had been killed in Iraq. But in this case, the slain were neither "civilians," as the news reports proclaimed, nor were they U.S. soldiers. They were highly trained mercenaries deployed to Iraq by a secretive private military company based in North Carolina — Blackwater USA. The company made headlines in early 2004 when four of its troops were ambushed and burned in the Sunni hotbed of Fallouja — two charred, lifeless bodies left to dangle for hours from a bridge. That incident marked a turning point in the war, sparked multiple U.S. sieges of Fallouja and helped fuel the Iraqi resistance that haunts the occupation to this day. Now, Blackwater is back in the news, providing a reminder of just how privatized the war has become. On Tuesday, one of the company's helicopters was brought down in one of Baghdad's most violent areas. The men who were killed were providing diplomatic security under Blackwater's $300-million State Department contract, which dates to 2003 and the company's initial no-bid contract to guard administrator L. Paul Bremer III in Iraq. Current U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who is also protected by Blackwater, said he had gone to the morgue to view the men's bodies, asserting the circumstances of their deaths were unclear because of "the fog of war." Bush made no mention of the downing of the helicopter during his State of the Union speech. But he did address the very issue that has made the war's privatization a linchpin of his Iraq policy — the need for more troops. The president called on Congress to authorize an increase of about 92,000 active-duty troops over the next five years. He then slipped in a mention of a major initiative that would represent a significant development in the U.S. disaster response/reconstruction/war machine: a Civilian Reserve Corps. "Such a corps would function much like our military Reserve. It would ease the burden on the armed forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them," Bush declared. This is precisely what the administration has already done, largely behind the backs of the American people and with little congressional input, with its revolution in military affairs. Bush and his political allies are using taxpayer dollars to run an outsourcing laboratory. Iraq is its Frankenstein monster. Already, private contractors constitute the second-largest "force" in Iraq. At last count, there were about 100,000 contractors in Iraq, of which 48,000 work as private soldiers, according to a Government Accountability Office report. These soldiers have operated with almost no oversight or effective legal constraints and are an undeclared expansion of the scope of the occupation. Many of these contractors make up to $1,000 a day, far more than active-duty soldiers. What's more, these forces are politically expedient, as contractor deaths go uncounted in the official toll. The president's proposed Civilian Reserve Corps was not his idea alone. A privatized version of it was floated two years ago by Erik Prince, the secretive, mega-millionaire, conservative owner of Blackwater USA and a man who for years has served as the Pied Piper of a campaign to repackage mercenaries as legitimate forces. In early 2005, Prince — a major bankroller of the president and his allies — pitched the idea at a military conference of a "contractor brigade" to supplement the official military. "There's consternation in the [Pentagon] about increasing the permanent size of the Army," Prince declared. Officials "want to add 30,000 people, and they talked about costs of anywhere from $3.6 billion to $4 billion to do that. Well, by my math, that comes out to about $135,000 per soldier." He added: "We could do it certainly cheaper." And Prince is not just a man with an idea; he is a man with his own army. Blackwater began in 1996 with a private military training camp "to fulfill the anticipated demand for government outsourcing." Today, its contacts run from deep inside the military and intelligence agencies to the upper echelons of the White House. It has secured a status as the elite Praetorian Guard for the global war on terror, with the largest private military base in the world, a fleet of 20 aircraft and 20,000 soldiers at the ready. From Iraq and Afghanistan to the hurricane-ravaged streets of New Orleans to meetings with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger about responding to disasters in California, Blackwater now envisions itself as the FedEx of defense and homeland security operations. Such power in the hands of one company, run by a neo-crusader bankroller of the president, embodies the "military-industrial complex" President Eisenhower warned against in 1961. Further privatizing the country's war machine — or inventing new back doors for military expansion with fancy names like the Civilian Reserve Corps — will represent a devastating blow to the future of American democracy. Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times 29 Jan 2007 @ 19:00 by Quinty @72.195.137.102 : And a'nuder Chief on the way Watching the SOTU I hadn't realized the antics behind the president were so childish... if Rich is right. But he makes some clear and telling points about Hillary here, which cast the truth in a clear and revealing light. Something many of us are compelled to do in this day and age. At least I think so..... Quinty Hillary Clinton's Mission Unaccomplished By Frank Rich The New York Times Sunday 28 January 2007 Hillary Clinton has an answer to those who suspect that her "I'm in to win" Webcast last weekend was forced by Barack Obama's Webcast of just four days earlier. "I wanted to do it before the president's State of the Union," she explained to Brian Williams on NBC, "because I wanted to draw the contrast between what we've seen over the last six years, and the kind of leadership and experience that I would bring to the office." She couldn't have set the bar any lower. President Bush's speech was less compelling than the Monty Python sketch playing out behind it: the unacknowledged race between Nancy Pelosi and Dick Cheney to be the first to stand up for each bipartisan ovation. (Winner: Pelosi.) As we've been much reminded, the most recent presidents to face Congress in such low estate were Harry Truman in 1952 and Richard Nixon in 1974, both in the last ebbs of their administrations, both mired in unpopular wars that their successors would soon end, and both eager to change the subject just as Mr. Bush did. In his '52 State of the Union address, Truman vowed "to bring the cost of modern medical care within the reach of all the people" while Nixon, 22 years later, promised "a new system that makes high-quality health care available to every American." Not to be outdone, Mr. Bush offered a dead-on-arrival proposal that "all our citizens have affordable and available health care." The empty promise of a free intravenous lunch, it seems, is the last refuge of desperate war presidents. Few Americans know more than Senator Clinton about health care, as it happens, and if 27 Americans hadn't been killed in Iraq last weekend, voters might be in the mood to listen to her about it. But polls continue to show Iraq dwarfing every other issue as the nation's No. 1 concern. The Democrats' pre-eminent presidential candidate can't escape the war any more than the president can. And so she was blindsided Tuesday night, just as Mr. Bush was, by an unexpected gate crasher, the rookie senator from Virginia, Jim Webb. Though he's not a candidate for national office, Mr. Webb's nine-minute Democratic response not only upstaged the president but also, in an unintended political drive-by shooting, gave Mrs. Clinton a more pointed State of the Union "contrast" than she had bargained for. To the political consultants favored by both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Bush, Mr. Webb is an amateur. More than a few Washington insiders initially wrote him off in last year's race to unseat a star presidential prospect, the incumbent Senator George Allen. Mr. Webb is standoffish. He doesn't care whom he offends, including in his own base. He gives the impression - as he did Tuesday night - that he just might punch out his opponent. When he had his famously testy exchange with Mr. Bush over the war at a White House reception after his victory, Beltway pooh-bahs labeled him a boor, much as they had that other interloper who refused to censor himself before the president last year, Stephen Colbert. But this country is at a grave crossroads. It craves leadership. When Mr. Webb spoke on Tuesday, he stepped into that vacuum and, for a few minutes anyway, filled it. It's not merely his military credentials as a Vietnam veteran and a former Navy secretary for Ronald Reagan that gave him authority, or the fact that his son, also a marine, is serving in Iraq. It was the simplicity and honesty of Mr. Webb's message. Like Senator Obama, he was a talented professional writer before entering politics, so he could discard whatever risk-averse speech his party handed him and write his own. His exquisitely calibrated threat of Democratic pushback should Mr. Bush fail to change course on the war - "If he does not, we will be showing him the way" - continued to charge the air even as Mrs. Clinton made the post-speech rounds on the networks. Mrs. Clinton cannot rewrite her own history on Iraq to match Mr. Obama's early opposition to the war, or Mr. Webb's. She was not prescient enough to see, as Mr. Webb wrote in The Washington Post back in September 2002, that "unilateral wars designed to bring about regime change and a long-term occupation should be undertaken only when a nation's existence is clearly at stake." But she's hardly alone in this failing, and the point now is not that she mimic John Edwards with a prostrate apology for her vote to authorize the war. ("You don't get do-overs in life or in politics," she has said.) What matters to the country is what happens next. What matters is the leadership that will take us out of the fiasco. Mr. Webb made his own proposals for ending the war, some of them anticipating those of the Iraq Study Group, while running against a popular incumbent in a reddish state. Mrs. Clinton, running for re-election in a safe seat in blue New York, settled for ratcheting up her old complaints about the war's execution and for endorsing other senators' calls for vaguely defined "phased redeployments." Even now, after the Nov. 7 results confirmed that two-thirds of voters nationwide want out, she struggles to parse formulations about Iraq. This is how she explains her vote to authorize the war: "I would never have expected any president, if we knew then what we know now, to come to ask for a vote. There would not have been a vote, and I certainly would not have voted for it." John Kerry could not have said it worse himself. No wonder last weekend's "Saturday Night Live" gave us a "Hillary" who said, "Knowing what we know now, that you could vote against the war and still be elected president, I would never have pretended to support it." Compounding this problem for Mrs. Clinton is that the theatrics of her fledgling campaign are already echoing the content: they are so overscripted and focus-group bland that they underline rather than combat the perennial criticism that she is a cautious triangulator too willing to trim convictions for political gain. Last week she conducted three online Web chats that she billed as opportunities for voters to see her "in an unfiltered way." Surely she was kidding. Everything was filtered, from the phony living-room set to the appearance of a "campaign blogger" who wasn't blogging to the softball questions and canned responses. Even the rare query touching on a nominally controversial topic, gay civil rights, avoided any mention of the word marriage, let alone Bill Clinton's enactment of the federal Defense of Marriage Act. When a 14-year-old boy from Armonk, N.Y., asked Mrs. Clinton what made her "so inspirational," it was a telltale flashback to those well-rehearsed "town-hall meetings" Mr. Bush billed as unfiltered exchanges with voters during the 2004 campaign. One of those "Ask President Bush" sessions yielded the memorable question, "Mr. President, as a child, how can I help you get votes?" After six years of "Ask President Bush," "Mission Accomplished" and stage sets plastered with "Plan for Victory," Americans hunger for a presidency with some authenticity. Patently synthetic play-acting and carefully manicured sound bites like Mrs. Clinton's look out of touch. (Mr. Obama's bare-bones Webcast and Web site shrewdly play Google to Mrs. Clinton's AOL.) Besides, the belief that an image can be tightly controlled in the viral media era is pure fantasy. Just ask the former Virginia senator, Mr. Allen, whose past prowess as a disciplined, image-conscious politician proved worthless once the Webb campaign posted on YouTube a grainy but authentic video capturing him in an embarrassing off-script public moment. The image that Mrs. Clinton wants to sell is summed up by her frequent invocation of the word middle, as in "I grew up in a middle-class family in the middle of America." She's not left or right, you see, but exactly in the center where everyone feels safe. But as the fierce war critic Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator from Nebraska, argues in a must-read interview at gq.com, the war is "starting to redefine the political landscape" and scramble the old party labels. Like Mrs. Clinton, the middle-American Mr. Hagel voted to authorize the Iraq war, but that has not impeded his leadership in questioning it ever since. The issue raised by the tragedy of Iraq is not who's on the left or the right, but who is in front and who is behind. Mrs. Clinton has always been a follower of public opinion on the war, not a leader. Now events are outrunning her. Support for the war both in the polls and among Republicans in Congress is plummeting faster than she can recalibrate her rhetoric; unreliable Iraqi troops are already proving no-shows in the new Iraqi-American "joint patrols" of Baghdad; the Congressional showdown over fresh appropriations for Iraq is just weeks away. This, in other words, is a moment of crisis in our history and there will be no do-overs. Should Mrs. Clinton actually seek unfiltered exposure to voters, she will learn that they are anxiously waiting to see just who in Washington is brave enough to act. ------- 30 Jan 2007 @ 00:50 by vaxen : Gee, you mean to tel lme that the truth is seeping out of the sewer, where it just loves to hide, into the lives of ye old citizen of the republic? Oops, sorry, I almost forgot... that the Res Publica has been co-opted in the name of communist democracy. Oh, is that, too, a faux pas? ;) 30 Jan 2007 @ 00:55 by vaxen : PS: Odd, but doesn't the gentleman on stage right look rather like old Monkey eared Phillip? You know; the pseudo "Prince of Wales." No real Welshman could ever accept that poppinjay as anything but what he is... an imposter! Now what does that have to do with eternal warfare? That's right... the Nation (cough, cough) has always been in a state of war! Very profitable, I dare say, for a few... The international arms, money, prostitution, dope, etc., etc., dealers such as... Ollie North? Clintons of all colors, Cheneys, Yorks, Bushs, etc., who are all, it is true, simply servitors and marionettes for the 'Wealthy' such as me. Can you see through that glass, if even darkley? Oh yeah. What about the Air Force and all the Para-Military groups, SPEC OPS, who function sans con-trolls' interference? See ya jazzolog #29 in the Book of Changes deals with Re-Volution. Volute that? http://www.virtualchase.com/legalresearcher/index.html Other entries in Rumors 1 Dec 2008 @ 11:01: Important Notice Of Change In Terms 14 Aug 2008 @ 11:20: The Republic Of Georgia: Hypocrisy 8 Apr 2008 @ 10:03: HopeDance And Waking Up 26 Jan 2008 @ 11:33: An Open Letter To Amy Goodman 1 Dec 2007 @ 10:42: Would You Invest In Green Technology Or Guns? 24 Aug 2007 @ 07:29: American History: The Bush Family Legacy 22 May 2007 @ 10:08: Who Is Davis Mac-Iyalla And Why Is He Here? 12 Mar 2007 @ 09:48: Halliburton: Why Dubai? Do Buy! 5 Nov 2006 @ 12:11: Three Last Minute Thoughts 27 Jul 2006 @ 07:56: Khalid The Jihadi
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27 Jan 2007 @ 05:57, by Richard Carlson