MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘Pentagon’

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

Pentagon: We’ll Shoot Any Syrian Official Who Tries to Access Syrian Oil | Zero Hedge

Posted by M. C. on November 10, 2019

But, as one reporter pointed out, ISIS fighters “have no armor. They have no aircraft.”

“Do they have the capability to actually seize the oil fields?” the reporter asked. “And isn’t this really about Russia and Syria seizing those oil fields?”

Yes, oil is why your sons and daughters are died.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/pentagon-shoot-any-syrian-official-who-tries-access-syrian-oil

by Tyler Durden

Authored by Andrea Germanos via CommonDreams.org,

Pentagon officials asserted Thursday U.S. military authority over Syrian oil fields because U.S. forces are acting under the goal of “protecting Americans from terrorist activity” and would be within their rights to shoot a representative of the Syrian government who attempted to retake control over that country’s national resource.

The comments came from Pentagon spokesperson Jonathan Hoffman and Navy Rear Admiral William D. Byrne Jr. during a press briefing in which the two men were asked repeatedly about the legal basis the U.S. is claiming to control Syrian oil fields.

The briefing came less than two weeks after Defense Secretary Mark Esper said, “That’s our mission, to secure the oil fields” in the Deir ez-Zor area of eastern Syria. President Donald Trump’s comments before and after that remark —”We’re going to be protecting [the oil], and we’ll be deciding what we’re going to do with it in the future,” and “The oil… can help us, because we should be able to take some”— were seized on by critics who claimed Trump was suggesting violating international law by plundering another country’s resources and openly saying the U.S. was pursuing war for oil.

Hoffman, in his comments Thursday, gave a different message—that “the revenue from this is not going to the U.S. This is going to the SDF,” referring to the Kurdish-led and U.S.-allied Syrian Democratic Forces, who are battling ISIS. Byrne claimed that the U.S. has been waging the oil field control mission alongside SDF and that the goal was to prevent ISIS from obtaining the oil revenue.

But, as one reporter pointed out, ISIS fighters “have no armor. They have no aircraft.”

“Do they have the capability to actually seize the oil fields?” the reporter asked. “And isn’t this really about Russia and Syria seizing those oil fields?”

* * *

Hoffman replied that the goal was “to prevent a resurgence” of ISIS which would be facilitated if the terrorist group had access to the oil revenue.

When the Pentagon officials were pressed on whether “U.S. troops have the… authorization to shoot if a representative of the Syrian government comes to the.. oil fields and says, ‘I am here to take property of these oil fields,’” Byrne said, “our commanders always retain the right and the obligation of self-defense when faced with a hostile act or demonstrated hostile intent.”

The officials were reminded by a reporter that “the government of Syria is still, based on international law… [the] recognized legitimate government.” Hoffman said, “Everyone in the region knows where American forces are. We’re very clear with anyone in the region in working to deconflict where our forces are. If anyone — we work to ensure that… no one approaches or has — shows hostile intent to our forces, and if they do, our commanders maintain the right of self-defense.”

Hoffman later said that the oil field mission couldn’t be separated from the fight to defeat ISIS. Operations in “Syria are done under the commander-in-chief’s authorities to — with regards to protecting Americans from terrorist activity.”

Pressed again by a reporter about the “legal basis for… the United States military to take and control the natural resources inside the boundaries of another country,” Hoffman responded, “the legal basis for this comes under the commander-in-chief’s authority for us to be conducting counter-terrorism efforts against ISIS. And I — I get your point when you’re trying to decouple the ISIS issue from the Syria issue, but it is not a decoupled issue.”

Later Hoffman was asked by a reporter if “President Trump [has] legal authority to take over these oil fields or is the United States stealing the oil?”…

Yes – Be seeing you

The Messy Reality Inside the Pentagon, Captured in Fiction ...

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Secretary of Defense, Incorporated – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on October 12, 2019

Perhaps we should confess to ourselves that the nation’s vaunted soldiers are little more than political pawns in a game that’s far bigger, far more Kafkaesque, than those troopers could begin to fathom. And, finally, let’s admit one last thing: Few of us care.

https://original.antiwar.com/Danny_Sjursen/2019/10/10/secretary-of-defense-incorporated/

This article originally appeared at TruthDig.

 

The man is so beautifully bland. In fact, I’d wager that only a tiny segment of Americans could name the current Secretary of Defense – and far fewer could pick him out of a lineup. Perhaps that’s the point. President Trump, a celebrity ham, has tired of sharing the stage with big-name advisers such as Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and national security adviser John Bolton. So they’re both gone. In their place, Trump has installed faceless bureaucrats to run the most powerful national security state in human history. And the rest of us hardly notice.

Trump’s appointment of Mark Esper as head of the largest and most active Cabinet department, and the new Defense Secretary’s near unanimous approval by the U.S. Senate, is no less of a scandal than Trump’s apparent efforts to seek foreign interference in the 2020 elections. Only it isn’t.

Still, the nomination of Esper, a recent lobbyist for the defense contracting corporation Raytheon, ranks as one of the most egregious illustrations of the “revolving door” between lobbyists and the Defense Department. It’s crony capitalism in fatigues, and while nothing new, a clear indication that things have only worsened under our reality-show-mogul-president.

Of course, seen through the rose-colored glasses of American empire, Esper is highly qualified to head the Defense Department. He’s a West Point graduate, former Army infantry officer, recipient of a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard and a doctorate in public policy from George Washington University, and has past experience working in the Pentagon.

If one digs further, however, Esper is wildly problematic—loaded with conflicts of interest, a veteran of the (should be) discredited neoconservative Bush-era DOD, and little more than a corporate “company man.” He didn’t just work for Raytheon, he lobbied on the defense contractor’s behalf only recently. Under rather sharp questioning by Sen. Elizabeth Warren during his confirmation hearings, Esper refused to recuse himself from participating in government business involving Raytheon. In typically lifeless language, Esper replied that “On the advice of my ethics folks at the Pentagon, the career professionals: No, their recommendation is not to.” How’s that for accepting responsibility? No matter, he was swiftly and quietly confirmed by a vote of 90-8 in the Senate.

Expect another banner year for Raytheon. It’s already the third-largest US defense contractor, and produces, among other tools of destruction, Paveway precision-guided missiles—the very weapons that Congress recently sought to stop shipping to Saudi Arabia due to (rather tardy) concerns about the heads of Yemeni civilians upon which they’re dropped.

I predict more deals and more taxpayer billions for Raytheon with Esper at the Defense helm…

All of which begs some questions and provides some disturbing answers. Perhaps we ought to ditch the myth that the Defense Secretary simply heads the Pentagon, and admit that Esper is really the emperor of a far grander military-industrial complex that includes a veritable army of K-Street lobbyists and venal arms dealers. Maybe it’s time to concede that unelected national security czars, and not a stalemated bought-and-sold Congress, run national defense and set the gigantic Pentagon budget. Perhaps we should confess to ourselves that the nation’s vaunted soldiers are little more than political pawns in a game that’s far bigger, far more Kafkaesque, than those troopers could begin to fathom. And, finally, let’s admit one last thing: Few of us care.

Be seeing you

Grand Theft Pentagon :Tales of Corruption and Profiteering ...

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Rutherford Institute :: Guns for Hire: No, the Government Shouldn’t Be Using the Military to Police the Globe | By John W. Whitehead |

Posted by M. C. on October 9, 2019

In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year.

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/guns_for_hire_no_the_government_shouldnt_be_using_the_military_to_police_the_globe

By John W. Whitehead

“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” — James Madison

Eventually, all military empires fall and fail by spreading themselves too thin and spending themselves to death.

It happened in Rome.

It’s happening again.

At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.

The American Empire—with its endless wars waged by U.S. military servicepeople who have been reduced to little more than guns for hire: outsourced, stretched too thin, and deployed to far-flung places to police the globe—is approaching a breaking point.

War has become a huge money-making venture, and America, with its vast military empire and its incestuous relationship with a host of international defense contractors, is one of its best buyers and sellers. In fact, as Reuters reports, “[President] Trump has gone further than any of his predecessors to act as a salesman for the U.S. defense industry.”

Under Trump’s leadership, the U.S. military is dropping a bomb every 12 minutes.

This follows on the heels of President Obama, the so-called antiwar candidate and Nobel Peace Prize winner who waged war longer than any American president and whose targeted-drone killings resulted in at least 1.3 million lives lost to the U.S.-led war on terror.

Most recently, the Trump Administration signaled its willingness to put the lives of American troops on the line in order to guard Saudi Arabia’s oil resources. Roughly 200 American troops will join the 500 troops already stationed in Saudi Arabia. That’s in addition to the 60,000 U.S. troops that have been deployed throughout the Middle East for decades.

As The Washington Post points out, “The United States is now the world’s largest producer — and its reliance on Saudi imports has dropped dramatically, including by 50 percent in the past two years alone.”

So if we’re not protecting the oil for ourselves, whose interests are we protecting?

The military industrial complex is calling the shots, of course, and profit is its primary objective.

The military-industrial complex is also the world’s largest employer.

America has long had a penchant for endless wars that empty our national coffers while fattening those of the military industrial complex.

Aided and abetted by the U.S government, the American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.

Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined. Indeed, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.

Unfortunately, this level of war-mongering doesn’t come cheap to the taxpayers who are forced to foot the bill.

Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.

In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year…

War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors.

For example, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending.”

Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.

Consider that the government lost more than $160 billion to waste and fraud by the military and defense contractors. With paid contractors often outnumbering enlisted combat troops, the American war effort dubbed as the “coalition of the willing” has quickly evolved into the “coalition of the billing,” with American taxpayers forced to cough up billions of dollars for cash bribes, luxury bases, a highway to nowhere, faulty equipment, salaries for so-called “ghost soldiers,” and overpriced anything and everything associated with the war effort, including a $640 toilet seat and a $7600 coffee pot.

A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:

$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.

That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government…

The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.

This is exactly the scenario Eisenhower warned against when he cautioned the citizenry not to let the profit-driven war machine endanger our liberties or democratic processes:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

We failed to heed Eisenhower’s warning.

The illicit merger of the armaments industry and the government that Eisenhower warned against has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation today…

Be seeing you

?u=https1.bp.blogspot.com-N5KeHtWp0VoWPk9_EDQBHIAAAAAAAB9bgzrYtrOntm10oXbjMPGjqKRsOiCBHc0deACLcBs160011warmongers.png&f=1&nofb=1

 

 

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Trump tweeted ‘billions of dollars’ would be saved on military contracts. Then the Pentagon fired the official doing that.

Posted by M. C. on October 1, 2019

In case you were wondering what the “Deep State” looks like, this is one of it’s faces.

https://news.yahoo.com/trump-promised-to-save-billions-of-dollars-on-military-contracts-then-the-pentagon-pushed-out-the-official-responsible-for-doing-that-090005221.html

Martin de Bourmont and Sharon Weinberger

Authors

In December 2016, just a few weeks before moving into the White House, President-elect Donald Trump tweeted that once he was in office, “billions of dollars can and will be saved on military (and other) purchases.”

Presidential candidates often campaign for or against defense spending, but Trump was perhaps the first to promise that his business acumen — an image bolstered by his bestselling book “The Art of the Deal” — would enable him to shave billions of dollars off costly weapons, like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, estimated to top $1 trillion.

While Trump’s critics were questioning whether he was actually capable of achieving big savings in the military budget, over at the Pentagon the man whose job it was to negotiate those weapons deals welcomed the president’s attention to the issue.

“When you get somebody who is the president of the United States who understands precisely what you do for a living and understands how it’s actually done, it becomes a pretty rewarding thing to do, especially when someone at the top is world-class himself in terms of negotiating,” Shay Assad, the Pentagon’s pricing director, told attendees at a conference held by McAleese and Credit Suisse in March 2017, just two months after Trump’s inauguration.

Assad had already built a reputation as the Department of Defense’s toughest contract negotiator, having spent more than a decade battling defense companies on behalf of taxpayers, trying to get the prices down on skyrocketing weapons costs. Over the course of his career, he has been decorated with a panoply of awards from the Pentagon for his work, and praised for saving the government billions of dollars. A 2016 Politico profile described Assad, known for his dogged campaigns to force defense industry companies to justify their costs, as “the most hated man in the Pentagon.”…

Yet within two years of Trump’s entrance into the White House, Assad would find himself removed from his job, and his efforts to save money and recover hundreds of millions of dollars in potentially fraudulent spending tabled.

His treatment, he contends, was the direct result of his attempts to save the Pentagon money and identify potential contract fraud, which brought him into conflict with the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer. It was a conflict that ended dramatically, he says, when shortly after he emailed senior Pentagon officials about potential fraud, details about his travel records and his demotion were published in the press.

Assad, who is now retired, says the issues he brought up involved potentially billions of dollars in waste and fraud, and still aren’t being addressed. It’s a claim that’s backed up by multiple interviews conducted by Yahoo News with Assad and those who worked with him at the Pentagon, as well as by documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

&nbsp
 

The Pentagon’s senior leadership, many of whom came directly from the senior leadership of defense companies, are only making the problem worse, Assad argues. “There’s a lot of inappropriate pricing going on by major companies dealing with the Department of Defense, and there is an inherent conflict of interest when you have people coming in from industry,” he said.

While the Pentagon, in response to detailed questions, objected broadly to the notion of any ethics violations, it declined to comment on Assad or his specific allegations, other than to argue over the scale of the potential contract fraud. Documents obtained by Yahoo News showed that the amount of overcharges identified to date by Pentagon auditors, who reviewed a relatively small sampling of contracts, is close to $900 million.

Assad isn’t alone in his concerns. Before his death, John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona, railed against the defense industry’s influence on the Pentagon and expressed concerns about the appointment of Patrick Shanahan, a Boeing executive, to the No. 2 spot in the Defense Department. More recently, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, expressed similar concerns when Mark Esper, a former Raytheon lobbyist, was nominated to the top job in the Pentagon.

Assad has his own description of what’s taking place inside the Defense Department. “It’s kind of like the fox is in the chicken coop,” he said…

In January 2018, Lord called Assad to her office to vent her frustration with the inconsistent performance of major defense firms. She said she wanted to find a way to get better results from defense companies — a message that was frequently repeated by the president. “I said, ‘Sure, you impact their cash flow, you’ll get their attention to whatever you think is important,’” Assad recalled telling her. “If you tell companies their cash flow is dependent on it, they will respond.”

 
 

Assad’s proposal had to do with what are known as progress payments, or periodic payments made to contractors in order to alleviate their operating costs. The Pentagon hadn’t conducted a comprehensive assessment of its contract financing policies in three decades. Since that time, interest rates had plummeted to a historic low, which meant the Pentagon was perhaps fronting too much money to companies. It was an area, Assad believed, that was ripe for reform.

“We have been mostly overpaying these companies in the program’s payment,” Assad said. “By overpayment, if you went back to the original rule in the mid-1980s, it was based on having an interest rate of about 12.5 percent.”

At a meeting in late February 2018, Assad said he briefed his plan to reform progress payments to Lord as well as to Eric Chewning, head of the Pentagon’s industrial policy office, and Kevin Fahey, assistant secretary for acquisition. Assad explained that his plan would tie progress payments to company performance, rather than stages of production process. The progress payment rate is set at 80 percent of total costs of delivering on a contract, and Assad wanted to reduce that to a base rate of 50 percent.

Assad recalls that Lord approved of the proposal, and they agreed not to discuss it with industry until after Congress was briefed. Over the next few months, Assad held a host of briefings on the rule with representatives of various branches of the armed forces and the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. There were, he said, no objections to the rule.

But by August, though the rule had been approved by the OMB, Assad said he still hadn’t gotten approval from Lord, despite his multiple requests, to speak to Congress. Nonetheless, on Aug. 24, 2018, the proposed rule was published in the Federal Register.

Defense companies were outraged…

Be seeing you

deep state media

It’s Always About Control

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Want To Save The Environment? De-Fund The Pentagon. – Caitlin Johnstone

Posted by M. C. on September 30, 2019

We know that our oligarchic empire will do literally anything, up to and including murdering a million Iraqis, to secure control over energy resources. We know this with absolute certainty.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/09/28/want-to-save-the-environment-de-fund-the-pentagon/

author: Caitlin Johnstone

Millions of people are uniting in demonstrations worldwide against our civilization’s ecocidal march toward extinction, which makes me so happy to see. It’s really encouraging to see so many young people burning with love for their planet and a hunger to reverse the damage that has been done to our ecosystem by the refusal of previous generations to turn away from our path of devastation. This must continue if we are to survive as a species.

The challenge now is the same perennial challenge which comes up every single time there is a massive and enthusiastic push from the public in a direction that is healthy: such movements always, without exception, become targeted for manipulation by establishment interests. I write all the time about how this has happened with the intrinsically healthy impulse of feminism; I just finished watching an MSNBC pundit proclaim that anyone who still supports Bernie Sanders over Elizabeth Warren is a sexist. This corralling of healthy energy into the advancement of corrupt establishment interests happens with feminism, it happens with the healthy fight against racism and antisemitism, and of course it happens with environmentalism.

Of course it does. People get very emotional when you say this, even if you fully support environmentalism and don’t have any objections to the overall scientific consensus about what’s happening to our environment, but environmentalism is not destined to be the one and only popular movement which establishment interests don’t move mountains to co-opt.

We know that our oligarchic empire will do literally anything, up to and including murdering a million Iraqis, to secure control over energy resources. We know this with absolute certainty. Therefore we can also know with certainty that they are working to ensure that when new energy systems are put in place, they are put in place in a way which allows the oligarchs to retain their power, and ideally to expand it, without losing their thrones to rival plutocrats, to governments, or (worst case scenario) to the rank-and-file public gaining control over their own energy. This agenda is on the table. It is happening.

The ruling elites have many advantages over us, but one of the greatest is the fact that they know exactly what they want and exactly where they’re trying to push things, whereas we the general public, on average, do not. If we only had one positive anti-establishment direction to push in there’d be no stopping us, and as soon as we find one the oligarchs will be done. But in general and on average what we have is a few clear ideas about what we don’t want and a great many vague, frequently contradictory ideas about what we do want. This lack of clarity in direction always leaves us highly susceptible to the influence of any well-funded narrative manager who steps forward to say “Oh yeah I know exactly where we’re going! It’s this way, follow me!”

Luckily for us, there’s a very clear demand we can add into the mix in this new push for environmentalist reforms which runs directly counter to the interests of the empire that is trying to manipulate our healthy impulses: de-fund the Pentagon.

There is no single, unified entity that is a larger polluter than America’s dishonestly labeled “Department of Defense”. Its yearly carbon output alone dwarfs that of entire first-world nations like Sweden and Portugal; if the US military were its own country it would rank 47th among emitters of greenhouse gasses, meaning it’s a worse polluter than over 140 entire nations. That’s completely separate from the pollution already produced by the US itself. None of the sociopathic corporations whose environmental impact is being rightly criticized today come anywhere remotely close to that of the Pentagon. They are going under the radar.

And that’s just greenhouse gas emissions, which the Pentagon’s poisonous effects on our environment are in no way limited to. As journalist Whitney Webb highlighted in an excellent article for Mintpress News about the wildly neglected subject of the US military’s ecological toxicity: “Producing more hazardous waste than the five largest US chemical companies combined, the US Department of Defense has left its toxic legacy throughout the world in the form of depleted uranium, oil, jet fuel, pesticides, defoliants like Agent Orange and lead, among others.”

Webb documents how the US “has conducted more nuclear weapons tests than all other nations combined”, how US military interventionism in Iraq “has resulted in the desertification of 90 percent of Iraqi territory, crippling the country’s agricultural industry and forcing it to import more than 80 percent of its food,” and how “US military bases, both domestic and foreign, consistently rank among some of the most polluted places in the world.”

“While the US military’s past environmental record suggests that its current policies are not sustainable, this has by no means dissuaded the US military from openly planning future contamination of the environment through misguided waste disposal efforts,” Webb writes. “Last November, the US Navy announced its plan to release 20,000 tons of environmental ‘stressors,’ including heavy metals and explosives, into the coastal waters of the US Pacific Northwest over the course of this year.”

This is all a massive environmental burden to take on for a branch of the government which provides no other service to anyone beyond bullying the rest of the world into obedience, wouldn’t you agree? So get rid of it.

Surely with all this talk about the huge, sweeping changes that are required to avert climate catastrophe we’re not going to overlook the world’s single worst polluter just because a few think tankers and their plutocratic sponsors believe it’s important for the US-centralized power alliance to retain total global hegemony? If we’re making huge, sweeping changes, the completely needless globe-spanning US war machine would be the obvious place to start.

That’s something we can inject into the mainstream dialogue as this environmental movement grows, and the cool thing about it is that the establishment manipulators can’t reject it or they’ll expose themselves. It’s something we can demand that they can’t legitimately say no to. We can surf this clear, concrete, exciting and utterly indisputable idea on the surging momentum of these climate demonstrations, and the same healthy impulse to save our planet that these budding activists are now embodying will lift it right up and carry it to the top of mainstream awareness. No sane person will reject this, so if anyone pushes back against it to say “No, not that,” they’ll immediately spotlight the insane agendas they serve.

The US does not need any more military power than what other normal nations have: enough to defend its own easily defended shores from unprovoked attack. Anything beyond that, and certainly the hundreds of environmentally toxic military bases circling our planet, exists solely for the benefit of murderous dominating imperialists and sociopathic war profiteers. Demanding a reversal of US military expansionism as a part of the environmental movement is sane on its face and will benefit everyone, and it will also help highlight all unwholesome elements of empire loyalism.

____________________________________

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

Be seeing you
Veterans Exposed to Burn Pits Wait for Lawsuit Decision ...

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

US Defends Your Freedom By Using Troops As Saudi Oil Security Guards – Caitlin Johnstone

Posted by M. C. on September 24, 2019

the US government has responded in the only possible rational way: by blaming Iran and deploying troops to act as security guards for Middle Eastern oil companies.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/09/22/us-defends-your-freedom-by-using-troops-as-saudi-oil-security-guards/

author: Caitlin Johnstone

If you’ve been lying awake at night terrified that the Pentagon might not send additional troops and armaments to defend oil corporations in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, I’ve got some great news for you.

In response to an attack on Saudi Aramco oil infrastructure for which Houthi rebels in Yemen have taken credit, the US government has responded in the only possible rational way: by blaming Iran and deploying troops to act as security guards for Middle Eastern oil companies.

“In response to the kingdom’s request, the president has approved the deployment of U.S. forces, which will be defensive in nature and primarily focused on air and missile defense,” Defense Secretary Mark Esper informed the press yesterday. “We will also work to accelerate the delivery of military equipment to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the UAE to enhance their ability to defend themselves.”

So you can breathe easy, my friend. Freedom and democracy are safe once more.

A lot of delusional, unpatriotic democracy haters like to argue that the US military doesn’t actually defend the freedom of the American people, and that it isn’t really used to defend freedom at all, and that it isn’t even really used to defend any rules-based international order as sometimes claimed, and that even to use the word “defend” to describe anything the US military does is inaccurate since it is consistently on the attacking and aggressing side of any given conflict, and that actually the US military functions as nothing other than a blunt object wielded by the rich and powerful for the advancement of plutocratic interests and the geostrategic dominance of opaque and unaccountable government agencies, and that it can in fact be accurately said that the only difference between the US military and any other band of armed thugs is funding…

I forget where I was going with this.

Ah, yes. Defending your freedoms. If sending a platoon of Paul Blarts to act as mall security for foreign oil corporations isn’t enough to get you saluting every American flag flying over every McDonald’s you see, then you should know that the US military’s freedom fighting doesn’t end at mere corporate asset protection.

They’re also defending your freedom by killing Afghan farmers in their sleep.

Why did the armed forces of the United States kill dozens of civilian farmers in Afghanistan while they rested in the field after a hard day’s work? That’s a good question. But an even better question is, what were those Afghan farmers doing lying on top of your freedom?

Obviously the compassionate US military would never dream of killing non-combatants under any circumstances whatsoever, but the unfortunate fact of the matter is that you can’t make an omelet without cracking a few civilians. Those dead farmers were collateral damage, caught in the crossfire of a a life-or-death struggle for freedom and democracy in a nation that surely has something to do with defending those things somehow. It is certainly a loss that civilians perish in this way on a regular basis in Afghanistan, but that’s a small price to pay for everything we’ve gained as a result of that eighteen-year occupation, such as [research what’s been gained and put here in second draft].

Yes, whether they’re defending Saudi Aramco profit margins, bombing field laborers, encircling the planet with hundreds of military bases, stockpiling nuclear weapons, funneling weapons to extremist militias, toppling governments, destabilizing large regions, inflicting siege warfare upon civilians via starvation sanctions, or just generally dominating the entire world using the carrot of military alliance and the stick of military retribution, you can rest assured that the US military is giving your freedoms the best protection that petrodollars and war profiteering can buy.

_______________________

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permissionto republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Dead Men Tell No Tales – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on September 14, 2019

Bin Laden, Jeffrey Epstein…who next? Julian Assange.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/09/eric-margolis/dead-men-tell-no-tales-bin-laden-and-9-11/

By

Special for LewRockwell.com

A large number of Americans still don’t believe the official version of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.  I am one of them.

The government and tame media version – that crazed Muslims directed by Osama bin Laden  attacked New York’s twin towers and the Pentagon because they hated ‘our freedoms’ and our religions – is wearing very thin as contrary evidence piles up.

Ever since the attacks, I’ve held the belief that neither bin Laden nor Afghanistan’s Taliban were involved, though bin Laden did applaud the attacks after the fact and remains a key suspect.  Unfortunately, he was murdered by a US hit squad instead of being brought to the US to stand trial.  Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, was adamant that bin Laden was not behind the attacks.

So who did it?  In my view, the attacks were financed by private citizens in Saudi Arabia and organized from Germany and possibly Spain.  All the hijackers came from states nominally allied to the US or its protectorates.

Fifteen of the 19 were Saudis. Two came from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and one each from Egypt and Lebanon. Amazingly, during the national uproar after the attacks, little attention was focused on Saudi Arabia, a key US ally (or protectorate) even though most of the hijackers were Saudi citizens, and a planeload of important Saudis were quietly ushered out of the US by the CIA soon after the attacks.

Saudi Arabia was too important to US domination of the Mideast to point any fingers at the Saudis. The Saudi royal regime in Riyadh did not appear to have been involved – why would it since their survival and gravy train depended on US protection?

But the royal regime does not represent all Saudis, as many people believe. Saudi Arabia is a collection of tribes played off against one another by Riyadh and kept in line by the US Air Force from its bases in Saudi and a tribal force, ‘the white army,’ led by American ‘advisors.’ Saudi Arabia has little in the way of a regular army because its rulers fear coups by the armed forces such as occurred in Egypt, Iraq and Syria.

In addition, over 40,000 Americans live and work in Saudi. Another 5,000 US military personnel are stationed there. Much of the kingdom’s technology – banking, telecommunications, airports and flights, trains, military affairs, TV and radio – are supervised by foreigners. This process began in the 1920’s when the British moved into Arabia and helped promote the Saudi tribe to prominence…

Within the complexities of Saudi Society lie bitterly anti-western groups who see the nation as being militarily occupied by the US and exploited – even pillaged – by foreigners. Arabia was originally the holy land of Islam. Today, it has been westernized, occupied by US military power, and given marching orders by Washington.

“When we succeed in kicking the Russians out of Afghanistan,” Azzam told me, “we will go on and kick the Americans out of Saudi Arabia.” I was shocked, never having heard of Americans called ‘occupiers’. Azzam was murdered by a bomb soon after, but his words kept ringing in my ears. He thought of the Americans as much colonialists as the Soviets.

Private nationalist groups in Saudi who bitterly opposed foreign domination of their country could very well have financed and organized 9/11. But, of course, Washington could not admit this. That would have brought into question the US occupation of Saudi.

What’s also pretty clear is that Israel – at minimum – knew the attack was coming yet failed to warn its American ‘allies.’ Israel was the chief beneficiary of the 9/11 attacks – yet its bumbling Arab foes and bin Laden were blamed for this crime.

Be seeing you

LAWSUIT: Former FBI Director Robert Mueller Helped Saudi ...

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Judicial Watch Sued To Get Footage of The ‘Plane’ Hitting The Pentagon On 9/11 (Video) – Collective Evolution

Posted by M. C. on September 13, 2019

I don’t know.

Although one would think the pentagram would would have surveillance imaging better than your local gas station. I don’t trust it after all this time.

What about passengers?

https://www.collective-evolution.com/2019/09/11/news-judicial-watch-sued-to-get-footage-of-the-plane-hitting-the-pentagon-on-911-video/

By

In Brief

  • The Facts:Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton Tweeted today that he hopes to put 9/11 conspiracy theories to rest with the video of the AA plane hitting the side of the Pentagon on 9/11. The video doesn’t seem to show a plane.
  • Reflect On:What does the image look like to you in the video? A plane? Or a missile? What seemed to create the hole in the Pentagon? A plane or a missile?

Finally, we can put to rest the theory that a plane hit the pentagon on 9/11. Tom Fitton from Judicial Watch released a video today on his Twitter showing what looks like a Tomahawk cruise missile going into the side of the Pentagon on 9/11. Although Fitton claims this was actually a plane that hit the Pentagon, the evidence doesn’t appear to support this at all.

The ‘plane hitting the Pentagon’ theory has been a question mark for so many people as the camera footage was instantly seized showing the entire event, and there were no plane parts to be found anywhere. Not to mention the plane would have to be flying completely parallel to the ground, JUST skimming the grass to make it into the side of the Pentagon. And of course the hole made in the Pentagon doesn’t match that of a plane at all. See image below.

I have honestly been trying to figure out what Fitton is really up to witH this post, because I almost can’t believe he thinks this is a plane which leads me to think he is doing this on purpose to help people see the truth.

Have a look at his Tweet below, and the video below that.

Do you see a plane? Or do you see what looks a lot more like a Tomahawk cruise missile?

Be seeing you

Best 25+ Conspiracy theories ideas on Pinterest ...

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

The Revolution in Military Affairs – PaulCraigRoberts.org

Posted by M. C. on September 7, 2019

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/09/06/the-revolution-in-military-affairs/

Paul Craig Roberts

Clarity Press has just published a new book by Andrei Martyanov, The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs  ( https://www.claritypress.com/product/the-real-revolution-in-military-affairs/ ).

Martyanov’s book is, in a way, two books.  One is about the revolution in military affairs that has left the United States behind.  The other is about the self-medicating and propagandistic version of reality that Americans mistake for reality.  Martyanov convinced me that the Pentagon’s war planners need to upgrade their understanding of war and how to conduct one, but I found more interesting the fake reality supported by controlled explanations from which Americans seem unable to escape that is described in the other part of his book.  It turns out that it is not only the insouciant general population but also the ruling elites themselves who are locked in The Matrix.

Slogans masquerade as ideas.  The media is devoid of integrity.  Fantasies such as Russiagate,  Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Iranian nukes, Russian invasions, Venezuela represented as “a threat to American national security,” Western Democracy in which voters decide nothing, self-regulating financial markets—really the fantasies are endless, and they leave America as the blind man of the world.

Martyanov concludes that “the unipolar world is over,” but the neoconservatives don’t know it or don’t accept the fact; that “American liberalism—a euphemism for imperialism” has run its course; that the race and gender splits fomented by Identity Politics and the economic split between the 1 and 99 percenters has left the United States as an unstable polity with unstable policies.

A country with instability on the American scale tends to unleash wars, and wars have been the sole activity of the US in the 21st century, leaving “a trail of destruction, suffering, refugee camps and death on an industrial scale.”  Consequently, the rest of the world is organizing to put a halt to Washington’s aggression and violent overthrow of countries.

With America unable to produce leadership, handicapped by inferior weapons systems, and left behind by the revolution in military affairs, the neoconservatives drowning in their own arrogant hubris could easily foment a conflict that will leave America in ruins.

Be seeing you

Why War Plans, Really? > National Defense University Press ...

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Pentagon Launches New Program to Fight “Viral” Internet Content

Posted by M. C. on September 3, 2019

https://www.infowars.com/pentagon-launches-new-program-to-fight-viral-internet-content/

DARPA declares war on memes.

Editor’s Note: This is a bipartisan takeover of the Internet to kill dissident speech as we outlined last year when top neocons said Facebook censorship of conservative was “just the beginning” during a conference in Germany.

The Pentagon has declared war on memes as DARPA launches a new program to fight “polarizing viral content” before it spreads.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is seeking to create software with the capability to “automatically detect, attribute, and characterize falsified multi-modal media to defend against large-scale, automated disinformation attacks.”

The software will scan news stories, photos and videos to identify “polarizing viral content” and stop its spread to eliminate “malicious intent” entirely.

Titled Semantic Forensics, the program will run content through a myriad of algorithms to identify inconsistencies and identify a story or a meme as inauthentic or fake. The system will also pinpoint the origin of the meme, the intent behind it and predict the impact of its spread.

Given that the program doesn’t take into account the fact that so-called “trusted sources” in the mainstream media have been responsible for some of the biggest fake news stories in modern history, such as Trump-Russia election collusion, the software will only succeed in eliminating dissident narratives.

As Helen Buyniski warns, the true intent of the program “seems to be to stamp out dissent.”

“To hear them tell it, the Pentagon just wants to even the playing field between the ‘good guys’ – the fake-hunters pursuing the cause of truth in media – and the ‘bad guys’ sowing discord one slowed-down Nancy Pelosi speech at a time,” she writes. “But the Pentagon’s targets aren’t limited to deepfakes, the bogeyman-of-the-month being used to justify this unprecedented military intrusion into the social media and news realm, or fake news at all. If the program is successful after four years of trials, it will be expanded to target all “malicious intent” – a possibility that should send chills down the spine of any journalist who’s ever disagreed with the establishment narrative.”

A study undertaken by researchers at University College London found that the most effective memes in the run up to the 2016 presidential election largely originated in two places – the subreddit r/the_donald – a forum devoted to boosting President Donald Trump, and 4chan’s politically incorrect /pol forum.

A VICE write-up of the study acknowledges that the most “effectively spread” memes originated on r/the_donald and /pol.

Last year, Facebook also announced it is developing a new AI algorithm that can detect and ban “offensive” memes.

Be seeing you

?u=http2.bp.blogspot.com-vsL9x6b60BcTcjveUcibvIAAAAAAAAB7o1H7iFzRkTx0s1600000pulp_fiction_judy_miller_the_heretik.jpg&f=1

 

 

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , | 3 Comments »

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »