Category: War

     According to DoD records made over $150 million dollars building Guantanamo bay’s detainee holding facilities, or, as other’s have come to call them, torture chambers.

    KBR, of course is one of Dick Cheney’s special interests friends.

    Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation’s top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in this tropical tax haven.

~snip~

    With an estimated $16 billion in contracts, KBR is by far the largest contractor in Iraq, with eight times the work of its nearest competitor.

bostonglobe.com March 6, 2008

    The no-bid contract it received in 2002 to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure and a multibillion-dollar contract to provide support services to troops have long drawn scrutiny because Vice President Dick Cheney was Halliburton’s chief executive from 1995 until he joined the Republican ticket with President Bush in 2000.

bostonglobe.com March 6 ,2008

JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, recently published a report written by a retired American Army Colonel who says:

“Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts, and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media. Perceiving themselves as superior beings, journalists have positioned themselves as protected-species combatants. But freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies. Such a view arouses disdain today, but a media establishment that has forgotten any sense of sober patriotism may find that it has become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.

“The point of all this is simple: Win. In warfare, nothing else matters. If you cannot win clean, win dirty. But win.

The article from which I am getting this information, here, at Anti-War.com, written by Jeremy Scahill, says the following about JINSA:

The organization has long boasted an all-star cast of criminal “advisers,” among them Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, James Woolsey, John Bolton, and Douglas Feith. JINSA, along with the Project for a New American Century, was one of the premiere groups in shaping U.S. policy during the Bush years and remains a formidable force with Obama in the White House.

It would be somewhat of a falsehood to say that Dick Cheney has now gone rogue with a national media tour during which he not only defends torture but also undermines the new regime of Barack Obama… Cheney has always been rogue. From even before the day that he as the head of George W. Bush’s vice presidential selection committee chose himself as the best possible candidate this has been a dark and amoral ascent from the bowels of the shadow government to the most powerful man on the planet. The man with the golden Rolodex, chock full of operatives throughout the military industrial complex and a lingering hard on to set things right after the godless commie liberals took down Richard M. Nixon was running the greatest war machine in human history out of the office of the Vice President until a few short months ago. Now, with the onslaught of vicious attacks on the new sitting President and the apparent influence on the policies of the new administration it is obvious and terrifying that Richard B. Cheney has absolutely no intention of going into the good night. He has made it a lifelong mission to betray, destabilize and destroy the United States from within and it is just too close to fruition for him to stop now.

Wow.  I’m sure this can only be good news for the impoverished, innocent, and war-torn people of Afghanistan.  They are freaking rich, RICH!  While many think they are sleeping on dirt floors (if not already taking “dirt naps,” heh indeedy), they are instead…well let’s hear it straight from Afghanistan’s minister of mines, Mohammad Ibrahim Adel:

“We are a people who don’t have money, food or clothes. But we are sleeping on gold,” he said. The country’s iron deposits were estimated at between five to six billion tons, he added.

That’s not all.  A 2005-06 joint survey by the US Geological Survery (USGS) and NASA showed they also have considerable copper, gold, precious stones, oil, and natural gas.

Based on the USGS survey, he said, Afghanistan’s north is estimated to hold between 600 to 700 billion cubic meters of natural gas and the country has some 25 million tons of oil in four basins.

Oh boy, pass the Bean-O!  That’s a lot of gas!  I think it’s fortunate for the people of Afghanistan that we are liberating them from al Qaeda the Taliban.  For one thing, by already being there, we were in an excellent position to be invited by former UNOCAL executive Hamid Karzai to send in NASA and the USGS to determine just how minerally enhanced ordinary Afghan citizens might be.  

The year was 1967.  An Army special forces unit goes on a seven-month killing spree in Vietnam.  Far from being isolated incidents that occurred without notice, Army commanders were aware of the actions and let it continue.  Ultimately, the unit was disbanded, its members never prosecuted, the facts buried by the Army from the public.

Then, a small newspaper, the Toledo Blade, got wind of the cover-up, investigated the accusations, and in 2003, released a Pulitzer-winning mini-series about “Tiger Force“, the unit that committed wholesale slaughter in Vietnam.

Donald Rumsfeld, who in 2003 was George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, stifled any investigation into Tiger Force or its surviving members.  

But, the story doesn’t end there…

Like a recent tragic event in Iraq brought out a number of reports on PTSD around the country there have also been a number of other reports as well that focussed on the homeless veterans, the first one just below is in and around this Nations Capital:

Homeless War Veterans Abound in D.C. Region

A new report is giving sobering statistics about how homeless veterans are treated in the Washington area.

The report says beds are available for only 10% of the homeless vets in Virginia, 8% have beds in Maryland and in the District, there is room is less than 2%.

From the Iraq War with the Army’s First Calvary Division to fighting a battle to find homes for fellow veterans, Chad Lego says he never imagined when he came home, he would find some 200,000 service members homeless. >>>>>More

By Abdul Malik Mujahid

According to the CIA World Factbook, an Afghan’s life expectancy is merely 44 years.

That's 20 to 30 years less than neighboring Pakistan and all other surrounding countries. It is just one result of the ongoing devastation in that country.

The war in Afghanistan did not start in 2001 with the US invasion. It began 30 years ago in December 1979, when the former Soviet Union invaded the country. The human toll of the conflict is staggering: more than a million Afghans have been killed and 3 million maimed.

Five million (one third of the pre-war population) were forced to leave their country and became refugees. There are still 3.1 million Afghan refugees today, making up 27 per cent of the global refugee population. Most of them live in Pakistan.

Another two million Afghans were displaced within the country. In the 1980s, one out of two refugees in the world was an Afghan. Most Afghans alive today have seen nothing but war.

Daily life in Afghanistan is miserable.  

A number of reports have sprung up in the last few days following the very tragic shooting by one soldier in killing five of his fellow soldiers at an in country military stress clinic, of which he himself was receiving care.

Military training alone starts the process of the change needed from how most are brought up and what they are taught and told to be able to serve and defend, if needed, this country.

Place these now trained soldiers in a War Zone creating the Occupation of same lasting many years and now in these times many tours being served and not only in one but two and for many the stress of war, what they experience, their individual incidents, what they see, feel, and just know, is overwelming!

They aren’t the only ones, think of those who live in these occupied countries! It also isn’t only a war that creates the traumatic nightmares, individuals that experience trauma in theirs lives also can suffer, most silently, from those traumas!

Below is a number of recent reports, this subject should have been takin seriously many years ago after finally realizing what War and Trauma can do to a Human Being!

If the release of the torture photos causes even one death, that is one death too many.

It is my fervent hope that insanity of the Bush/Cheney years doesn’t cause any one else to die.

It is a fervent, wishful, unrealistic hope.

I don’t think my thoughts on these issues are all that earth-shaking, but there are many, many people who are consistent with their efforts to bring awareness to these events, events which, to me, are all part of the insanity of war.

JimStaro is one. Please read his work.  Thanks.