China rejects U.S. charge it hacked Pentagon

I posted about these Chinese hackers who allegedly got into the Pentagon's computers when the story first showed up on the news services. Now its time to give China a chance to tell their side of the story.

China on Tuesday rejected a report that hackers controlled by its military had successfully entered a Pentagon network, calling the claim a product of "Cold War" thinking.

Via Reuters.

Pentagon won't make surge recommendation to Bush

Not that it matters one whit what they recommend. Its pretty clear by now Bush will do what Bush wants to do regardless what his experts say.

In a sign that top commanders are divided over what course to pursue in Iraq, the Pentagon said Wednesday that it won't make a single, unified recommendation to President Bush during next month's strategy assessment, but instead will allow top commanders to make individual presentations.

Via McClatchy.

Pentagon Denies Increase in Troops' Suicides a Result of War

This is patently ridiculous. Some things just don't need studying. Common sense says the connection is there.

I wrote earlier about Owen Wilson's suicide attempt which was unfortunate and unsuccessful. People commit suicide when under far less stress than soldiers who are in 100°+ heat and worried about IEDs, snipers, mortars.

As the widow of a Vietnam vet who killed himself after coming home, I find every new report about suicides among this generation of soldiers particularly painful. So I was surprised the other day to find myself laughing out loud reading about how poor Elspeth Ritchie, a psychiatric consultant to the Army Surgeon General's office, got stuck with the awful job of announcing, with a perfectly straight face and no irony whatsoever, that, although the suicide rate among soldiers has reached a 26-year record high, Pentagon studies still haven't found a connection between soldier suicides and the war.

Via AlterNet (Reuters).

They have no shame at all

Little miss Rambo. Gimme a break.

The Pentagon's propaganda machine fabricated Lynch as a petite female Rambo, holding off the enemy after her vehicle was hit by a rocket. In fact, the attack left her unconscious and unable to fight.

Don't get me wrong here. She put her fucking ass on the line for Bush and his thugs. Her ordeal wasn't minor by any measure and she is a hero, but...

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Pentagon to End Talon Data-Gathering Program

Yay! But...

as currently constituted

Hmmm. Makes ya wonder, huh?

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Pentagon Bomb Squad Under Fire

Does this not sound exactly like a Bush operation? Is anyone with competence in charge? Stoopid question I know.

After six billion dollars and over three years, the Pentagon is finally going to examine the office that is supposed to help solve the improvised bomb problem. More telling, one of the people tapped to head the review was a vocal war critic early on. Congress was already casting a suspicious eye towards the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO). Now, it seems, some in the Defense Department have grown frustrated, too.

Uh, I think we got us a problem with those fucking IEDs. Duh! Maybe its time we look into that.

And is it just me who finds it interesting four soldiers would be so nonchalant about an IED explosion near them?

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H/T 76003.1414

Must read IMHO

Trust me. I'm never wrong. A snippet.

The presiding judge in the José Padilla case has held that the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a speedy trial does not protect American citizens from being indefinitely incarcerated by the Pentagon.

Padilla had filed a motion to dismiss the case on the ground that the federal government had denied him his right to a speedy trial. Padilla has been in custody since May 2002 and his trial, which is scheduled to begin in April, is not being held until some five years later.

From May 2002 until January 2006, Padilla was held in U.S. military custody as an “enemy combatant” in the “war on terror.” In January 2006, the Pentagon chose to transfer custody of Padilla to the U.S. Justice Department, which had indicted Padilla on terrorism charges in U.S. District Court. (Ever since 9/11, U.S. officials have had the option of treating people suspected of terrorism either as “enemy combatants” or as federal-court defendants.)

Last Friday, the presiding judge in the case, Marcia Cooke, denied Padilla’s motion to dismiss. The judge held that when a person, including an American citizen, is held in custody by the Pentagon as an “enemy combatant,” the time doesn’t start running with respect to his right to a speedy trial. It begins running, she held, only when he becomes part of the federal criminal-justice system.

Gee, I wonder if the judge’s reasoning applies to the rest of the Bill of Rights as well. Maybe the First Amendment doesn’t apply if it’s the Pentagon that is suppressing speech and assembly as part of its perpetual “war on terror.” Or maybe the Second Amendment prohibits only the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), not the Pentagon, from seizing guns from the American people, as it is doing as part of the “war on terror” in Iraq.

Our 18th-century American ancestors would have found Judge Cooke’s ruling to be ludicrous. If a military department of government is exempt from the restrictions of the Bill of Rights, then the entire executive branch is exempt for the obvious reason: Whenever the government wants to exempt itself from the Bill of Rights, all it has to do is employ the military to do the dirty deed. The purpose of the Bill of Rights was to protect the American people from the federal government, not a particular department of the federal government.

So, how comfortable are you under your new dictatorship? Cuba? How quaint. But their dictatorship is different from yours, right?

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Several large US military projects under fire

Color me completely surprised...not. And, again as always, ya gotta love the GAO.

The Pentagon is facing mounting criticism over the awarding of several large contracts because of deficiencies and irregularities in the procurement of new age military machines.

Thursday, the US Government Accountability Office [GAO], a congressional agency responsible for keeping tabs on federal spending, revealed delays in developing an advanced combat Joint Strike Fighter [JSF] and costs had swollen 12 percent.

"Total JSF program acquisition costs (through 2027) have increased by 31.6 billion dollars," the GAO said. [emphasis mine]

Yes you read that right. The increase was 31.6 billion. They throw around billions like you or I might throw coins into a fountain.

Oh yeah, if they are predicting 31.6 billion now, wouldn't you expect several revisions over the next 20 years?!!!1!!

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March on the Pentagon March 17!

This appears to be shaping up into an impressive protest. Join in if you can.

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"Theater Iran Near Term" (TIRANNT)

Another piece of the puzzle. And this piece goes back a long way.

And don't ya just love that acronym? BTW, who decided battle fields should be called "theaters". True there's violent drama involved, but its hardly make-believe.

Code named by US military planners as TIRANNT, "Theater Iran Near Term" has identified several thousand targets inside Iran as part of a "Shock and Awe" Blitzkrieg, which is now in its final planning stages.

According to the Kuwait-based Arab Times, an attack on Iran under TIRANNT could occur any time between late February and the end of April. This assessment, however, does not take into account the disarray of US ground forces in Iraq as well as the untimely withdrawal of several thousand British troops from the Iraq war theater, many of whom were stationed in Southern Iraq on the immediate border with Iran.

Revealed last April by William Arkin, a former US intelligence analyst, writing in the Washington Post, TIRANNT was first established in May 2003, following the invasion of Iraq.

"In early 2003, even as U.S. forces were on the brink of war with Iraq, the Army had already begun conducting an analysis for a full-scale war with Iran.

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Israel seeks all clear for Iran air strike

File under: This can't be good. Especially coupled with my last post. Its all coming together. Wake up Congress and stop this...NOW!

Israel is negotiating with the United States for permission to fly over Iraq as part of a plan to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, The Daily Telegraph can reveal.

To conduct surgical air strikes against Iran's nuclear programme, Israeli war planes would need to fly across Iraq. But to do so the Israeli military authorities in Tel Aviv need permission from the Pentagon.

Oh yeah, about Iraq's being a sovereign nation? Israel needs the Pentagon's permission? Why not the Iraqi government? Sure, it makes sense to warn the Pentagon before racing across Iraqi sky because you don't wanna get blown out of the air, but permission?

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Must Read IMHO

Its long, but well worth your time. Its over at Balloon Juice.

The Pentagon is planning to send more than 14,000 National Guard troops back to Iraq next year, shortening their time between deployments to meet the demands of President Bush’s buildup, Defense Department officials said Wednesday.

National Guard officials told state commanders in Arkansas, Indiana, Oklahoma and Ohio last month that while a final decision had not been made, units from their states that had done previous tours in Iraq and Afghanistan could be designated to return to Iraq next year between January and June, the officials said.

...


A lengthy call-up to a war in a foreign country would have destroyed my life. I would have lost my job (and spare me the nonsense about people keeping their jobs- I worked for a small company, they would have had to replace me). My academic career would have been put on hold, and I would probably have had to start over again. I also would have earned significantly while on active duty than I did while working my job, and incurred debts paying for rent in a place I was not living, paying insurance/monthly bills on a car I could not drive, etc.

An astute observer might, at this point, say two things. First, are there not programs in place to help with those burdens? The answer, of course, is, “yes.” There are programs to ease the financial burdens of call-ups, to suspend cc and home and car payments until a person returns from duty. But the bills still exist, and do not go away. You just pay them later, and with a significant loss in earning power for the duration of your activation.

Preparing for failure on SURGE™

Could this be thought of as a self-fulfilling prophecy or just monumental skepticism?

Deep within the bowels of the Pentagon, policy planners are conducting secret meetings to discuss what to do in the worst-case scenario in Iraq about a year from today if and when President Bush's escalation of more than 20,000 troops fails, a participant in those discussions told me. None of those who are taking part in these exercises, shielded from the public view and the immediate scrutiny of the White House, believes that the so-called surge will succeed. On the contrary, everyone thinks it will not only fail to achieve its aims but also accelerate instability by providing a glaring example of US incapacity and incompetence.

The profoundly pessimistic thinking that permeates the senior military and the intelligence community, however, is forbidden in the sanitized atmosphere of mind-cure boosterism that surrounds Bush. "He's tried this two times - it's failed twice," speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi said on January 24 about the "surge" tactic. "I asked him at the White House, 'Mr. President, why do you think this time it's going to work?' And he said, 'Because I told them it had to.'" She repeated his words: "'I told them that they had to.' That was the end of it. That's the way it is."

Of course the SURGE™ will fail. That's precisely the reason it should be stopped before it happens. Telling the military it has to work is hardly useful. Its nothing more than wishful thinking and that's a hell of a poor way to conduct foreign policy.

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File under: WTF?

Will this fucking meme ever go away? Al-Qaeda and Hussein were not connected.

Some of the Pentagon's prewar intelligence work, including a contention that the CIA underplayed the likelihood of al-Qaida connections to Saddam Hussein, was inappropriate but not illegal, a Defense Department investigation has concluded. [emphasis mine]

Downplayed the likelihood? There was no likelihood. Anyone knowledgeable about the Mid-East knew Hussein did not support al-Qaeda.

As to whether twisting, fudging and contorting intelligence to suit president idiot is a crime, I don't know what the legal system would say, but its a huge crime to my mind.

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Pentagon official quits over lawyer remarks

Yeah, I'm sure his "resignation" was his idea. He made a stupid mistake and is now paying the price.

A senior Pentagon official has resigned, it was disclosed today, three weeks after he ignited a firestorm of controversy by casting fellow lawyers as dishonorable for offering free-of-charge legal service to U.S.-held captives at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Charles D. ''Cully'' Stimson, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, submitted his resignation Thursday, said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman.

No replacement has been named.

But it comes at a crucial time. The Pentagon is gearing up to announce new charges and stage new war crimes tribunals called military commissions against at least a few of the 395 of so foreigners held in remote Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

And Stimson had been a major behind-the-scenes player, advocating Bush administration policy, shuttling special guests to the base and trying to promote a favorable image of the at-times controversial detention center.

It was unclear where he would go next.

Stimson, 43, is a Navy Reserves JAG officer and former federal prosecutor. He sparked a national legal controversy on Jan. 11, the fifth anniversary of the establishment of the prison camp, with some broadcast remarks on a Washington D.C. radio station, Federal New Radio.

Unprompted, during an interview, he rattled off a comprehensive list of leading U.S. law firms who let lawyers defend detainees -- and said corporate executives ``are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms.''

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Rookie Sen. Claire McCaskill not shy in making her presence felt

I don't know about you, but I love this lady already.

Rookie senator Claire McCaskill couldn't have planned her first Senate subcommittee hearing any better if she'd scripted it herself.

Campaigning for the Senate last fall when she was still the Missouri state auditor, she vowed to go after waste at the Pentagon. So who turns up at her maiden Armed Services subcommittee hearing but the Pentagon's inspector general, who described a culture where buildings were built without cost controls and where contracts were worked out afterward.

"When I read this, I don't know whether to laugh or cry," McCaskill told him. "Does somebody get fired when that happens?"

This is what new blood is all about.

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Pentagon halts sale of F-14 parts

If you were planning to attack another country, wouldn't it make sense to make sure they couldn't keep their war planes in the air? Just asking.

The Pentagon has announced that it is to stop selling surplus parts for the F-14 jet fighter, saying it was the "right thing to do" given US congressional concerns that some parts could land in the hands of Iran.

Iran is the only country still flying the F-14 since the US military retired the plane in July.

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