Disinformation » Military

PTSD And Homicidal Behavior

Good German — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 14:21:52 +0000

Benjamin Colton Barnes

Many commenters on CNN’s website believe this article unfairly conflates PTSD and homicidal behavior. What do you think?

A man opens fire in a national park, killing a ranger who was attempting to stop him after he blew through a vehicle checkpoint.A second man is suspected in the stabbing deaths of four homeless men in Southern California.

Both men, U.S. military veterans, served in Iraq — and both, according to authorities and those who knew them, returned home changed men after their combat service.

A coincidence — two recent high-profile cases? Or a sign of an increase in hostile behavior as U.S. troops complete their withdrawal from Iraq, similar to that seen when U.S. troops returned home from the Vietnam War?

“You’re going to see this more and more over the next 10 years,” said Shad Meshad, founder of the National Veterans Foundation, who has been working with veterans since 1970. “… There’s a percentage that come back, depending on how much trauma and how much killing they’re involved in, they’re going to act out.”

Margaret Anderson, a ranger at Washington state’s Mount Rainier National Park, was shot to death on New Year’s Day. Police believe Benjamin Colton Barnes, who served in Iraq from 2007 to 2009, was responsible for the shooting. After a manhunt, authorities found Barnes’ body face down in a creek in the park.

According to court documents obtained by CNN affiliate KIRO, the woman with whom Barnes was in a custody dispute said she believed he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from his deployment. Barnes was emotionally unstable, vindictive and anger-prone, the woman said, and owned many knives and guns. The woman said she was frightened to be in the same state with him, the documents said.

In California, former Marine Cpl. Itzcoatl Campo is accused of stabbing four homeless men to death. According to the military, Campo was deployed to Iraq during 2008…

Obama Administration Selling Arms to Bahrain

Good German — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:52:56 +0000

Via Common Dreams:

As the Arab Spring unfolded last year, protesters in the streets saw something startling about the tools of repression being used on them. The Humvees, tanks, helicopters were from the US government; the canisters of chemical agents used to attack them said, “Made in the USA.”

Bahrain, home to the US Fifth Fleet and close ally of Saudi Arabia, brutally suppressed the uprising among their citizens. More than 40 pro-democracy protesters were killed and thousands more were arrested and tortured. While speaking out loudly on Libya’s brutality, the Obama administration remained largely silent on Bahrain.

Last fall the Obama administration announced plans to sell Bahrain $53 million worth of military weapons including bunker buster missiles, armored vehicles and wire-guided missiles. The Pentagon said at the time the sale “will improve Bahrain’s capability to meet current and future armored threats. Bahrain will use the enhanced capability as a deterrent to regional threats and to strengthen its homeland defense.”

Congressional opposition to the sale forced Obama to delay the weapons transfer. Now, sources have leaked, the Obama administration is quietly moving forward with the arms sales to the Bahraini monarchy – despite their on-going human rights abuses…

Read more here.

Defense Secretary Panetta Admits Iran Not Developing Nukes

JacobSloan — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:49:22 +0000

Raw Story reports on the banging of the drums of war:

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta let slip on Sunday the big open secret that Washington war hawks don’t want widely known: Iran is not developing nuclear weapons.

Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Panetta admitted that despite all the rhetoric, Iran is not pursuing the ability to split atoms with weapons, saying it is instead pursuing “a nuclear capability.” That “capability” falls in line with what Iran has said for years: that it is developing nuclear energy facilities, not nuclear weapons.

“They cannot continue to do what they’re doing. Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability, and that’s what concerns us.”

Republicans have been beating the drums of war in recent weeks as tensions in the Iranian gulf have soared. Iran has threatened to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil transport hub crucial to global industry, if U.S. warships return to monitor their activities.

Iran said recently that it had created the country’s first ever nuclear fuel rod made from domestic uranium enriched at their own facilities.

Nuclear fuel enrichment is much different from enrichment for weapons. Most commercial nuclear reactors use lightly enriched uranium, which is between 3-5 percent enriched. Weapons-grade uranium must be enriched to approximately 85 percent or more of a key radioactive isotope for it to be usable in an atomic bomb.

George Carlin on PTSD Euphemisms

ralph — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:23:59 +0000

Thanks to Anarchy Pony for the comment on this post:

U.S. Army Asks the American Psychiatric Association to Take the ‘D’ Out of PTSD

Good German — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:16:24 +0000

Do you think this could increase enlistment? Lindsay Wise writes in the Houston Chronicle:

The president of the American Psychiatric Association says he is “very open” to a request from the Army to come up with an alternative name for post-traumatic stress disorder so that troops returning from combat will feel less stigmatized and more encouraged to seek treatment.

Dr. John Oldham, who serves as senior vice president and chief of staff at the Houston-based Menninger Clinic, said he is looking into the possibility of updating the association’s diagnostic manual with a new subcategory for PTSD. The subcategory could be “combat post-traumatic stress injury,” or a similar term, he said.

“It would link it clearly to the impact and the injury of the combat situation and the deployment experience, rather than what people somewhat inaccurately but often assume, which is that you got it because you weren’t strong enough,” Oldham said.

Read more here.

US Soldier Says He Was ‘Told to Lie’ About Iraqi Killings

Good German — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 13:35:32 +0000

A picture taken at the scene of the Haditha killings shows several dead Iraqis who were killed by Marines.

Have they always taught soldiers to piss on dead people, or was it a special directive Cheney and Rumsfeld came up with? Via Al Jazeera English:

A US soldier has told a military jury in California how his commander killed five Iraqi civilians in the western al-Anbar province in 2005 and then asked him to lie about it.

At a trial stemming from one of the Iraq war’s most controversial episodes, Sergeant Sanick Dela Cruz testified on Wednesday, the third day of Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich’s court martial.

Wuterich was Dela Cruz’s squad leader, who Dela Cruz said gunned down the Iraqis after they pulled up in a car near the scene of a bombing in which a US marine had died.

In all, 24 Iraqi civilians including women and children were killed in the revenge attacks – 19 in several houses along with the five men who pulled up in a car in the town of Haditha on November 19, 2005.

Victims unarmed

At the military trial in Camp Pendleton, California, Dela Cruz told prosecutor Lieutenant Colonel Sean Sullivan that he saw the men outside the car on the side of the road.

He testified that the Iraqis did not appear to have any weapons and were not making any quick moves toward the car. He said he then saw a man drop to the ground.”That’s when I saw Staff Sergeant Wuterich kneeling with his gun aimed at the Iraqi. He was by the road holding the weapon in a firing position,” said Dela Cruz, demonstrating that position in the courtroom.

He said he could not recall how many gunshots he had heard. Dela Cruz also said that when he looked back in the direction of the car he did not see any of the men anymore.

“I run through there and crouched on the side of the vehicle. I saw four to five Iraqis dead near the trunk area of the car,” he said.

“I saw Sergeant Wuterich approach the bodies, he shot at them,” said Dela Cruz, adding that Wuterich went around to each corpse and shot it in the upper body from close range.

Revenge killings

“Sergeant Wuterich approached me and told me if anyone asks, the Iraqis were running away from the car and the Iraqi army shot them,” Dela Cruz said.

Dela Cruz, a veteran of three combat deployments, said he later urinated on the mangled head of one of the bodies, adding that he was “regretful” of his actions.

“I was pissed, sir, about what happened (the bombing),” he said…

Read more here.

Somali Rebels Embrace Twitter Terrorism

JacobSloan — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 19:00:37 +0000

El Shabbab, the fundamentalist Islamic insurgency group fighting to control southern Somalia, reject most things Western and/or modern, but ironically have embraced Twitter, garnering thousands of followers. In addition to straightforward updates on battles and territory, the best part is the taunting that goes on between the insurgents and Kenyan military spokesman Major E. Chirchir:

Connecticut’s Cold War Secret

majestic — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 14:19:26 +0000

AP via Fox News:

For more than a decade they toiled in the strange, boxy-looking building on the hill above the municipal airport, the building with no windows (except in the cafeteria), the building filled with secrets.

They wore protective white jumpsuits, and had to walk through air-shower chambers before entering the sanitized “cleanroom” where the equipment was stored.

They spoke in code.

Few knew the true identity of “the customer” they met in a smoke-filled, wood-paneled conference room where the phone lines were scrambled. When they traveled, they sometimes used false names.

At one point in the 1970s there were more than 1,000 people in the Danbury area working on The Secret. And though they worked long hours under intense deadlines, sometimes missing family holidays and anniversaries, they could tell no one — not even their wives and children — what they did.

They were engineers, scientists, draftsmen and inventors — “real cloak-and-dagger guys,” says Fred Marra, 78, with a hearty laugh…

[continues at AP via Fox News]

The Pentagon Seeks Inner Peace

majestic — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 21:47:21 +0000

The Pentagon and peace: not two words you see in the same sentence too often. Wired’s Katie Drummond goes inside the Pentagon’s Alt-Medicine mecca, where the generals meditate:

The general is surprisingly good at meditation. It’s not just the impeccable posture — that might be expected of a man long used to standing at attention. It’s his hands, which rest idly on his knees, and his combat boots, which remain planted firmly on the floor. Over the next several minutes, Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker, the Surgeon General of the Army, will keep his eyes closed and his face perfectly relaxed.

Few in this hotel conference room, where three dozen have assembled to mark the 10th anniversary of the Samueli Institute, a research organization specializing in alternative therapies, are able to match Schoomaker’s stillness.

Even as our first speaker implores that we “close [our] eyes … feel the chair, feel the air, feel the breath going in and out,” this motley crew of professors, bejeweled clairvoyants, military personnel and Einsteinian-haired futurists tap their toes, shuffle papers and ogle paper plates of fruit and croissants.

“Wherever you’ve come from, wherever you imagine you’re going, you’re actually only doing it right now, in this moment.” Our meditation guru for the day, Dr. Wayne Jonas, is not only a retired Army medical officer and former director of the holistic branch of the National Institute of Health. He’s also the leader of the organization we’ve met to celebrate.

Schoomaker is here because he has a health crisis on his hands. And he’s betting on guys like Jonas to help cope with it — despite the obvious institutional schisms between Schoomaker’s organization and this one.

The Pentagon is turning to alternative medicine to help alleviate the devastating symptoms of Post-traumatic stress disorder that afflict more than 250,000 military personnel; soothe the brain trauma that’s left thousands more with tremors, speech impediments and memory lapses; and assuage the chronic pain that lingers after grueling, repeat deployments.

The Samueli Institute might be the Pentagon’s best chance at making alt-medicine work. Or, at least, figuring out if it even stands a chance…

[continues at Wired]

How Private Warmongers and the U.S. Military Infiltrated American Universities

DrLechter — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 01:19:31 +0000

Steve Horn and Allen Ruff recently reported in Truthout:

A matrix of closely tied university-based strategic studies ventures, the so-called Grand Strategy Programs (GSP), have cropped up on a number of elite campuses around the country, where they function to serve the national security warfare state.

In tandem with allied institutes and think tanks across the country, these programs, centered at Yale University, Duke University, the University of Texas at Austin, Columbia University, Temple University and, until recently, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, illustrate the increasingly influential role of a new breed of warrior academics in the post-9/11 United States. The network marks the ascent and influence of what might be called the “Long War University.”

Ostensibly created to train an up-and-coming elite to see a global “big picture,” this grand strategy network has brought together scores of foreign policy wonks heavily invested — literally and figuratively — in an unending quest to maintain US global supremacy, a campaign which they increasingly refer to as the Long War.

MSNBC Finally Has A Good Ad, About the GI Bill (Video)

ralph — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 05:26:32 +0000

EIther hell has frozen over or I have shit my pants. Comments welcome …

UPDATE: NBC has removed this ad off the internet because Disinformation is talking about it …

Ron Paul in Saturday’s Republican Debate (Video)

Aaron Dames — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 20:00:54 +0000

Ron Paul Highlights from Des Moines. He’s got my vote. Does he have yours? (How is this man not ranked number one in the polls yet?)

Quest For The Ultimate Human Killing Machine

majestic — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 13:57:56 +0000

Guilt, tiredness, stress, shock – can specialized drugs help to mute the qualities that make soldiers human, asks Michael Hanlon in the Independent (with thanks to disinfo reader Freeman for the tip):

…The era of The Terminator, the perfect robotic killing machine, is decades away; to date, all efforts to create a humanoid robot that can climb the stairs, let alone fight the Taliban, have been risible. But scientists are reporting breakthroughs with the next-best thing – the creation of human terminators, who feel less pain, less terror and less fatigue than “non-enhanced” soldiers and whose very bodies may be augmented by powerful machines.

Efforts to understand the brain of the soldier and put this knowledge to good use have been going on for some time. Professor Jonathan Moreno, a bioethicist at Pennsylvania State University, studies the way neuroscience is being co-opted by the military. “Right now, this is the fastest-growing area of science,” he says.

The Pentagon is currently spending $400m a year researching ways to “enhance” the human fighter. The defence giant Lockheed recently unveiled its “Hulc” (Human Universal Load Carrier), a science fiction-like, battery-powered exoskeleton that allows a human to lift 100kg weights and carry them at a fast run of 16kph (10mph). The videos of the Hulc in action are truly impressive. Superman strength is one thing, but soldiers still need to sleep. In Afghanistan the average soldier in combat gets only four hours’ rest a day and sleep deprivation is the single biggest factor in reducing fighting performance. Not only are tired soldiers less physically able to fight and run, they make more mistakes with the complex weapons systems at their disposal – mistakes that can prove deadly to themselves and their comrades.

Using chemistry to attack fatigue is, of course, nothing new. Two centuries ago, Prussian soldiers used cocaine to remain alert and Inca warriors used coca leaves to stay alert long before that. Since then, nicotine, amphetamines, caffeine and a new class of stimulants including the drug Modafinil have all been used successfully, to the extent that American soldiers can now operate normally even after 48 hours without sleep. Now the chemists are trying to tweak the molecular structure of this drug so that it will switch off the desire for sleep for even longer…

[continues in the Independent]

One Vet Speaks His Mind on Veterans Day @OccupyWallStreet

Camron Wiltshire — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 06:11:20 +0000

Remote Viewers Predict the End of the World? (Video)

phunkychic666 — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 05:18:21 +0000

‘SEAL Target Geronimo’ Claims Bin Laden Kill Mission Took 90 Seconds

ralph — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 23:10:46 +0000

Chuck Pfarrer, a former Navy SEAL and author of SEAL Target Geronimo, offers a different account of those events in early May 2011 on The Dylan Ratigan Show:

U.S. & Israel To Hold Their ‘Largest and Most Significant’ War Games (Video)

imkaan — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 05:24:35 +0000

Via Press TV:

U.S. Assistant Secretary for Political-Military Affairs Andrew Shapiro says the U.S. and the Israeli regime are set to hold their ‘largest and most significant’ joint military maneuvers without offering details about the time and location of the war games.

More than 5,000 U.S. and Israeli forces will take part in the war drills, said Shapiro, in a Saturday speech at the Israeli-sponsored think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). He reportedly did not mention a specific time and location for what observers have described as part of the new U.S.-led publicity campaign aimed at raising the threat level against Iran.

The joint military maneuver will simulate Israel’s ballistic missile system and will allow Washington to ‘learn from’ Tel Aviv’s experience in warfare, the senior American official added.

More: Press TV

The U.S. Military’s Sexual Assault and Rape Epidemic

Good German — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 22:14:04 +0000

Sarah Lazare reports in Al Jazeera:

As the war in Afghanistan passes its ten-year mark, sexual assault runs rampant within the ranks, with an estimated one in three female service members raped during their service, according to at least one peer-reviewed study. This is in a military where women comprise more 11 per cent of active duty service members deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan and more than 15 per cent of the total military, with at least 200,000 active duty women currently serving. This epidemic also affects men: 60 per cent of women serving in the National Guard and Reserve, along with 27 per cent of men, are estimated to have experienced Military Sexual Trauma (MST). Perpetrators rely on a chain of command that appears to offer virtual impunity for sexual assaults committed against lower-ranking service members.

Military reports and Congress-appointed task forces acknowledge that sexual assault within the military is widespread. While the Department of Defense (DoD) has repeatedly said it is attempting to curb the problem, the most recent evidence shows that it has failed to adequately address the spread of this outbreak …

Read more here.

President Obama: All U.S. Troops Out of Iraq by End of Year

Join Or DIE — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 17:07:25 +0000

Via MSNBC:

President Barack Obama announced on Friday that all U.S. troops will leave Iraq by the end of the year. The president made the announcement at a White House briefing following a private video conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

“As promised the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year. After nearly nine years, the war in Iraq will be over,” Obama said.

More than 4,400 American military members have been killed, and another 2,000 wounded since the U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003.

The two countries have been negotiating over whether the United States would leave behind up to several thousand military trainers after year-end, or if all remaining troops would depart as planned by Dec. 31. The main sticking point has been legal immunity for any U.S. forces that remain.

Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet

HAL9000 — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 00:22:24 +0000

Amazing story broken by Noah Shachtman on WIRED’s Danger Room:

A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.

The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military’s Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech’s computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.

“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”

Prisoners Help Build Patriot Missiles

Join Or DIE — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 07:00:07 +0000

File this in the “in case you missed it” news cycle. Why should the government not hire unemployed Americans to do this …? Noah Shachtman reported back in March on the excellent WIRED’s Danger Room:

This [past] spring, the United Arab Emirates is expected to close a deal for $7 billion dollars’ worth of American arms. Nearly half of the cash will be spent on Patriot missiles, which cost as much as $5.9 million apiece.

But what makes those eye-popping sums even more shocking is that some of the workers manufacturing parts for those Patriot missiles are prisoners, earning as little as 23 cents an hour.

The work is done by Unicor, previously known as Federal Prison Industries. It’s a government-owned corporation, established during the Depression, that employs about 20,000 inmates in 70 prisons to make everything from clothing to office furniture to solar panels to military electronics.

One of the company’s high-tech specialties: Patriot missile parts. “UNICOR/FPI supplies numerous electronic components and services for guided missiles, including the Patriot Advanced Capability (PAC-3) missile,” Unicor’s website explains. “We assemble and distribute the Intermediate Frequency Processor (IFP) for the PAC-3s seeker. The IFP receives and filters radio-frequency signals that guide the missile toward its target.”

The Rise Of The Drones

JacobSloan — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:18:11 +0000

Military planners are also pushing for greater autonomy for drones and other unmanned systems. Some are even arguing that the autonomous systems themselves will be better at making the decision about when and where to fire weapons than humans.

New Left Project writes about the inhuman future of how we engage in warfare. Will the decision whether to conduct military strikes eventually be determined by algorithm?

One night last summer Shakeel Khan and his family were at home in North Waziristan when there was a huge explosion. ‘I was resting with my parents in one room when it happened. God saved my parents and I, but my brother, his wife, and children were all killed.’ The children were five and three years old. Khan says, ‘I must support my aged parents now but I earn very little We don’t have enough to reconstruct our house and fear that the drones will strike us again.’ Shakeel Khan and his family, living in a remote part of Pakistan, had become victims of one of the newest weapons on the planet: unmanned drones.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, are aircraft which can be piloted remotely using wireless technology. Most military drones are fairly small and used over distances of a few kilometres for intelligence and reconnaissance purposes. Over the past few years however we have witnessed the rapid rise of the use of armed drones such as the Predator and the Reaper. They are used by US and British forces to launch attacks at great distances while the operators sit safely in air-conditioned trailers over 7,000 miles away in a base near Las Vegas. It is not just the US and the UK. Israel too has used armed drones to launch attacks in Gaza (indeed it’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that the drone wars were conceived in the occupation); Italy has been using drones over Libya; and it is estimated that over forty other countries are now trying to buy or develop their own drones. A recent defense market report predicted that annual global spending on drones would double to $11.5 billion over the next few years.

While supporters of unmanned systems like drones argue they are in effect the same as piloted aircraft, others are beginning to see that by removing one of the key restraints to warfare – the risk to one’s own forces – unmanned systems seem to be making armed attacks much more likely. This year alone US forces have been engaged in armed conflicts in six separate countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan), something that many military experts are saying would not be possible without the use of drones.

Drones are also clearly eroding legal and human rights. In Pakistan and Yemen, for example, the CIA are using drones to undertake assassinations of individuals placed on a so-called ‘high value target’ list. The hi-profile targeted killing of US-born cleric Anwar al-Alwaki this weekend is just the latest example. Human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have condemned such killing and the UN Special Rapporteur on extra-judicial killing has repeatedly called on the US to explain how they justify using drones to target and kill individuals under current international law. Although the UK has never officially confirmed that it operates a High Value Target list, it has hinted that it does and a recent presentation at an MoD conference in Cardiff told the delegates to assume ‘that a HVT list was agreed and maintained.’

As well as targeted killing, drones are being used to deliver what the military call ‘persistent presence’. Without on-board pilots, drones are able to loiter over a particular area for hours, days, and even weeks, enabling weapons operators and intelligence analysts back at base to scrutinise particular areas looking for suspicious behavior and ‘targets of opportunity’. It is suggested that this way of using drones is leading to high civilian casualty rates, and it is perhaps easy to see why. With young servicemen and women subjected to long hours of boredom whilst in control of lethal technology, mistakes are bound to be made. While the secrecy surrounding the circumstances of drone strikes makes these allegations difficult to prove, a NATO enquiry into attack on a convoy in Afghanistan in February 2010, in which 23 civilians were killed, reported that drone operators had ‘downplayed’ the presence of civilians as they wanted an attack to go ahead.

Earlier this year the British MoD admitted for the first time that it had killed Afghan civilians in a drone strike in March 2011. Responding to a parliamentary question from Green Party MP Caroline Lucas about the deaths David Cameron said, ‘I do not think that the answer is to turn our face away…’ Unfortunately the Prime Minister was not suggesting that we should of course face up to our responsibilities to these innocent victims, but was, rather predictably arguing that we cannot turn away from drone technology which, as he put it, is ‘taking out’ the bad guys.

In the US too, officials argue that drones are efficiently and carefully taking out only the ‘bad guys’. John Brennan, a former member of the CIA and currently a senior counter terrorism advisor to President Obama, has been mocked in the mainstream press for arguing in response to questions about drone strikes in Pakistan that ‘…for the past year there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop’. Those claims were shown to be patently untrue by the excellent research work on drone strikes in Pakistan by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. The BIJ working with local researchers, journalists and lawyers in Pakistan have uncovered hundreds of civilian deaths including those of more than 160 children, in drone strikes in Pakistan over the past seven years.

Military planners are also pushing for greater autonomy for drones and other unmanned systems. Some are even arguing that the autonomous systems themselves will be better at making the decision about when and where to fire weapons than humans. Gordon Johnson, formerly of the Joint Forces Command at the Pentagon, for example, commenting on the growth of robotic systems suggested that, ‘they don’t get hungry. They’re not afraid. They don’t forget their orders. They don’t care if the guy next to them has just been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.’ While the technology for fully autonomous systems utilising artificial intelligence is still some way off military planners are pushing ahead with exploring the underlying technology that will increase autonomy of drones.

Many in government and the military see drones as the ‘perfect weapons for a war weary nation on a tight budget,’ as one journalist recently put it. They are much cheaper than traditional piloted aircraft, they enable the military to undertake armed attacks at little or no risk and their use is much easier to keep secret. However, both the military and the drone industry recognise that a major obstacle to the continued use of drones is the ‘public perception’ of drones. They recognize, as they put it, that the public has a ‘natural scepticism’ about the use of unmanned drones. It’s no coincidence then that we have seen a steady rise in stories about how drones and other unmanned systems could potentially be used for good purposes such as search and rescue, wildlife monitoring and environmental surveys; the idea of the ‘killer drone’ needs to be overcome.

How America Planned For An Attack On Britain In 1930

BananaFamine — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 01:42:18 +0000

David Gerrie writes in the Daily Mail:

Details of an amazing American military plan for an attack to wipe out a major part of the British Army are today revealed for the first time. In 1930, a mere nine years before the outbreak of World War Two, America drew up proposals specifically aimed at eliminating all British land forces in Canada and the North Atlantic, thus destroying Britain’s trading ability and bringing the country to its knees.

Previously unparalleled troop movements were launched as an overture to an invasion of Canada, which was to include massive bombing raids on key industrial targets and the use of chemical weapons, the latter signed off at the highest level by none other than the legendary General Douglas MacArthur.

The plans, revealed in a Channel 5 documentary, were one of a number of military contingency plans drawn up against a number of potential enemies, including the Caribbean islands and China. There was even one to combat an internal uprising within the United States.

In the end there was no question of President Franklin D. Roosevelt subscribing to what was known as War Plan Red. Instead the two countries became the firmest of allies during WW2, an occasionally strained alliance that continues to this day. Still, it is fascinating that there were enough people inside the American political and military establishment who thought that such a war was feasible.

Article continues at here.

Protecting Their Prosperity

aaroncynic — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 19:14:22 +0000

Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:

Even though the U.S. military spends more than 6 times that of our next competitor (China), the GOP is still pushing the narrative that any more cuts in spending to the Pentagon’s budget would be “disastrous” and spell “doomsday” for the military. The Hill reports House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif) said he’d even be willing to support tax increases before more cuts to the military’s budget. Predictably, 13 freshmen Republicans on McKeon’s panel, many of which are Tea Party darlings, feel “enough is enough” and believe federal spending cuts need to come from entitlement programs.

McKeon said “It’s time to focus our fiscal restraint on the driver of our debt, not the protector of our prosperity.”

In addition to McKeon’s doomsday forecasting, Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) also voiced concerns earlier this month regarding proposed defense spending cuts. In a letter to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Chambliss warned that a “draconian budget cutting exercise” towards the F-35 fighter program would risk the United States’ advantage in aerial warfare. At present, the U.S. Has a 20 to 1 advantage in airpower over China, even without the most expensive plane in U.S. History.

Much like the Bank of America CEO who has most of his fortune staked in Bank of America stock and signed 30,000 pink slips to bolster profits, the wolves are in charge of the henhouse when it comes to defense spending. Since 1994, Chambliss received nearly $100,000 in campaign contributions from Lockheed Martin’s PAC or individuals from the company, which is the prime contractor for the F-35. McKeon’s top 4 contributors in his reelection campaign this cycle are companies with big defense contracts, including Lockheed Martin.

Is it any wonder why politicians like Chambliss and McKeon ring the doomsday bell every time someone hints at cutting the military’s budget? And while a record number of Americans live below the poverty line, politicians like Buck and Saxby are more than willing to sacrifice what little social safety nets still exist, supposedly in the name of “protecting our prosperity.”

Read the full post at Diatribe Media

CIA-Linked General Poised to Win Guatemalan Presidential Election

Jin_TheNinja — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 07:18:41 +0000

Democracy Now! explores accusations of genocide against Presidential hopeful General Otto Molina Perez, and examines US foreign policy in Latin America with particular regard for the ongoing ‘War on Drugs’:

Army Colonel John Alexander On UFOs

JacobSloan — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 19:46:09 +0000

Former Army intelligence officer Col. John Alexander discusses his efforts to penetrate the mystery surrounding UFOs will serving in the army. (While on active duty he was granted permission to create the military’s only UFO working group.)

Alexander believes UFO’s exists but are not necessarily extraterrestrial, and that there is no grand, sinister, coordinated cover-up by the military structure. His hope is for experts to be able to probe the topic further without being subjected to ridicule or damage to their careers. My conclusion: this man is, in fact, an alien.

Camouflage And The Quest For Invisibility

JacobSloan — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 17:01:29 +0000

The Atlantic traces the history of military disguise in the twentieth century, the breakthrough realization that pixelated, “digital”-looking camouflage patterns work better than the traditional swirly ones, and the future of making people undetectable to the human eye:

Modern military camouflage traces its origins to World War I, when the French army gathered a cadre of artists in three top-secret workshops near the western front. The blotchy smocks they created sparked the popular imagination. Camouflage was not issued widely, though, because of the high cost and low production capacity: every yard of camouflage was a hand-painted work of art.

U.S. marines in the Pacific wore industrially manufactured camouflage during World War II, but its use was limited in Europe because German paratroopers were known for their camouflage uniforms, and American officials didn’t want confusion to cause fratricide. Camo uniforms were more widely issued to U.S. troops in the early 1970s, when jungle prints provided immediate advantages in Vietnam. Then in the late ’90s, the Canadians adopted the next generation of camouflage: they went digital. The Canadian Army’s pattern, called CADPAT (for “Canadian Disruptive Pattern”), replaced swirls with pixel-shaped blocks.

CADPAT looked unlike any natural background a soldier would encounter. The idea had been conceived by Lieutenant Colonel Timothy O’Neill, who founded the U.S. Military Academy’s engineering-psychology program. In 1976, O’Neill painted an armored personnel carrier in a crude block-print pattern he called “Dual-Tex.” The results were astounding. Spotters took significantly longer to find the Dual-Tex vehicle than one with a standard paint job.

The reason has to do with the way the eye and the brain interact. The eye has evolved to conduct two operations simultaneously. Focal vision involves our direct attention, as when the eye centers on words that we’re reading. Meanwhile, ambient vision is constantly processing visual information in our periphery. It’s trained to pick up cues of motion, color, and shape—as when, say, you spot a mouse scampering along the baseboard—and to ignore what it perceives as visual white noise.

Digital camouflage wants the eyes’ ambient system to see it, register it as unimportant, and send no alarm to the brain. Dual-Tex made that happen, by breaking up color and shape at tactical combat distance (50 to 300 meters). It turned the human form into background noise.

Despite its proven effectiveness, the material was shelved by military brass, who refused to believe something so artificial-looking could work. Only after the Canadians went digital (and the U.S. Marine Corps, shortly thereafter) did the Army follow suit in 2004. Around the same time, the first of 390,000 uniforms, Guy Cramer’s debut collection, were issued in Jordan. Word got around.

These days, the next half-step breakthrough in concealment might well be something called “adaptive camouflage” — “materials that can change their color, shape, and brightness, depending on the surrounding environment”. SmartCamo is a fabric that chameleons from dark-green forest to tan-and-dun desert when the wearer operates a dimmer switch. “We’re working on materials that can change their color, shape, and brightness, depending on the surrounding environment,” says Guy Cramer. When he demonstrated it for me (the stuff really works), Cramer half-apologized for the crudeness of the design. “I’ve got a version in the works that adapts automatically, using a light sensor,” he said.

The other technology that shows promise involves so-called metamaterials, fabrics engineered at the nano level to interact with light to produce what’s known as a negative index of refraction. Refraction occurs when a wave—a microwave, a light wave—changes speed. Think of how a drinking straw in a water glass appears to bend at the surface. That’s refraction, produced as light moves from air to water. If scientists can figure out how to manipulate this action and bend light around an object (imagine a stream of water moving around a rock), they might be able to make the object appear to disappear.

Afghanistan: The Endless War for Resources

Abby Martin — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 23:35:33 +0000

Photo: DVIDSHUB (CC)

Abby Martin writes on Media Roots:

Last year marked the tenth anniversary of America’s invasion of Afghanistan, officially making it the longest war in US history. Now that Osama Bin Laden is finally confirmed dead, the federal government’s logic of continuing the occupation remains unclear.

Initially, the Bush administration irrationally insisted that any sovereign nation harboring terrorists was itself complicit in “terror” and therefore open for pre-emptive US military action. This rationale is absurd — just because one criminal might be living inside of a particular country doesn’t make that entire country guilty of the criminal’s crimes.

In 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was quick to tell CNN that US forces had successfully pushed the Taliban and Al Qaeda out of the region, and reports reveal that Osama Bin Laden hadn’t even been in Afghanistan since 2001. Additionally, a White House spokesperson recently admitted that there hasn’t been a terrorist threat in the country for the last eight years.

So what has the US been doing in Afghanistan for the last decade?

War has always been about two things: resources and control. Alongside the supposed surprise discovery of Afghanistan’s $1 trillion wealth of untapped minerals, it’s more than coincidental that before the US invasion, the Taliban along with the UN had successfully eradicated the opium crop in the Golden Crescent. Now 90% of the world’s heroin comes from Afghanistan.

As reported by Global Research:

Heroin is a multibillion dollar business supported by powerful interests, which requires a steady and secure commodity flow. One of the “hidden” objectives of the war was precisely to restore the CIA sponsored drug trade to its historical levels and exert direct control over the drug routes.

Immediately following the October 2001 invasion, opium markets were restored. Opium prices spiraled. By early 2002, the opium price (in dollars/kg) was almost 10 times higher than in 2000.

In 2001, under the Taliban opiate production stood at 185 tons, increasing to 3400 tons in 2002 under the US sponsored puppet regime of President Hamid Karzai.

While highlighting Karzai’s patriotic struggle against the Taliban, the media fails to mention that Karzai collaborated with the Taliban. He had also been on the payroll of a major US oil company, UNOCAL. In fact, since the mid-1990s, Hamid Karzai had acted as a consultant and lobbyist for UNOCAL in negotiations with the Taliban.

In today’s globalized world, one can’t discount the role that multinational corporations play in US foreign policy decisions. Not only have oil companies and private military contractors made a killing off the Afghanistan occupation: big pharmaceutical companies, who collectively lobby over $250 million to Congress annually, need opium latex to manufacture drugs for this pill happy nation.

Read full article by Abby Martin on Media Roots.

Anonymous Releases Defense Contractor’s Drone Data

Good German — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 22:15:36 +0000

Alastair Stevenson reports in the International Business Times:

The hacker collective Anonymous has released a fresh batch of data taken from Vanguard Defense Industries, a Pentagon and FBI contractor.

The data release was revealed via a post on tor2web.org and later publicised on the group’s AnonymousIRC Twitter account. In it the group claimed to have released “1GB of private emails and documents belonging to Vanguard Defense Industries (VDI).”

Anonymous later said the e-mails belong to the contractor’s senior vice president, Richard T. Garcia, and contained information regarding “internal meeting notes and contracts, schematics, non-disclosure agreements, personal information about other VDI employees, and several dozen ‘counter-terrorism’ documents classified as ‘law enforcement sensitive’ and ‘for official use only.’”

A key bit of information highlighted in its release pertained to Vanguard Defense Industries’ ShadowHawk drones, which are used by military, law enforcement and private companies across the world and are loaded with grenade launchers and shotguns. Despite highlighting the ShadowHawk unmanned aerial vehicle, the group offered no clear reason for the attack on Vanguard Defense Industries besides its association with military and law enforcement agencies.

U.S. Has Provided $360 Million To Taliban To Fight U.S.

JacobSloan — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 17:59:43 +0000

Granted, Afghanistan is very corrupt, and $360 million that flowed to criminals and the Taliban is a mere one percent out of the total reconstruction contracts reviewed. Also, consider this a marked improvement from our 1980s policy of giving billions of dollars to Afghanistan’s jihadist forces on purpose. Via Washington Post:

After examining hundreds of combat support and reconstruction contracts in Afghanistan, the U.S military estimates $360 million in U.S. tax dollars has ended up in the hands of people the American-led coalition has spent nearly a decade battling: the Taliban, criminals, and power brokers with ties to both. The losses underscore the challenges the U.S. and its international partners face in overcoming corruption in Afghanistan.