Tag: Military

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The Right’s Target List

Trish

This list was started on Twitter, by Peter Daou:

As I’ve said, the right’s target list speaks volumes: unions, scientists, academics, public broadcasters, health providers, women.

We can think of a few more.

  • Gay people, especially those in long-term, loving relationships who want to marry and/or adopt children
  • Veterans, once they’ve been injured, maimed, or traumatized in defense of our country
  • Children, when they are out of the womb and require food, health care, or education
  • People who adhere strictly to religious faiths, unless it’s Christianity
  • Anyone who wasn’t born an American citizen but yearns to become one
  • Doctors who want to protect children from accidental shootings
  • Mass transit, renewable energy, and anything else that does not involve paving more land for more cars and SUVs

We’ll stop now but please keep this list going. What else do Republicans, tea partiers, and the right want to get rid of?

John McCain on Repealing DADT: Gay People Aren’t Fit to “Live, Eat, Sleep, or Fight’ Alongside Straight Service Members

Trish

If you’re wondering what very poorly disguised homophobia sounds like, check out John McCain. And a little newsflash for the senator: no amount of “studying” and holding hearings will turn back time. The world has changed, Pops, and your opinion of gay people, which apparently includes the idea that they are inherently less able than straight people to control their sexual urges (maybe like the situation you’re more familiar with, being married to one woman but screwing another?) and force themselves on straight people who are not interested in them, is sheer biogotry. And one last thing: I wouldn’t want to live, eat, sleep, or fight alongside you either.

Verbatim

Trish

As president, I have said we’re going to reverse it. I got the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and I got the secretary of defense to say that we’re going to reverse it. Think about what happened in Congress two days ago where you got 56 Democrats voting to debate this issue and zero Republicans. And as a consequence, some of those signs should be going up at the other folks’ events. And folks should be hollering at the other folks’ events because the choice in November could not be clearer.

— Pres. Obama, answering protesters who want to overturn the Clinton-era Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy for gays serving in the military.

It Was Inevitable — Day of the Gamer/Soldier Arrives

Buck Banks

What do you get if you combine an electronic Roomba vacuum cleaner with an X-Box video game? The next generation of military weaponry, operated by 20-something gamer/soldiers with big thumbs, lightning reflexes and a knack for remote-controlled combat.

It’s been a standing parental joke for decades: If only Junior could turn his skills at Halo 3 honed over hundreds of hours to good …. Well, now he can — in the Army.

According to NextGov, for the past year the U.S. Army has been testing robots, unmanned airplanes, sensors and other gear at the White Sands facility in New Mexico, and plans to deploy the high-tech weaponry to combat troops as early as 2011, when it’s likely we’ll still be fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The high-tech systems the Army is testing and refining at White Sands Missile Range are both the remnants of its ambitious and now canceled $160 billion Future Combat Systems program and the core of a new battlefield modernization program the service plans to develop to replace it.

The Army intends to spin out systems developed for FCS as part of the brigade combat team modernization program headquartered at Fort Bliss, Texas, which adjoins White Sands, said Jerry Tyree, director of integration for the program. These include the tracked robot, an aerial robot, tactical and urban unmanned ground sensors, a missile system, and a battlefield network to link them all together.

The service plans to field these systems to seven infantry brigade combat teams between 2011 and 2014 at a cost of less than $2 billion, said Paul Mehney, an Army spokesman.

Of course, first the Army will have to figure out how to provide a battlefield broadband network to operate and coordinate the new systems. Today, communications-equipped Humvees can only deliver about 1.5 megabytes per second while the average speed of a residential broadband connection is 7 Mps.

D.C. Insiders Doubt an Attack on Iran — Don’t Tell the Public

Buck Banks

In recent months the U.S. population has become more “hawkish” according to some polls. A recent Zogby poll found that 53 percent of those polled think the U.S. will mount strikes against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons. I’m not so sure it’s due to increasing hawkishness or more an increasing realization that George W. Bush seems bent leaving a legacy of scorched earth — in healthcare, social services, education and war.

But today’s PollTrack from National Journal gives some insight into the topic from a different angle — Beltway insiders — and the breakdown of opinion between parties might surprise you:

Of the 41 Republican insiders surveyed, over half said a strike was ‘not very likely,’ and one in five called it ‘very unlikely.’

In National Journal’s latest survey of 84 congressional insiders, Republicans were much more skeptical than Democrats of the chances the administration would attack Iran, but few members of either party considered an attack to be “very likely.” Whether they were optimistic about the effectiveness of diplomatic pressure and sanctions or merely distracted by the growing foreign policy challenges in Pakistan, respondents were generally less concerned about Iran than is the public at large.

Of the 41 Republican insiders surveyed, over half said a strike was “not very likely,” and one in five called it “very unlikely.” Asked about the chances of attack, one GOP member dismissed the possibility, saying, “The administration swung its bat in Iraq…. They don’t have the energy, backing or resources to attack Iran.” Another Republican who said the U.S. was not very likely to launch a strike added, “Israel will, however.”

Democrats were more convinced that President Bush would attack Iran, with over half saying that attacks were likely. “They’re that crazy,” said one insider. While 14 percent of Democrats said attacks seemed probable, a 49-percent plurality were less sure, deeming military action only “somewhat likely.” “The administration may bomb or attack by air if Congress is in recess; but no invasion, because we lack the troops for that,” said a Democratic respondent.

What do they know that we don’t know? And why won’t they tell us, their constituents why they think it’s unlikely that Bush won’t attack Iran?

there’s the argument that we don’t have enough troops, but we certainly have enough planes and bombs. And what was that bit about Israel? Are these Republicans confident that the U.S. isn’t going to attack because they know there’s a plan to have Israel be the aggressor? And are the Dems less sure because they’re not in on the plan?

New Gov’t Report: Surge Producing Little Progress in Iraq

Jon Ponder

New York Times:

Attempts by American-led reconstruction teams to forge political reconciliation, foster economic growth and build an effective police force and court system in Iraq have failed to show significant progress in nearly every one of the nation’s provincial regions and in the capital, a federal oversight agency reported on Thursday.

The report, by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, comes as the United States tries to take advantage of a drop in overall violence to create a functioning government here.

Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general, testified about the report to a House Armed Services subcommittee yesterday.

Al Qaeda in Iraq Said to Be Defeated

Jon Ponder

This appears to be credible:

The U.S. military believes it has dealt devastating and perhaps irreversible blows to al-Qaeda in Iraq [AQI] in recent months, leading some generals to advocate a declaration of victory over the group, which the Bush administration has long described as the most lethal U.S. adversary in Iraq.

Of course, it could be White House propaganda to seed good news into the media, however one of the reporters, Thomas Ricks, is the author of “Fiasco,” a book on the Bush administration’s disastrous war planning.

And while the defeat of bin Laden’s franchise group in Iraq is good news for Iraqis and U.S. troops, it is not necessarily a positive development for war advocates, including Pres. George W. Bush who has used AQI as a bogeyman to prolong the fight — as he did in July, addressing a pro-war group in South Carolina:

“It’s hard to argue that Al Qaeda in Iraq is separate from bin Laden’s Al Qaeda when the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq took an oath of allegiance to Osama bin Laden,” Mr. Bush said, referring to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a leader of the affiliated group in Iraq who was killed last year.

Mr. Bush called the two similarly named groups “an alliance of killers,” and said, “No enemy is more ruthless in Iraq than Al Qaeda”…

“We’ll stay on the hunt, we’ll deny them safe haven, and we will defeat them where they have made their stand,” he said. “However difficult the fight is in Iraq, we must win it. And we can win it.”

It is possible that news about the defeat of AQI is the first step in a strategy by the administration to declare victory in Iraq and get out.

Are Chinese Zombies Lurking On Your Computer?

Buck Banks

First it was pet food, then it was lead paint on toys, but the latest toxic import from China might be more dangerous than both of those incidents — computer zombies that inhabit the computers of unsuspecting Americans. The U.S. government knows about it, but will not officially accuse the Chinese.

As of the morning of Sept. 14, there were exactly 735,598 computers in the United States infested by Chinese zombies.

The wave of cyberprobes or cyberattacks against Pentagon networks and government computer systems in France, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom this summer appears to emanate from China, but no one in authority in the Defense Department or any of the other countries that have been victimized seems willing to finger the Chinese government or military as the culprit.

Paul Strassmann — who served as director of Defense information in the early 1990s, the acting chief information officer of NASA from 2002 to 2003, and now serves as a Defense senior adviser — declines to point fingers, either. He prefers, instead, to focus on one startling fact about Chinese activity in cyberspace: As of the morning of Sept. 14, there were exactly (remember, Strassmann is an engineer and likes precision) 735,598 computers in the United States infested by Chinese zombies, he said. Zombies are those small programs that infect computers at the root level and allow the computers to be controlled by remote users.

“This is a fact that should get everyone’s attention,” Strassmann said. Those zombie computers can launch massive denial-of-service attacks, spewing 1,000 messages a second against target computers, he said.

The ostensible purpose of harboring these malicious little programs on U.S. computers would be to use them in denial-of-service attacks against Defense Department computer networks:

Defense experiences millions of cyberscans of the Global Information Grid every day, according to an internal talking paper it prepared in response to news reports this month that China had successfully attacked Pentagon computer systems, including those used by the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

The paper dances around the subject of Chinese culpability and would only go as far as to report, “We have seen attempts by a variety of state- and nonstate-sponsored organizations to gain unauthorized access to, or otherwise degrade, DoD information systems.”

So whatever you do, don’t open that e-mail about Viagra or the one about nice Russian girls because they could be harboring little zombie units just waiting to get into the millions of lines of code that constitute your Microsoft operating system. To check your computer and to monitor the inexorable march of th computer zombies, visit CipherTrust, a company that sells Internet detection and protection products.

New Ads Blame GOP Senators for Continuing Bush’s War

Jon Ponder

The public, including most liberals, blame Congressional Democrat for not ending Bush’s war — despite the fact that majorities of Democrats in both the House and the Senate voted against the war several times earlier this year.

The Democrats’ efforts were quashed in the Senate, however, where a majority of Republican senators continued to rubberstamp the president’s desire for never-ending war in the Middle East.

Now Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI) have launched an ad campaign against key Bush-enablers, GOP Senators Mitch McConnell, Norm Coleman, Susan Collins and Pete Domenici, targeting them, according to an AAEI news release, for “their continued support of the President’s endless Iraq war policy, which leaves our troops in the crosshairs of another country’s religious civil war.”

Titled “Fatigues,” the ad shows children going through mock basic training. It will air in each of the four senators’ states by the Campaign to Defend America, which is part of AAEI.