Tainted Saints

A hearing in Sen. Claire McCaskill’s Contract Oversight subcommittee on contracting in Afghanistan has highlighted some important statistics that provide a window into the extent to which the Obama administration has picked up the Bush-era war privatization baton and sprinted with it. Overall, contractors now comprise a whopping 69% of the Department of Defense’s total workforce, “the highest ratio of contractors to military personnel in US history.” That’s not in one war zone—that’s the Pentagon in its entirety.

In Afghanistan, the Obama administration blows the Bush administration out of the privatized water. According to a memo [PDF] released by McCaskill’s staff, “From June 2009 to September 2009, there was a 40% increase in Defense Department contractors in Afghanistan.  During the same period, the number of armed private security contractors working for the Defense Department in Afghanistan doubled, increasing from approximately 5,000 to more than 10,000.”

At present, there are 104,000 Department of Defense contractors in Afghanistan. According to a report this week from the Congressional Research Service, as a result of the coming surge of 30,000 troops in Afghanistan, there may be up to 56,000 additional contractors deployed. But here is another group of contractors that often goes unmentioned: 3,600 State Department contractors and 14,000 USAID contractors. That means that the current total US force in Afghanistan is approximately 189,000 personnel (68,000 US troops and 121,000 contractors). And remember, that’s right now. And that, according to McCaskill, is a conservative estimate. A year from now, we will likely see more than 220,000 US-funded personnel on the ground in Afghanistan.

The US has spent more than $23 billion on contracts in Afghanistan since 2002. By next year, the number of contractors will have doubled since 2008 when taxpayers funded over $8 billion in Afghanistan-related contracts.

Despite the massive number of contracts and contractors in Afghanistan, oversight is utterly lacking. “The increase in Afghanistan contracts has not seen a corresponding increase in contract management and oversight,” according to McCaskill’s briefing paper. “In May 2009, DCMA [Defense Contract Management Agency] Director Charlie Williams told the Commission on Wartime Contracting that as many as 362 positions for Contracting Officer’s Representatives (CORs) in Afghanistan were currently vacant.” [more...]

Obama’s speech at West Point tonight will be a masterpiece of manipulation. Lee Siegel on how this president has hoodwinked the nation.

Well, what a coincidence. Two days before Obama is set to give a speech at West Point, in which he is expected to announce at least 30,000 more troops for Afghanistan, a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report is released that blames an insufficient number of troops for Osama bin Laden’s escape from American forces in 2001. You could be forgiven for thinking that the chairman of the committee, Sen. John Kerry, is serving his commander in chief’s interests.

The report implies that it was the lack of American soldiers under the Bush administration that was responsible for, in the report’s words, “laying the foundation for today’s protracted Afghan insurgency and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan.” That was Bush’s policy, and since we all know Bush was evil, the opposite policy must be good. The aggressiveness that we associate with Bush is actually, in Obama’s hands, the righteous corrective to Bush’s aggressiveness.

Once again, Obama is using Bush’s counter-example as a lever to sway the public. Yet to an even greater extent than his predecessor, Obama is proving himself an expert manipulator of public opinion, capitalizing on the McChrystal and then the Eikenberry leaks to give the impression of anguished, many-sided deliberations over whether to increase troop levels in Afghanistan. The good cop/bad cop routine with Joe Biden, who dutifully argued against more troops, was breathtakingly cynical. [more...]

The blasts went off less than a minute apart on Sunday, near the ministry of justice and the headquarters of the Baghdad provincial administration close to the Tigris river…

T. Boone Pickens told Congress on Wednesday that U.S. energy companies are “entitled” to some of Iraq’s crude because of the large number of American troops that lost their lives fighting in the country and the U.S. taxpayer money spent in Iraq.

Boone, speaking to the newly formed Congressional Natural Gas Caucus, complained that the Iraqi government has awarded contracts to foreign companies, particularly Chinese firms, to develop Iraq’s vast reserves while American companies have mostly been shut out.

“They’re opening them (oil fields) up to other companies all over the world … We’re entitled to it,” Pickens said of Iraq’s oil. “Heck, we even lost 5,000 of our people, 65,000 injured and a trillion, five hundred billion dollars.”

[Interesting argument. By the same token, if China invaded us and some of their people died in the process, would they then be entitled to our land and water as reparations...? - Ed.]

…Those who seek to dominate our behavior first seek to dominate our speech. They seek to obscure meaning. They make war on language. And the English- and Arabic-speaking worlds are each beset with a similar assault on language. The graffiti on the mud walls of Gaza that calls for holy war or the crude rants of Islamic militants are expressed in a simplified, impoverished form of Arabic. This is not the classical language of 1,500 years of science, poetry and philosophy. It is an argot of clichés, distorted Quranic verses and slogans. This Arabic is no more comprehensible to the literate in the Arab world than the carnival barking that pollutes our airwaves is comprehensible to our literate classes. The reduction of popular discourse to banalities, exacerbated by the elite’s retreat into obscure, specialized jargon, creates internal walls that thwart real communication. This breakdown in language makes reflection and debate impossible. It transforms foreign cultures, which we lack the capacity to investigate, into reversed images of ourselves. If we represent virtue, progress and justice, as our clichés constantly assure us, then the Arabs, or the Iranians, or anyone else we deem hostile, represent evil, backwardness and injustice. An impoverished language solidifies a binary world and renders us children with weapons. 

Read entire article here…

“President Obama announced in March that he would be sending 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. But in an unannounced move, the White House has also authorized — and the Pentagon is deploying — at least 13,000 troops beyond that number, according to defense officials.

The additional troops are primarily support forces, including engineers, medical personnel, intelligence experts and military police. Their deployment has received little mention by officials at the Pentagon and the White House, who have spoken more publicly about the combat troops who have been sent to Afghanistan.

The deployment of the support troops to Afghanistan brings the total increase approved by Obama to 34,000. The buildup has raised the number of U.S. troops deployed to the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan above the peak during the Iraq “surge” that President George W. Bush ordered, officials said.”

Courtesy of This Week with George Stephanopolous and Crooks and Liars:

16 U.S soldiers were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan this week:

Army SGT Roberto D Sanchez, 24 of Satellite Beach, FL
Army SGT Aaron M Smith, 25, of Manhattan, KS
Army SPC Brandon A Owens, 21, of Memphis, TN
Army SSG Thomas D Rabjohn, 39, of Litchfield Park, AZ
Army SPC Paul E Andersen, 49, of Dowagiac, MI
Army CPT Benjamin A Sklaver, 32, of Medford, MA
Army PFC Alan H Newton Jr, 26, of Asheboro, NC
Army MAJ Tad T Hervas, 48, of Coon Rapids, MN
Army SGT Justin T Gallegos, 27, of Tucson, AZ
Army SGT Joshua M Hardt, 24, of Applegate, CA
Army SGT Joshua J Kirk, 30, of South Portland, ME
Army SGT Michael P Scusa, 22, of Villas, NJ
Army SPC Christopher T Griffin, 24, of Kincheloe, MI
Army SPC Stephan L Mace, 21, of Lovettsville, VA
Army PFC Kevin C Thomson, 22, of Reno, NV
Army SPC Kevin O Hill, 23, of Brooklyn, NY

This brings the total number of allied servicemembers killed in Iraq to 4,667, in Afghanistan, 1,453.

During this same week, Iraq Body Count listed 63 war-related Iraqi civilian deaths, and 17 war-related Afghani civilian deaths. Unfortunately, there is no record of the names of these people…

Um, we’re 6 months from surpassing America’s longest war — Vietnam. Do we just not care, anymore…?

For the low, low price of $228 billion and rising. In 13 months, we will surpass the Soviet Union’s miserable debacle from 1979-1989. When will we ever learn…?

So in 1969, Richard Nixon and Golda Meir made an agreement to not acknowledge Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons. Ever since, we have upheld the myth that Israel is utterly defenseless, surrounded on all land-locked sides by big, bad Arabs. Except the reality is, Israel has nuclear weapons, and none of their neighbors do. Ya think that might cause a little tension between Israel and Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and…Iran (who is not technically a neighbor, but is definitely within missile range)?

I like this quote from Netanyahu the best:

“Netanyahu spoke of his confidence that  Obama’s recent remarks on a world free of nuclear weapons would not apply to Israel.

“It was utterly clear from the context of the speech that he was speaking about North Korea and Iran,” the Israeli leader said.”

All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others…

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/10/2009103125440407949.html#