Many Veterans Would Suffer Under Trumpcare

With the 4th of July tomorrow, there will be many Congressional Republicans out and about glad handing constituents at 4th of July celebrations and bloviating about how they "support our troops - even when they don't in fact.  Some will go even further and loudly claim support for America's military veterans even though they are poised to actively harm thousands of veterans if Trumpcare is signed into law.  I have touched on this topic before, but it bears repeating and many in the military and many veterans need to have a wake up call that will have them aware of the danger and just maybe convince them to stop reflexively voting Republican.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the looming harm that many veterans could well fall victim to thanks to their duplicitous Republican "friends" in Congress.  Here are highlights:

As Republicans strive mightily — and perversely — for a health-care system that would increase the uninsured by 22 million people, they should ponder the impact on a particularly deserving group — veterans.

It’s not unexpected that heartless GOP plans would be hard on the vulnerable, but do they realize that includes many who continue to suffer from their service?

These are people largely supportive of Republicans . . Republicans [claim to] honor veterans, but you can’t tell it by their current health-care proposals.

The GOP plans do not directly affect the Veterans Affairs Department’s extensive system of health services. About 7 million vets, however, get their care outside of VA services. After the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, kicked in, the number of vets without insurance dropped by almost 40 percent, according to Sen. Jon Tester (Mont.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, and other committee members.  Republicans would reverse that trend. 

Tester and his Democratic colleagues said the Senate bill could:

·        Result in nearly 1.75 million disabled and low-income veterans losing Medicaid coverage
·        Impose a tax on 600,000 veterans, forcing them to pay up to five times more for health insurance
·            Cause more than 5 million veterans difficulty in finding services at rural hospitals
·        Generate increased mental health-care fees for the many veterans who suffer post-traumatic stress from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam
·        Result in up to 7 million veterans losing tax credits to help pay for medical care
·        Cause about 7 percent of veterans to lose access to care for opioid or other substance abuse problems.

In five recent polls, the approval ratings for the Republican health-care plan ranged from a miserable 16 percent to a pitiful 30 percent, sometimes with a significant percentage undecided.

“This plan, written in secret, will devastate thousands of elderly, disabled and rural veterans who go outside of the VA for all or some of their health care,” Tester said. . . . . He was joined in outrage by Democratic Sens. Patty Murray (Wash.), Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), Joe Manchin III (W. Va.), and Sherrod Brown (Ohio).

“Our country makes a promise to take care of the men and women who serve, but Trumpcare would do just the opposite,” Murray said.

Added Blumenthal: “Every Member of Congress who plans to support this bill needs to imagine looking a veteran in the eye and telling them why their mental-health care for PTS (post-traumatic stress) has been halted, or why they can no longer afford treatment for traumatic brain injury sustained while serving their country.”

Again, the moral bankruptcy of today's Republican Party is nearly complete.

The Perversity of Trump and the Republican Party

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I know that I sound like a broken record when it comes to bemoaning and condemning what the Republican Party has become.  The election of Der Trumpenführer is but the culmination of two decades or more of descent into moral bankruptcy.  Throughout this descent we have witnessed never ending hypocrisy as the Republican Party falsely claims to be the party of Christian values, voices false concern about the average citizen, and, of course, pretense that it supports our men and women in uniform, and our military veterans.  Nothing could be farther from the truth if one looks at the actual facts and changes the channel from Fox New, a/k/a Faux News.  Like the Christofascists who have hijacked the party base, the safest bet nowadays is to assume that if a Republican elected officials lips are moving, he/she is lying.  Things truly have gotten that bad.  The newly released Senate Republican "healthcare reform" bill epitomizes the perversity of the GOP.  In deed, how "decent people" not driven by racism, religious extremism, greed and/or hatred of others can vote Republican makes me question their morality. 

For newer readers, many may not know of my son-in-law's story of being badly injured in Afghanistan while on his third tour in that hell hole of a country. His recovery was remarkable and he is now back in college securing a new degree that will allow him to give back to others the type of care that helped him make it through his nightmare experience.  His experience and meeting a number of his friends, some of whom were no where near as lucky as he was, has made me very conscious of the GOP's broken promises to veterans. He steered me to a piece that examines the huge number of veterans who will be harmed under Trumpcare/Ryancare.  It's the ultimate betrayal of those who sacrificed so much for their country - far more than the most of the foul Republicans in Congress ever will.  The article here is a must read.  So too is Andrew Sullivan's latest assessment of Trump and the GOP.  First these highlights from how are veterans will be harmed:

A new analysis by the Center for American Progress finds that 441,300 veterans would lose Medicaid coverage by 2026 under the plan of President Donald Trump and House Republicans to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The Senate proposal, crafted behind closed doors, contains even larger Medicaid cuts in the long term than the House plan—cuts that would ultimately result in more veterans losing Medicaid coverage. Moreover, like the House bill, the Senate plan allows states to make changes to essential health benefits, which would reduce current protections for veterans with pre-existing conditions—including service-connected disabilities such as spinal cord injuries, amputations, and post-traumatic stress disorder—and lead to steep increases in medical costs, harming American veterans and their families.

Contrary to common misperceptions, the majority of the nation’s 20 million veterans do not get their health care coverage from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs but instead depend on other types of insurance. This includes Medicaid, which currently covers nearly 1.8 million American veterans.

The cuts not only break President Trump’s pledge to support veterans, they also disproportionately harm voters in the areas that most strongly supported him. New CAP analysis reveals that in the counties Trump won in the 2016 presidential election, 10 percent of adults are veterans—45 percent more than the share who are veterans in counties Trump lost.

The message to veterans and the members of the military: stop reflexively voting Republican.  It is NOT in your best interest.  Hollow sound bites about supporting our troops need to be ignored. Actions, not words, are what need to be watched.   But as Sullivan notes, the perversity of today's Republican Party and, of course, Der Trumpenführer, goes far beyond the betrayal of veterans.  Here are excerpts from Sullivan's piece:

I was mulling, as one does, over this presidency, and something crystallized in my head that I had not quite grasped before. Its policies are best described as simply perverse. The new Senate health-care bill is just the latest shining example. . . . it has no vision of how it wants health care to be organized; the loss of health care for the working poor will be most intense in Republican districts; . . . For good measure, by ending many of the taxes in the bill that make it work, and by removing the individual mandate, it risks sending the insurance markets into a deeper crisis.

So what on earth is the point? For Trump, it seems to me, the whole point is to have a “win.” He doesn’t give a shit about what the bill actually contains. He’ll just lie about it afterward and assume his cult followers will believe him. For Ryan, it’s just a way to make a future tax cut for the superrich more budget-friendly, while pushing the political costs of shredding Medicaid onto some future sucker.

And then you think about those tax cuts Ryan wants so badly. We are told that these cuts will spark so much growth they will pay for themselves — and more. And yet if there is one thing we really do know by now, it is that this strategy has spectacularly failed and failed again to work. Reagan’s tax cuts left the U.S. with an unprecedented peacetime deficit; George W. Bush inherited a small surplus and, after his tax cuts didn’t spur higher growth, handed Obama a Treasury close to bankrupt. In Kansas, the exact same strategy has incurred so much debt that a supermajority of the legislature, led by Republicans, have junked it. To pursue it a third time on a national scale is the definition of madness.

We are also living in an era of extreme inequality. . . . the policy of the Republicans is to further increase such inequality to levels beyond even the robber-baron era. Again, the only word for this is … perverse.

Ditto, for that matter, the idea that coal is the future of energy, and that climate change is a hoax. . . . It was an utterly pointless way to isolate the U.S. from the rest of the world, and cede leadership to China. There was really no point at all in trashing the modest opening to Cuba under Obama, poisoning relations, and then just fiddling with the details.

Elsewhere in foreign policy, we have just begun a deepening of the war in Afghanistan, the longest in American history, with no strategy in place. . . . . The opening to Iran gave the U.S. far more leverage in the region, balancing out our previous Sunni commitments with a Shiite counterweight. Now Trump has fully committed the United States to one side of an intra-Muslim divide, while trashing Qatar, which houses the most important military base in the entire region. Again: perverse.

One of the ironies of the impact on veterans is that Texas, a red state that loves to huff and puff about patriotism will see the larges number of veterans harmed by Trumpcare if it passes.

Pentagon Investigates Doctored "Intelligence" on ISIS

Living in an area with a heavy military population, I and others are supportive of our nation's military and not just in terms of the lip service so prevalent among Republicans who talk about supporting the military even as they cut veterans benefits and send our troops to war without property equipment.  All of this said, I remain highly suspicious of senior commanding military personnel who whether it be in the Vietnam era or now in the Middle East fiasco ALWAYS claim to be making better progress than is the reality and who ALWAYS claim that with more time, men and money they can do the impossible regardless of objective reality and/or that local military personnel in countries such as Iraq are capable of defending themselves.  The result is that bad decisions are made and American lives and treasure are wasted.  Now, the Pentagon is investigating doctored intelligence reports that sought to hide the military's failed "success" with fighting ISIS.  Here are highlights from the New York Times:

When Islamic State fighters overran a string of Iraqi cities last year, analysts at United States Central Command wrote classified assessments for military intelligence officials and policy makers that documented the humiliating retreat of the Iraqi Army. But before the assessments were final, former intelligence officials said, the analysts’ superiors made significant changes.

In the revised documents, the Iraqi Army had not retreated at all. The soldiers had simply “redeployed.”

Such changes are at the heart of an expanding internal Pentagon investigation of Centcom, as Central Command is known, where analysts say that supervisors revised conclusions to mask some of the American military’s failures in training Iraqi troops and beating back the Islamic State. The analysts say supervisors were particularly eager to paint a more optimistic picture of America’s role in the conflict than was warranted.

In recent weeks, the Pentagon inspector general seized a large trove of emails and documents from military servers as it examines the claims, and has added more investigators to the inquiry.

The electronic files seized in the Pentagon investigation tell the story of the group’s [ISIS] rise, as seen through the eyes of Centcom, which oversees military operations across the Middle East.

The exact content of those documents is unclear and may not become public because so much of the information is classified. But military officials have told Congress that some of those emails and documents may have been deleted before they had to be turned over to investigators, according to a senior congressional official, who requested anonymity to speak about the ongoing inquiry. Current and former officials have separately made similar claims, on condition of anonymity, to The New York Times.

The committee is not just examining reports about Iraq, Syria and the Islamic State, but also about Afghanistan and other areas under Centcom’s purview. The insurrection inside Centcom is an important chapter in the story of how the United States responded to the growing threat from the Islamic State. This past summer, a group of Centcom analysts took concerns about their superiors to the inspector general, saying they had evidence that senior officials had changed intelligence assessments to overstate the progress of American airstrikes against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

The analysts said problems in Iraq were rooted in deep political and religious divides that could not easily be solved with a military campaign, current and former officials have said. Yet Centcom’s official posture remained generally upbeat. 

It is not clear whether the Centcom assessments significantly changed the Obama administration’s views about ISIS. While Centcom was largely positive about American gains, other agencies have been more pessimistic. The White House has generally been measured in its assessments.

[T]he prospect that senior officials intentionally skewed intelligence conclusions has raised questions about how much Mr. Obama, Congress and the public can believe the military’s assessments.

On Thursday, Foreign Policy reported that a group of Republican lawmakers will be focusing on whether Centcom also skewed intelligence assessments about Afghanistan. 

In addition to determining whether changes were made to intelligence reports — and if so, who ordered them — the investigators, like the staff members of the House intelligence committee, are studying reports from other intelligence agencies produced at the time to determine what was actually occurring in Iraq and Syria when the reports were written.

Sadly, senior military commanders never seem to be held to a level of accountability that is warranted given their ability to throw away the lives of our troops.    If reports were falsified, people need to lose their jobs - and their retirement packages.

The Catastrophe Netanyahu Is Courting

One of the rules of the world is that he who has the gold makes the rules. In the case of American-Israeli relations, Israel is a client state propped up with American money and arms no matter how much bluster we hear otherwise.  The other rule is that politicians can only ignore public opinion for so long before there will be a revolt against agendas that do not fit what the public wants.  The truth is that most Americans do not want another war in the Middle East.  To date, every war launched by the Republicans and the neocons has made matters worse, not better, except for defense contractors and arms manufacturers.  That reality is lost on both Netanyahu and his GOP allies.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at where they are trying to take America and the danger it poses to Israel as well.  Here are excerpts:

[Netanyahu] has forced a true low point in U.S.-Israel relations. As has been often observed, he’s turning Israel into a partisan issue—up to somewhere around a quarter of congressional Democrats are refusing to attend the speech. That’s a crack, a big one. If he remains prime minister after the March 17 elections, the fissures between Netanyahu’s government and Barack Obama and the Democrats will only widen.

Congressional support for Israel is due for a reconsideration. As Scott McConnell wrote last month in The American Conservative (an anti-neocon magazine), Congress “does not come close to representing the views of the American people” on Israel, either with respect to Iran or the occupation. 

Now, Congress can go a long time without representing American public opinion. On certain big-money issues like banking, that’s all Congress does. But on most issues, Congress at least has to act like it’s listening to the American people, and on foreign policy questions in particular, Congress, and for that matter the president, can’t usually go where the American people don’t want to go.

So one of these days, in two years or five or six, congressional fealty to Israel will cease being so bipartisan and reflexive—and that will be entirely an outcome of Netanyahu (and John Boehner’s and Ron Dermer’s and AIPAC’s) making.

But all that is just politics. Netanyahu is creating a much bigger problem here. Ultimately, he wants war with Iran. And American neoconservatives want it, too.  Few of them will say so (although some do—see below). But that’s what they want, and we need to be clear about it.

Think about it. What is the alternative to negotiating with Iran? Well, there is only one: not negotiating with Iran. And what are the possible courses of action under that option? At the end of the day, there are two. Number one, let Iran do what it wants. Number two, ultimately, be willing to start a war to block Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Knowing the neocons’ world view as I’m sure you do, how willing do you think they’d be to let Iran do what it wants? Correct. Not very. That leaves war. . . . . with a country of 77 million people, a huge army, and formidable wealth. As a point of comparison, Iraq in 2003 had about a third of Iran’s population.As noted above, not many on the right are going to be honest enough to speak openly of war. The Republican presidential candidates, for example, don’t want the American public to think they’re crazy, so they won’t admit this . . .

Netanyahu wants, at the very least, a bombing campaign. . . . .  Do Netanyahu and Bolton really expect that Iran would not retaliate in such a case? Of course it would retaliate. And far more likely against Israel than against the United States. But the United States would be dragged into it, which is exactly what Bolton and Cotton told CPAC we should all want.

It seems to be what Netanyahu wants, too. It’s what he wanted back in 2002, when—then as a private citizen—he went to Congress and made the case for war against Iraq.

He and his Republican backers are leading us down a potentially catastrophic path. And catastrophic not least for Israel itself: If this path someday reaches its logical end point, it won’t be only liberal Democrats in America who’ll conclude that we should just let Israel fight its own battles.

Telling the Truth: Will the GOP Admit That The Iraq War Was Wrong From the Start?

Photo: The remains of three US servicemen, their equipment, and a Humvee lay scattered on a dirt road after a massive IED vaporized their vehicle on August 4, 2007 in Hawr Rajab, Iraq. By Benjamin Lowy/Getty Images

CAUTION: The image above is graphic.  

Regardless of what happens to Chris Christie as Bridgegate continues to spiral out of control, a larger issue facing the GOP in the context of the 2016 presidential election is whether or not the presidential candidates and the party as a whole will concede that the Iraq War was a disaster and that the rush to war was an unmitigated mistake.  To a lesser extent, the question will also haunt Democrat candidate(s) who voted for the war.  Why is the issue important?  Because (i) if the error cannot be recognized, the danger is greater that a similar fool's errand may happen in the future, and (ii) because more and more Americans, including veterans who fought and/or were grievously wounded in Iraq, are coming to the conclusion that they fought and friends died for nothing.  Andrew Sullivan has two posts that look at the two pieces of the issue.  Here are highlights from the first:

Jeremy Lott hopes GOP presidential hopefuls will face reality:

Any Republican seeking nomination for the 2016 presidential election should at a minimum be willing to admit Iraq was a mistake.  It was an error that cost us upwards of $1.5 trillion, thousands of U.S. lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, while seriously hindering our efforts to track down the real culprits of September 11. (The war, incidentally, helped pave the way for a Nancy Pelosi-controlled House and a Barack Obama-controlled White House, as well.)

Larison sees this as improbable:

There are some obstacles to what Lott proposes. Chief among them is the difficulty that many hawks in the party still truly don’t accept that the Iraq war was a mistake. Despite the fact that by virtually any measurable standard the Iraq war was a senseless waste of lives and resources, they don’t consider this to be the truth, so they won’t greet it with relief. At best, many hawks will agree that the there were flaws in the execution, but they remain convinced that the original idea was sound.

Readers know how terrible a mistake this was and is, in my judgment. Listening to what passes for “debate” about the continued sectarian warfare in Iraq – which never ended, and was never resolved by the surge, and is the core reason why Iraq as a country remains a democratic impossibility – has been a sobering moment. Men like John McCain have obviously not internalized for a millisecond the awful error they made. Their response has been either utter denialism or silence – which was roughly their position throughout the entire, horrifying experience.

And here are highlights from the second post:

William McNulty blames the high suicide rate among young veterans on the “amorphous nature” of the wars they fought in:

No amount of counseling can dispel the gnawing sense that one sacrificed for a bogus cause. From this stems despair — from a sense that so much of one’s life was given for so little purpose. Today’s vets do not see themselves as saviors, they cannot identify whom they defeated, they are not certain that they truly liberated anyone, and they fought, at best, a holding action against an ill-defined threat. Progress has been absent.

Joe Klein seconds McNulty:

McNulty makes an important distinction: between depression and despair. Depression is one of the prevalent symptoms of post-traumatic stress. It is a natural reaction to the unimaginable terror that comes with combat, the survivor’s guilt that comes with the loss of friends, the frustration that comes with the loss of a limb or a traumatic brain injury. Despair is more profound: it comes when you’ve experienced any or all of those things–and you come to the conclusion that it was all in vain, that there was no earthly reason to have invaded Iraq in the first place or extended the war in Afghanistan beyond the counter-terrorist effort to snuff out Al Qaeda.

 We owe it to those who died or returned maimed for life to make sure that such a disastrous debale never, ever happens again.  As noted before, one way to insure this is to put George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and others on trial for war crimes.  So far, no one has been held accountable.

DISCLOSURE: One of my daughters' husband was badly wounded by an IED.  Fortunately, he has largely recovered and is posed to leave the military in a few months.  A number of his friends were not so lucky.  We do not discuss the event and aftermath, but it was grueling for both him and my daughter.  Yet, ultimately, they were the lucky ones.  Thousands of young Americans were not so lucky.  A true patriot cannot silently let those responsible get away with no accounting for their misdeeds in sending America to war, not to mention authorizing the commission of war crimes as well.

Obama Considers Faster Pullout in Afghanistan

As regular readers know, I have been a constant critic of America's fool's errand in Afghanistan first launched and then utterly botched by Chimperator Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney.  Anyone with knowledge of Afghanistan's history over the last 2,500 years should have known that pacifying the country and "nation building" were doomed to fail.  Despite this reality, thousands of young Americans have lost their lives (others have suffered serious wounds) for nothing and America has squandered huge sums of money that could have been better used rebuilding America's infrastructure.  Now, Barack Obama is considering an accelerated withdrawal  of all troops from that benighted basket case of a nation.  The New York Times has details.  Here are excerpts:

Increasingly frustrated by his dealings with President Hamid Karzai, President Obama is giving serious consideration to speeding up the withdrawal of United States forces from Afghanistan and to a “zero option” that would leave no American troops there after next year, according to American and European officials. 

Mr. Obama is committed to ending America’s military involvement in Afghanistan by the end of 2014, and Obama administration officials have been negotiating with Afghan officials about leaving a small “residual force” behind. But 

Mr. Karzai promptly repudiated the talks and ended negotiations with the United States over the long-term security deal that is needed to keep American forces in Afghanistan after 2014. 

A videoconference between Mr. Obama and Mr. Karzai designed to defuse the tensions ended badly, according to both American and Afghan officials with knowledge of it. Mr. Karzai, according to those sources, accused the United States of trying to negotiate a separate peace with both the Taliban and their backers in Pakistan, leaving Afghanistan’s fragile government exposed to its enemies.

The option of leaving no troops in Afghanistan after 2014 was gaining momentum before the June 27 video conference, according to the officials. But since then, the idea of a complete military exit similar to the American military pullout from Iraq has gone from being considered the worst-case scenario — and a useful negotiating tool with Mr. Karzai — to an alternative under serious consideration in Washington and Kabul.

American commanders in Afghanistan have generally pushed to keep as many American troops in the country as long as possible, creating friction with White House officials urging a speedier military withdrawal.   . . . .  with American relations with the Karzai government continuing to deteriorate, it is unclear whether the Pentagon and American commanders in Afghanistan would vigorously resist if the White House pushed for a full-scale pullout months ahead of schedule.

As it stands, the number of American troops in Afghanistan — around 63,000 — is scheduled to go down to 34,000 by February 2014. The White House has said the vast majority of troops would be out of Afghanistan by the end of that year, although it now appears that the schedule could accelerate to bring the bulk of the troops — if not all of them — home by next summer, as the annual fighting season winds down. 

And Afghanistan would probably see far less than the roughly $8 billion in annual military and civilian aid it is expecting in the coming years — an amount that covers more than half the government’s annual spending. 

Note how military leaders want more time and high troop levels despite the fact that virtually nothing permanent has been accomplished.  When my son-in-law was seriously wounded, he had to wait to fly out of the largest American airbase because it was too dangerous for aircraft to take off due to Taliban anti-aircraft fire.  This speaks volumes about how little has ever been accomplished.

The Ugly Truth About American War Crimes

As noted before, one of my biggest disappointments with Barack Obama is that he has refused to open the lid on American war crimes and torture that were official policy under Bush/Cheney.  The provisions of the Geneva Conventions were knowingly and deliberately ignored and violated and in the process America lost all moral standing to ever criticize other nations for human rights abuses.  Worse yet, war criminals such as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have been allowed to go free of any consequences.  Andrew Sullivan sums the situation up this way:

The country still won’t come to terms with the fact that the US perpetrated a global campaign of war crimes, torture, dehumanization and cruelty for seven years, and its impact is still being felt. It is felt not simply among all those dictators – from the master-torturer, the King of Jordan, to the Chinese and Russians, beaming broadly, knowing that the US has now no moral legs to stand on, especially since Obama’s decision to ignore binding Geneva Convention laws that require prosecution of the guilty.

But there is a human toll as well: not just among those still living with PTSD from the brutal torture sessions, but from the perpetrators as well. Many did so with qualms, under orders; others, given the signal from the commander-in-chief that torture was now an American value, took to it with relish and occasionally desperation. One reluctant participant soldier, just killed himself – yet another one – because he couldn’t live with what he had actually been ordered by his president to do.

Sullivan is referring to the suicide of  Daniel Somers who was a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom.  In his suicide note, Somers gives an indication that things that were done are far worse than most Americans realize.  Somers and others like him simply found it impossible to go on living knowing what they had done under orders.  Here are portions of Somers' suicide note via Gawker:

On June 10, 2013, Daniel wrote the following letter to his family before taking his life. Daniel was 30 years old. His wife and family have given permission to publish it. 
 

I am sorry that it has come to this.

The fact is, for as long as I can remember my motivation for getting up every day has been so that you would not have to bury me. As things have continued to get worse, it has become clear that this alone is not a sufficient reason to carry on. The fact is, I am not getting better, I am not going to get better, and I will most certainly deteriorate further as time goes on. From a logical standpoint, it is better to simply end things quickly and let any repercussions from that play out in the short term than to drag things out into the long term.

You must not blame yourself. The simple truth is this: During my first deployment, I was made to participate in things, the enormity of which is hard to describe. War crimes, crimes against humanity. Though I did not participate willingly, and made what I thought was my best effort to stop these events, there are some things that a person simply can not come back from. I take some pride in that, actually, as to move on in life after being part of such a thing would be the mark of a sociopath in my mind. These things go far beyond what most are even aware of.

To force me to do these things and then participate in the ensuing coverup is more than any government has the right to demand. .  .  .  .  And for what? Bush’s religious lunacy? Cheney’s ever growing fortune and that of his corporate friends? Is this what we destroy lives for

The fact is that any kind of ordinary life is an insult to those who died at my hand. How can I possibly go around like everyone else while the widows and orphans I created continue to struggle?

 Bush and Cheney in their megalomania and religious insanity simply did not care what was done to others.  The same holds for many in the "Christian" Right who view non-Christians as not even human.  And, apparently, Obama is little better.  How else to explain his refusal to see that war criminals be brought to justice.  Americans need to know the horrors done in their name.  By doing nothing, we all end up with blood on our hands.  I find myself less than proud to be an America as any decent moral person should be.

Afghanistan - The Fool's Errand Continues

My oldest daughter and her husband - who is still recovering from wounds he received in Afghanistan the week prior to last Thanksgiving - visited last week.   While he was here, my son-in-law drove to Walter Reed Hospital near Washington, D.C., to see a friend and former roommate who had lost both legs to an IED explosion.  Words cannot express my support and concern for our men and women in uniform.  Likewise, words cannot properly describe my contempt for those who sent America nation to war in a fools errand in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Would that these hubris filled bastard could suffer the same grievous wounds that they have brought upon others.  And unfortunately, the needless deaths and injuries continue.  America needs to leave Afghanistan NOW.  The Seattle Times reports on the latest needless American deaths.  Here are highlights:

Militants killed six Americans, including a female diplomat, and an Afghan doctor Saturday in a pair of attacks in Afghanistan. It was the deadliest day for the United States in the war in eight months.
The violence — hours after the U.S. military’s top officer arrived for consultations with Afghan and U.S.-led coalition officials — illustrates the instability plaguing the nation as foreign forces work to pull nearly all their combat troops out of the country by the end of 2014.

The attacks came just days after insurgents stormed a courthouse, killing more than 46 people in one of the deadliest attacks of the war, now in its 12th year.

The three U.S. service members, two U.S. civilians and the doctor were killed when the group was struck by an explosion while traveling south to donate books to students in a new school in Qalat, the provincial capital of Zabul province, officials and the State Department said.

Officials said the explosion occurred just as a coalition convoy drove past a caravan of vehicles carrying the governor of Zabul province to the same school event. It is unclear whether the attack was aimed at the coalition forces or the governor.

Another U.S. civilian was killed in a separate insurgent attack in eastern Afghanistan, the U.S. military said in a statement.

It was the deadliest day for Americans since Aug. 16, when seven U.S. service members were killed in two attacks in Kandahar province, the birthplace of the Taliban insurgency. Six were killed when their helicopter was shot down by insurgents and one soldier died in a roadside bomb explosion.
Violence in Afghanistan is expected to pick up in the coming weeks and months, as the warm weather spreads. Further, as the NATO troops who have secured the country for the past decade pack up and leave at the end of 2014, the Taliban are expected to intensify efforts to destabilize the Afghan security forces, who are taking over the battle.

The next time you hear some bombastic politician claiming to "support our troops," ask him or her whether they supported the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.  If they say "yes," they need to be called out as liars in so far as they claim to support our troops.  You do not send out young men and women out on an unwinnable fool's errand and get off claiming that you support the.

The Hagel Witch Hunt - The GOP Has Learned Nothing

This blog has published a number of posts taking to task politicians who claim that they "support the troops" while on the campaign circuit yet who betray the troops and throw away American lives - and also bankrupt the country - as they seek to go off on one foreign war fool's errand after another.  The totally unnecessary Iraq War and the continuing fiasco in Afghanistan are two prime example.  And in questioning today directed at Defense Secretary nominee Chuck Hagel, the biggest GOP objection to Hagel seemingly is that he (i) calls the Iraq War for the needless disaster that it was and (ii) isn't sufficiently reckless and willing to take the nation into un-winnable wars.    Indeed, one would think the GOP's only concern is to maximize profits to defense contractors.  The lives of American troops?  They simply are not an issue to these members of the GOP.  Perhaps because so many of these assholes don't even have family members in the military in harm's way.   The Daily Beast looks at the GOP effort to crucify Hagel because his isn't enough of a war monger.  Here are highlights:

The contentious Senate hearing for Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel divided starkly along partisan lines, with Republicans attacking their former colleague with the pitchfork zeal of heretic hunters.

Hagel’s calm recitation of consensus catechism on issues ranging from Iran to Israel to nuclear weapons didn’t seem to make any impression on his conservative critics.

This was personal. John McCain repeatedly interrupted his “old friend” and fellow Vietnam Vet with palpable anger, his fury directed at Hagel’s opposition to the Iraq War and the 2007 troop surge. The core offense appeared to be Hagel’s contention that the invasion of Iraq was the worst foreign policy “disaster” since Vietnam – a parallel that infuriates McCain.

Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, a Republican, reinforced his reputation as possibly the worst U.S. Senator with bear-baiting questions like this: “Why do you think that the Iranian foreign ministry so strongly supports your nomination for Secretary of Defense?”

 
Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions doggedly focused on a report by the anti-nuke group Global Zero, which advocates the elimination of nuclear weapons. The report was co-authored by Hagel, four generals and a number of ambassadors. The organization itself has hundreds of international leaders who have signed on to its recommendations, including Reagan’s Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci, Carter National Security Advisor Zbignew Brezinksi, 9/11 Commission Co-Chair Lee Hamilton and General Anthony Zinni. Sessions and other Republican senators kept cherry-picking phrases from the report and ignoring substantive subtlety, despite Hagel’s repeated assurance and demonstrated record in opposing unilateral disarmament and support for modernizing the U.S. nuclear program. This clarification by the authors might help calm any genuine concerns, if they exist.

It made me wonder what Sessions would have said to Ronald Reagan, who advocated for nuclear disarmament more than 150 times, according to his aide Martin Anderson, in statements like this: “I believe we’ve come to the point that we must go at the matter of realistically reducing… if not totally eliminating, nuclear weapons—the threat to the world.”

A Democratic President nominating a Republican to his cabinet is usually seen as bipartisan outreach. But not this time. The reason, I think, is threefold.

First, it reflects the polarization afflicting the Republican party and its intolerance of dissent. Hagel is a small-government conservative but a committed internationalist who is wary of unilateral American over-extension, views that extend from his experience as a twice-wounded enlisted infantryman in Vietnam.

Second, it reflects the tortured legacy of the Iraq War and the contradictions it creates for conservatives who feel compelled to defend that war of choice, predicated on flawed intelligence presented to the American people. Hagel earned the enduring anger of the neo-conservative crowd by openly criticizing the Bush administration for its prosecution of the Iraq war and subsequently opposing the Surge. Defenders of the Bush administration now often try to delink the decision to invade from the decision to double down with the surge as a way of reclaiming the high ground. It is now clear that Hagel was right at least on this count: the invasion of Iraq was an ideologically driven overreach that proved a costly distraction from Afghanistan in terms of both blood and treasure while further destabilizing the region. History, as Hagel noted, will be the ultimate judge.

Third, it reflects the deep animus that still exists for President Obama on the part of some conservatives–so much so that any Republican who consents to serve with him is seen as a traitor to the tribe, a dynamic also seen in the GOP’s primary rejection of Utah governor and former Obama China Ambassador Jon Huntsman, despite being arguably the most fiscally conservative candidate in the 2012 pack. By consenting to serve with President Obama–and therefore creating bipartisan cover for the Democrat’s defense strategy–Hagel has committed an unpardonable sin.

My view?  The next time you encounter a GOP elected official bloviating about "supporting the troops," call them out.  I certainly plan on doing so. They are lying assholes.

The Betrayl of Our Troops Continues - Another Death in America's Longest and Needless War

While politicians in Washington fight over spending, the squandering of money and American lives continues unabated in Afghanistan.  One recent squandered life was that of 25 year old David J.Chambers of Hampton, Virginia (pictured at right).  Chambers was killed by an IED similar to that which severely injured my son-in-law two months ago also in Afghanistan.  Here's what the Virginia Pilot reported:

A soldier from Hampton has been killed while serving in Afghanistan.  Sgt. David J. Chambers, 25, died Wednesday in the Panjwai District of Kandahar Province, the Department of Defense said. He sustained injuries in a mortar attack while on dismounted patrol.

Chambers was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 38th Infantry Regiment, 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. That is under control of the 7th Infantry Division at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in the state of Washington.

Like my son-in-law, Chambers was based out of Fort Lewis and was a member of the Stryker Brigade.   And like so many others who have been sacrificed for nothing meaningful in Afghanistan, Chambers was ultimately sacrificed on the altar of American military and political hubris. Rather than call the Afghanistan War for what it is, namely a fool's errand from the start, the military brass continues to lie and pretend that we are "making progress" and asks for more time, soldiers and, of course money.  A piece in American Prospect looks at the disaster known as the Afghanistan War.  Here are highlights:

In October 2001, George W. Bush told the country he was sending the American military to Afghanistan in order to "bring justice to our enemies." It's safe to say support for the war would not have been as nearly unanimous as it was had he said, "Oh, and by the way, our troops are going to be fighting there for the next 13 years."

Last spring, Afghanistan passed Vietnam (measured by the time between the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964 and the departure of the last Americans from Saigon in 1975) to become America's longest war.

To date, we've spent over half a trillion dollars in Afghanistan, a figure that includes only the direct yearly costs for both military expenditures and civilian aid. It doesn't include the cost of replacing materiel and weapons used in Afghanistan, nor the long-term costs of caring for the thousands of servicemembers who were wounded there. Those factors will add hundreds of billions of dollars to the tally in the years to come. And today, keeping a single servicemember in Afghanistan costs upward of a million dollars per year.

Last August, the number of Americans killed in Afghanistan passed 2,000.

If politicians really believed in "supporting the troops" we would have left Afghanistan years ago.  They give lip service to the concept for political sound bite purposes, yet in fact they betray our troops every single day.

The Pentagon's F*cked Up Priorities - Banning LGBT Sites While Squandering American Lives

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Supposedly American troops in Afghanistan and other parts of the world are fighting and risking their lives to protect American values.  Values like religious freedom, freedom of thought and opinion and freedom from state sponsored censorship.  At least that's the message trumpeted by politicians ranging from Barack Obama to far right wing nuts in the House GOP.  But apparently, the Pentagon hasn't received this message.  Or the message that honoring and supporting our men and women in uniform means not sending them out on futile fools' errands in unwindable wars like the fiasco in Afghanistan foisted on America by Chimperator George Bush and Emperor Palpatine Dick Cheney. 

First, with respect to the Pentagon's disdain for claimed American values, Towleroad and Americablog are both reporting that the Pentagon is blocking blogs and webs sites labeled as "LGBT" - a label that certainly applies to this blog.  Seemingly, some folks at the Pentagon did not get the news alert that Don't Ask, Don't Tell has been repealed and that LGBT service members can come out of the closet and that they should be freely able to surf the Internet for LGBT news and outlets (some do somehow make it to this blog from Afghanistan).  It's also disturbing that far right GOP sites are not being blocked.  Here are highlights from Americablog:

It’s bad enough the United States Department of Defense censors Towleroad and AMERICAblog – banning the gay civil rights Web sites from being accessed on DOD computers – and it’s even worse that the Pentagon has no problem permitting their computers to access Ann Coulter’s and Rush Limbaugh’s hate-filled Web sites.

But what’s really offensive is that at least one of the Pentagon’s safe-surfing Internet filters has a censorship category called “LGBT.” And if you’re deemed “LGBT” by the Pentagon, they ban you.

I wonder if the Pentagon has a censorship category titled “Jewish,” “African-American,” or “Latino.”

The LGBT filter existed before the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, but still has not been fixed. And the Pentagon was notified of the problem as early as last summer, 2012. Yet no one’s gotten around to doing anything about it. I’m also told that the censorship varies depending on service and geographical region – it’s not entirely clear why the Pentagon doesn’t use the same bans/filters nationwide and agency-wide, if it’s going to censor the Internet at all. This problem has to be fixed Pentagon-wide.

Our site, AMERICAblog, was previously banned for being “LGBT,” but now we’re only banned at least by the Air Force, for being “political” and “activist.” The Air Force is banning my Web site for being “political” while permitting other Republican “political” Web sites. Daily Kos is banned as well. Anyone else smelling a Big Brother constitutional problem with that?

I had a few different contacts try accessing a variety of sites on DOD computers, in order to confirm this, including Zeke Stokes, communications director for OutServe-SLDN, who confirmed via one of their military members. Note what they found. Towleroad – Banned for being “LGBT”

While the Pentagon worries about censoring LGBT sites, liberal "activist" sites and liberal political sites, it still has absolutely no problem throwing away the lives of young Americans not to mention billions of dollars which might just as well be put in a huge piled, doused with gasoline and burned.  Here's the latest sacrificial offering to American hubris and the Pentagon's betrayal of our troops:

 Pfc. Markie T. Sims, 20, of Citra, Fla., died Dec. 29 in Panjwal, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to the 38th Engineer Company, 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, under control of the 7th Infantry Division, Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash.

For regular readers, you guessed it.  Sims was in my son-in-law's Company and while my son-in-law is lucky enough to be recovering (he still has a long way to go even after 7 weeks), Pfc. Sims will not have that option.  Dead at 20 years old for, in my opinion, absolutely nothing.  This country and most certainly the Pentagon learned nothing from the Vietnam fiasco as we repeat the same exact disaster except in an arid climate rather than in the jungle.  Meanwhile, as always, the generals strut around like peacocks surrounded by attendants while lying to the American public and those only too happy to believe the lies in the White House and Congress.  We are not "making progress" in Afghanistan.  We are merely squandering young lives and bankrupting the country.

Afghanistan: The Fools Errand Continues As Does the Betrayal of Our Troops

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The United States has expended billions of dollars and squandered thousands of young American lives in the doomed from the outset fiasco in Afghanistan.  Anyone other than the cretinous George W. Bush and the war mad Emperor Palpatine Cheney could have predicted the outcome of America's fool's errand given the last 2,000+ years of Afghan history.  But, no, the Chimperator and his malevolent Vice President were more concerned in fighting a religious crusade and enriching defense contractors like Halliburton than look out for America's true interests.  And what do we have to show for the wasted billions and lives?  One of the most corrupt and incompetent nations on earth.  At least that is the finding of Transparency International which has just released its annual Corruption Perceptions Index.  How bad are things in Afghanistan?  It is tied with Somalia and North Korea as the most corrupt nation in the world.  Here's a sampling of some of the findings via the Washington Post:

Afghanistan ranks as one of the most corrupt countries, and it seems bribes and fraud permeate nearly every level of life there. One Afghan in seven paid a bribe in 2010, and the average bribe is equal to one third of the average Afghan salary. A recent report found that high-level political interference and institutional failures thwarted efforts to probe the 2010 collapse of Afghanistan’s Kabul Bank, recover hundreds of millions of dollars from fraudulent loans and prosecute the people who profited, the Washington Post’s Pamela Constable reported. The Transparency International authors concluded last year, ”Corruption, weak institutions and a lack of economic development pose a fatal threat to the viability of Afghanistan,” and it seems the situation this year is sadly no different.

As for the "progress" that senior military leaders claim to be making, UPI has this:

KHOST, Afghanistan, Dec. 8 (UPI) -- Taliban militants in Afghanistan's Khost province ambushed a convoy of NATO-led coalition security forces and claimed to have killed nine NATO troops.

Local authorities confirmed that the incident took place, but have denied that there were any casualties, Khaama Press reported Saturday.  No other information on the incident was released.

Based on the experience of how information was kept under wraps when my son-in-law was badly wounded in Afghanistan last month, I am sure no account of the incident will be released until the military brass decides how to best spin yet another failure in security.  Meanwhile two more Americans have lost their lives for nothing:
  

The Department of Defense announced today the death of two soldiers who were supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. 

They died Dec. 3, in Lashkar Gah City, Helmand province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked their unit with an improvised explosive device. They were assigned to the 818th Engineer Company, 164th Engineer Battalion, Williston, N.D. 

Killed were:Sgt. 1st Class. Darren M. Linde, 41, of Sidney, Mont., andSpc. Tyler J. Orgaard, 20, of Bismarck, N.D.

Americans and politicians who really support our troops should be demanding that we withdraw completely from Afghanistan NOW.

Afghanistan: The Ongoing Betrayal of Our Troops

The image above shows a U.S. Army honor guard carrying the casket of Army Spc. Ryan Jayne, 22, Tuesday at Elmira Corning Regional Airport. According to the Department of Defense, Jayne died of wounds suffered Nov. 3, when enemy forces attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device in Paktia province, Afghanistan.   The sad thing is that, if one knows the history of Afghanistan stretching back for two milennia, is that Jayne, and some 2030+ other young men and women gave up their lives for nothing.  Nothing other than the hubris, idiocy and  sabre rattling of Chimperator George W. Bush and Dick "Emperor Palpatine" Cheney.  The Daily Advertiser summarizes the wasted lives of our troops at the hands of Bush/Cheney and predominately the Congressional Republicans who maintained pressure on Barack Obama to not admit the futility of the war in Afghanistan.  Here are highlights:

As of Tuesday, Nov. 27, 2012, at least 2,030 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan as a result of the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to an Associated Press count.

The AP count is one less than the Defense Department's tally, last updated Tuesday at 10 a.m. EST.

At least 1,693 military service members have died in Afghanistan as a result of hostile action, according to the military's numbers.

Outside of Afghanistan, the department reports at least 118 more members of the U.S. military died in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. Of those, 11 were the result of hostile action

Since the start of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, 17,992 U.S. service members have been wounded in hostile action, according to the Defense Department.

Like my son-in-law, I am sure that Spc. Ryan Jayne was following the flawed orders of senior military officers and seeking to honorably serve his country.  Meanwhile, my son-in-law had yet another surgery today to repair his body from burns, shrapnel, and related wounds incurred two weeks ago today.  He faces many weeks of recovery.  Yet he's one of the lucky ones, because he is alive.   The Pakistan New Service shows the continued inability to maintain even a semblance of order within Afghanistan:

KABUL/JALALABAD: Defence ministry on Monday said six Afghan National Army (ANA) troops were killed and 10 more wounded during separate hostile incidents over the past 24 hours.

The ANA troops were killed and wounded in explosions and direct attacks while discharging security responsibilities in Ghazni, Helmand, Uruzgan, Wardak and Faryab province, the defence ministry said in a statement.

It said two anti-government gunmen were killed by combined force in Charchino district of Uruzgan while three suspects were detained in Kandahar city and Muhammad Agha district of Logar province, adding the security force also recovered 450 kg of explosions in Narkh district of Wardak province.

Meanwhile, two police among six persons were wounded in two back-to-back bomb explosions in Haska Maina district of eastern Ningarhar province this morning, sources said Monday.

A roadside bomb exploded near a police vehicle in Baghiband Kandao area of Haska Maina at about 7:30 a.m. (local time), injuring two police, security forces told Afghan Islamic Press (AIP).

To use one of Chimperator Bush's terms, its a" heck of a job" that our disingenuous senior military officers have done in Afghanistan.  Anyone who truly supports our military troops ought to be blowing up the phones of their Senators and members of the House demanding that ALL of our troops come home NOW.

Great News From Texas

The photo above tells so much - my son-in-law is on the mend and we are all overjoyed.  He still has a long way to go to full recovery. He/we were very lucky.  Sadly, so many have not be as lucky.

Afghanistan: The Continued Betrayal of Our Troops

On the good news front, my son-in-law continues to improve after being severely injured in Afghanistan.  On the bad news side of things, that area remains a nightmare and any claims to the contrary by senior military leaders is pretty much nothing less than a huge lie.  I noted recently that France had admitted reality and was withdrawing all of its troops.  Now Australia has begun its own withdrawal.  And the USA?  Still in denial and a refusal on the part of senior military commanders and politicians that once Chimperator Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney bungled the response to the World Trade Center attack, we should have left immediately.  But, due to all too typical American hubris we remained and have thrown away billions of dollars and thousands of lives.  And for nothing in the long view of things.  Absolutely nothing.  The Brisbane Times looks at Australia's moves toward total withdrawal.  Here are highlights:

AUSTRALIAN troops have withdrawn from all forward operating bases and patrol bases in Oruzgan, and handed over control of security in the province to Afghan forces.  And after 13 years keeping the peace in East Timor, the last remaining Australian troops will begin pulling out on Thursday. . . . .

Forward operating and patrol bases in Afghanistan have been progressively handed over to Afghan control since October, and Australian troops will now operate only out of the multinational base in Tarin Kowt, Oruzgan's capital.

And as for the unfolding fiasco in Afghanistan that belies the claims that progress is being made, Google News has this:

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A Taliban suicide bomber detonated a truck full of explosives Friday in eastern Afghanistan, killing three Afghan civilians and wounding more than 90 people, including several Afghan and NATO troops, officials said.

The early morning explosion in Maidan Shahr, the capital of Wardak province, also destroyed or damaged several government offices and a local prison, said provincial spokesman Shahidullah Shahid.

The blast occurred in an area that is home to government offices, the provincial governor's office, police headquarters, a prison and a coordination center used by international and Afghan security forces.

Shahid said two men and a woman were killed and 90 people — 75 men, 11 women and four children — were wounded.

U.S. Army Maj. Adam Wojack, a spokesman for the international military coalition, said a half-dozen NATO soldiers also received minor injuries in the explosion.