I’m guessing they won’t look too far…….

The Defense Department is seeking private contractors to carry out various tasks — such as clearing land mines, building detention facilities and providing fuel — to assist U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

This month, the Pentagon issued a proposal seeking civilian contractors to help clear land mines in Afghanistan, including the outer areas of Bagram Air Base, where new construction is under way. A $25 million contract to build about 14 miles of roads inside the Bagram complex will be awarded this month. The roads are to “ease traffic flow” and “provide diversions for construction traffic” on the expanding base, according to the published solicitation.

More at the Star Telegram

The Defense Department is looking for an “energetic and imaginative executive” to run its newly formed Defense Media Activity, according to an advertisement on the agency’s Web site.

The executive would earn as much as $172,200 a year overseeing DMA, which since its establishment in January combines formerly separate Pentagon media organizations, such as the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, the Stars and Stripes newspaper, and the Pentagon Channel on television. It also includes the DefenseLink Web site and the military services’ Web sites, the Bloggers Roundtable, and the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine magazines.

All told, the new chief would oversee 2,400 military, government and contract employees around the world, and a budget of more than $225 million.

The primary mission of DMA, according to the directive that set it up, is to “provide a wide variety of information products to the entire DoD family.” That “family” includes active, National Guard and Reserve service members; their dependents; retirees; Defense civilian and contract employees; and “external audiences.”

Along with communicating “messages and themes” from senior Defense officials, DMA will provide radio and television news and entertainment programming.

More at the Washington Post

Yah, these wounded French troops are lying…….riiigggghhhhttt. Why can’t our military just tell the truth???? Shit happens…… just tell the truth.

The Pentagon said Wednesday it has no information that close US air support resulted in casualties among French troops ambushed by insurgents in Afghanistan.

The newspaper Le Monde reported that French troops wounded in the fighting said NATO air strikes missed their targets and hit French troops, as did shots fired by Afghan troops backing them up.

“We have no reports of any casualties caused by close air support,” said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. Asked whether French soldiers had been killed or wounded by friendly fire, he said there were “no reports of that.”

More at Yahoo News

by Chalmers Johnson

The military adventurers in the Bush administration have much in common with the corporate leaders of the defunct energy company Enron. Both groups thought that they were the “smartest guys in the room” — the title of Alex Gibney’s prize-winning film on what went wrong at Enron. The neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon outsmarted themselves. They failed even to address the problem of how to finance their schemes of imperialist wars and global domination.

As a result, going into 2008, the United States finds itself in the anomalous position of being unable to pay for its own elevated living standards or its wasteful, overly large military establishment. Its government no longer even attempts to reduce the ruinous expenses of maintaining huge standing armies, replacing the equipment that seven years of wars have destroyed or worn out, or preparing for a war in outer space against unknown adversaries. Instead, the Bush administration puts off these costs for future generations to pay or repudiate. This fiscal irresponsibility has been disguised through many manipulative financial schemes (causing poorer countries to lend us unprecedented sums of money), but the time of reckoning is fast approaching.

There are three broad aspects to the U.S. debt crisis. First, in the current fiscal year (2008) we are spending insane amounts of money on “defense” projects that bear no relation to the national security of the U.S. We are also keeping the income tax burdens on the richest segment of the population at strikingly low levels.

Second, we continue to believe that we can compensate for the accelerating erosion of our base and our loss of jobs to foreign countries through massive military expenditures — “military Keynesianism” (which I discuss in detail in my book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic). By that, I mean the mistaken belief that public policies focused on frequent wars, huge expenditures on weapons and munitions, and large standing armies can indefinitely sustain a wealthy capitalist economy. The opposite is actually true.

Third, in our devotion to militarism (despite our limited resources), we are failing to invest in our social infrastructure and other requirements for the long-term health of the U.S. These are what economists call opportunity costs, things not done because we spent our money on something else. Our public education system has deteriorated alarmingly. We have failed to provide health care to all our citizens and neglected our responsibilities as the world’s number one polluter. Most important, we have lost our competitiveness as a manufacturer for civilian needs, an infinitely more efficient use of scarce resources than arms manufacturing.

Continue reading at Alternet

Senator Byron Dorgan speaking on the floor about the DOD contract for $300 million contract given to a 23 year old.

Obama at Texas debate:

It seems the Public Affairs Office at the DOD has a spokesliar named Bryan Whitman running around the MSM calling Obama a liar. It also seems Mr. Whitman is lying……..but then again, this is nothing new, as Scott Horton at Harpers tells us.

DOD = Department of Disinformation. Same shit, different day.

A United States-based private security firm received a contract worth up to US$92 million from the Department of Defense amid hard questions about its involvement in two separate violent incidents in Iraq.

“Blackwater [USA] has been a contractor in the past with the department and could certainly be in the future,” said the US’s top-ranking military officer, General Peter Pace, last week.

The future arrived just two hours later when the Pentagon released a new list of contracts - Presidential Airways, the aviation unit of parent Blackwater, was awarded the contract to fly Department of Defense passengers and cargo around Central Asia.

The announcement comes as a cloud of suspicion gathers around the “professional military” firm for its actions as a State Department security contractor in Iraq in which at least eight Iraqis and possibly as many as 28 were killed, including a woman and child.

The Iraqi government initially announced that it had revoked Blackwater’s license to operate in the country. The initial report on the incident by the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security was put together by the US Embassy in Baghdad and details of the event in which a car bomb exploded near a meeting attended by officials from the US Agency for International Development. Some of the Blackwater team members hired as security for the officials were involved in the shootout while apparently trying to clear an evacuation path.

More at the Asia Times

From USA Today:

Financial records at the Pentagon and Homeland Security Department are so disorganized and inconsistent that they cannot be audited fully, making them subject to waste, fraud and abuse.

That’s the conclusion of an Associated Press review of the two departments’ files.

In 1997 Congress ordered that outside auditors must examine federal agencies’ books. But neither Defense nor Homeland Security - created just four years ago - has met even basic accounting standards, the AP concludes.

“It means we really can’t put any faith in the numbers they use,” said Ross Rubenstein, who teaches public administration at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School.

Most of the 15 agencies examined pass their audits. But several - notably NASA, the Coast Guard and FEMA - have been cited for serious accounting errors.

Furthermore, AP writes:

How’s the song go……..MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY……….MONEY

Envision an aircraft carrier in the sky. Drugs that can immediately prepare soldiers for duty at high altitudes. Prosthetic limbs with something approaching real sensitivity.

The Pentagon has.

For half a century, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - a low-profile but vital division of the Defense Department - has developed technologies to confound America’s foes and comfort its friends. The agency has been the force behind dozens of weapons, from the M-16 rifle and night-vision goggles to smart bombs and stealth aircraft.

Now, DARPA is planning for a long war in which U.S. troops will be expected to face guerrilla adversaries. And just as during the Cold War, DARPA is counting on high-tech Silicon Valley to give U.S. forces the edge.

“We need to anticipate all of the challenges and discover the technical means to conquer those challenges,” Anthony Tether, DARPA director, told more than 3,000 scientists, entrepreneurs and military leaders who gathered in Anaheim earlier this month for the agency’s 50th anniversary conference.

Full article at SFGate (see what Chalmers Johnson has to say about this)

Pathetic…… we have no idea where our arms end up. And who was in charge of all this? General Betrayus……the guy who’s going to tell us how wonderful the surge is working. Oy vey……..

A top Pentagon official is heading to Iraq to investigate claims that US arms supplied to Iraqi security forces have ended up in Turkey, which is fuming over cross-border attacks by Kurdish rebels.

The Defense Department’s inspector general Claude Kicklighter, a retired Army general, is due in Iraq next week with an 18-member assessment team to probe the allegations.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told reporters Wednesday that he had no evidence to show that US’supplied arms had been used by Iraqi insurgents against US forces, or by Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) rebels against Turkish forces.

But he added: “If American-issued weapons have ended up in the hands of criminals in Turkey or terrorists in Turkey, that is not based upon the policy of this department or this government.”

Since January, Kicklighter’s office has been investigating allegations that US arms intended for the Iraqi police are ending up in the wrong hands.

Morrell said that Defense Secretary Robert Gates was “deeply troubled by the reports and the allegations.”

More at Kurdmedia

On the heels of a scathing report issued by the Defense Department’s inspector general that took high-level Pentagon officials to task for allowing an evangelical Christian organization unfettered access to the Department of Defense (DOD) to promote its fundamentalist agenda, comes word the Pentagon’s top chaplain opened its doors yet again to another evangelical group whose leader recently spent two days at the facility proselytizing, passing out Christian literature, and “saving souls.”

The Constitution bars the federal government from establishing religion.

According to documents obtained by the watchdog group the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and made available to Truthout, David Kistler, President of Hickory, North Carolina-based H.O.P.E. Ministries International, embarked on a “DC Crusade” along with dozens of members of the evangelical organization for two weeks that included two days inside the Pentagon proselytizing and preaching the “gospel” to government employees and “saving souls.”

More at the Baltimore Chronicle

By Robert O’Harrow Jr.
The Washington Post
cross posted at TRUTHOUT

Use of favored firms a common shortcut.

Under pressure from the White House and Congress to deliver a long-delayed plan last year, officials at the Department of Homeland Security’s counter-narcotics office took a shortcut that has become common at federal agencies: They hired help through a no-bid contract.

And the firm they hired showed them how to do it.

Scott Chronister, a senior official in the Office of Counternarcotics Enforcement, reached out to a former colleague at a private consulting firm for advice. The consultant suggested that Chronister’s office could avoid competition and get the work done quickly under an arrangement in which the firm “approached the government with a ‘unique and innovative concept,’ ” documents and interviews show.

A contract worth up to $579,000 was awarded to the consultant’s firm in September.

Though small by government standards, the counter-narcotics contract illustrates the government’s steady move away from relying on competition to secure the best deals for products and services.

A recent congressional report estimated that federal spending on contracts awarded without “full and open” competition has tripled, to $207 billion, since 2000, with a $60 billion increase last year alone. The category includes deals in which officials take advantage of provisions allowing them to sidestep competition for speed and convenience and cases in which the government sharply limits the number of bidders or expands work under open-ended contracts.

Government auditors say the result is often higher prices for taxpayers and an undue reliance on a limited number of contractors.

“The rapid growth in no-bid and limited-competition contracts has made full and open competition the exception, not the rule,” according to the report, by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Keith Ashdown, chief investigator at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said that in many cases, officials are simply choosing favored contractors as part of a “club mentality.”

read more HERE

By Gordon Lubold
The Christian Science Monitor

Washington - In the hunt for Osama bin Laden and other individuals the military considers high-value targets, the US Air Force is pursuing a new program that could put a missile on a target in minutes instead of hours.

The Air Force is developing a “hypersonic” engine designed to fly bombs at Mach 6.5 speed, or more than 4,000 miles per hour, allowing commanders a chance to conduct long-range strikes on targets in a fraction of the time it takes now. The program, known as the X-51A scramjet, could be a valuable tool as a “manhunter” in fights such as those in Afghanistan or Iraq - or as a deterrent against more conventional enemies in industrialized nations, officials say. It all comes down to speed, and that could change the nature of the fight in the war on terrorism, military officials say.

“Faster is always better in air power,” says Brig. Gen. Jim Poss, the Air Force’s director of intelligence for its Air Combat Command at Langley Air Force Base, Va. “What we’ve found from combat experience is that people realize very quickly you have to move to survive on the modern battlefield. And the best way to counter that is to get there with the appropriate weapon in the appropriate size very quickly.”

The program isn’t a weapons program per se, but a demonstration of an engine that can move a weapon really, really fast. Unlike a rocket, which requires its own oxygen stored in heavy tanks, a scramjet engine mixes the oxygen already in the air with fuel at such a high rate that it can propel itself faster than anything else that can fly long distances within the atmosphere. Strap on a warhead, and the United States has a unique new weapon, analysts and military officials say.

It sounds ideal from a military commander’s standpoint. There’s just one problem: The X-51A doesn’t quite exist just yet.

read more HERE

How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties.

by Seymour M. Hersh
from The New Yorker

On the afternoon of May 6, 2004, Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba was summoned to meet, for the first time, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in his Pentagon conference room. Rumsfeld and his senior staff were to testify the next day, in televised hearings before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees, about abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq. The previous week, revelations about Abu Ghraib, including photographs showing prisoners stripped, abused, and sexually humiliated, had appeared on CBS and in The New Yorker. In response, Administration officials had insisted that only a few low-ranking soldiers were involved and that America did not torture prisoners. They emphasized that the Army itself had uncovered the scandal.

If there was a redeeming aspect to the affair, it was in the thoroughness and the passion of the Army’s initial investigation. The inquiry had begun in January, and was led by General Taguba, who was stationed in Kuwait at the time. Taguba filed his report in March. In it he found:

Numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees . . . systemic and illegal abuse.

Taguba was met at the door of the conference room by an old friend, Lieutenant General Bantz J. Craddock, who was Rumsfeld’s senior military assistant. Craddock’s daughter had been a babysitter for Taguba’s two children when the officers served together years earlier at Fort Stewart, Georgia. But that afternoon, Taguba recalled, “Craddock just said, very coldly, A-Wait here.- ” In a series of interviews early this year, the first he has given, Taguba told me that he understood when he began the inquiry that it could damage his career; early on, a senior general in Iraq had pointed out to him that the abused detainees were “only Iraqis.” Even so, he was not prepared for the greeting he received when he was finally ushered in.

“Here . . . comes . . . that famous General Taguba-of the Taguba report!” Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice. The meeting was attended by Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J.C.S.); and General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials. Taguba, describing the moment nearly three years later, said, sadly, “I thought they wanted to know. I assumed they wanted to know. I was ignorant of the setting.”

In the meeting, the officials professed ignorance about Abu Ghraib. “Could you tell us what happened?” Wolfowitz asked. Someone else asked, “Is it abuse or torture?” At that point, Taguba recalled, “I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, A-That’s not abuse. That’s torture.- There was quiet.”

Rumsfeld was particularly concerned about how the classified report had become public. “General,” he asked, “who do you think leaked the report?” Taguba responded that perhaps a senior military leader who knew about the investigation had done so. “It was just my speculation,” he recalled. “Rumsfeld didn-t say anything.” (I did not meet Taguba until mid-2006 and obtained his report elsewhere.) Rumsfeld also complained about not being given the information he needed. “Here I am,” Taguba recalled Rumsfeld saying, “just a Secretary of Defense, and we have not seen a copy of your report. I have not seen the photographs, and I have to testify to Congress tomorrow and talk about this.” As Rumsfeld spoke, Taguba said, “He’s looking at me. It was a statement.”

read more at THE NEW YORKER

Why can’t they fund their own defense???? They are not a poor nation. Oh wait, I forgot. 75% of the military aid to Israel has to be spent in the United States. More war profiteering on the part of this administration.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives has adopted a measure aimed at weaving closer U.S. and Israeli defenses against ballistic missiles of the type that could be fired by Iran.

Part of a $504 billion defense spending bill passed Thursday, the measure would redirect $205 million in Defense Department funds toward projects already underway in Israel.

It would provide $25 million more for Arrow missile co-production and integration, $45 million for a U.S.-Israeli short-range missile defense system dubbed “David’s Sling” and $135 million to buy a Theater High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, fire unit.

All three projects involve interceptors designed to shoot down ballistic missiles in the terminal phase of their flight paths.

The move was spearheaded by Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, the senior Republican on the House Armed Services Committee and a candidate for his party’s 2008 presidential nomination.

It was a last-minute addition to the Democratic-controlled House’s version of the fiscal 2008 defense authorization bill, which still awaits action in the Senate and reconciliation of any differences between the bills.

More at Reuters

To get an idea of the aid we’ve given Israel since 1949, go here.