Lawmakers Set to Propose Record $847B for Defense, $45B Over Biden’s Request

Indeed, the Pentagon is the only federal agency that has never passed an audit. Critics point out that over half of the defense budget goes toward private contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, resulting in huge profits for these companies; in the first three quarters of 2022, while the public has been suffering due to inflation, Lockheed Martin made over $4.2 billion in profit, while Raytheon reported an operating profit of over $3.9 billion.

The Donald’s Assassination Of General Soleimani—As Stupid As It Gets, by David Stockman - The Unz Review

But that’s just colossal nonsense and imperialistic arrogance. The Assad government in Syria, the largest political party in Lebanon (Hezbollah), the dominant population of northern Yemen (Houthis) and a significant portion of the Iraqi armed forces represented by the Shiite militias (the PMF or Popular Mobilization Forces) are no less civilized and no more prone to sectarian violence than anybody else in this woebegone region. And the real head-choppers of ISIS and its imitators and rivals have all been Sunni jihadist insurrectionists, not Shiite-based governments and political parties.

The truth is, America has no dog in the Shiite versus Sunni hunt, which has been going on for 1300 years in the region. And when it comes to spillover of those benighted forces into Europe or America, recent history is absolutely clear: 100% of all Islamic terrorist incidents in the US since they began in the 1990s were perpetrated or inspired by Sunni jihadists, not Iran or its Shiite allies and proxies in the region.

How the U.S. betrayed the Marshall Islands, kindling the next nuclear disaster - Los Angeles Times

Three years after Castle Bravo, U.S. authorities encouraged Joseph, her family and her neighbors to return to Rongelap.

U.S. government documents from the time show that officials weighed the potential hazards of radiation exposure against “the current low morale of the natives” and a “risk of an onset of indolence.” Ultimately they decided to go forward with the resettlement so researchers could study the effects of lingering radiation on human beings.

“Data of this type has never been available,” Merrill Eisenbud, a U.S official with the Atomic Energy Commission, said at a January 1956 meeting of the agency’s Biology and Medicine Committee. “While it is true that these people do not live the way that Westerners do, civilized people, it is nonetheless also true that they are more like us than the mice.”

Resistance Means More Than Voting | by Garry Wills | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

Obama said that people who “secretly aren’t following the president’s orders” are not defending democracy: “These people are not elected. They’re not accountable.”

Interesting, and telling, that Obama seems to consider elections the sole means of accountability. So elected officials are the only persons who may affect change. And if they torture, commit war crimes, perpetrate massive financial fraud and theft, run illegal assassination programs, the only way to hold them accountable is vote them out. And once voted out, they are punished as much as can be. We know that's what Obama believes because that is exactly what happened during his terms.

I Know Which Country the U.S. Will Invade Next

This leaves only one question: Who will be next on the list of U.S. illegal invasions cloaked in bullshit justifications? Well, last week, Iran finally did it: It switched from the dollar to the euro. And sure enough, this week, the U.S. military industrial complex, the corporate media and Israel all got together to claim that Iran is lying about its nuclear weapons development. What are the odds that this news would break within days of Iran dropping the dollar? What. Are. The. Odds?

Sacramento coroner releases Stephon Clark autopsy, disputing he was shot mostly in back - SFGate

The March 18 death of the 22-year-old Clark in his grandmother’s backyard has sparked weeks of protests and called into question the officers’ tactics and decision to shoot. A central point of contention, which could be critical to prosecutors weighing whether to file criminal charges against the officers, is whether Clark was in fact advancing toward officers, as police have said.

And of course, as we are all fully aware, advancing toward officers unarmed is punishable by death.

Police shoot, kill man in backyard of south Sacramento home - SFGate

During that pursuit the subject turned toward our officers with both arms out and had an object pointed at our officers and our officers believed it was a firearm and they feared for their safety,” Chandler said. “And they fired their weapons to basically protect themselves.”

Family members told KCRA the home belonged to the man’s grandparents and he frequently stays there.

Family said the man was trying to get inside of the home, but they didn’t know why he didn’t have a key to the house Sunday night.

The man died on the scene.

Investigators did not find a firearm at the scene. The only item found near the man was a cellphone.

This is what happens when you train policemen as if they are combatants in a guerrilla war. And it is getting worse.

Facebook translates 'good morning' into 'attack them', leading to arrest | Technology | The Guardian

The Israeli Defence Force has been open about monitoring the social media accounts of Palestinians, looking for “lone-wolf” attackers who might otherwise slip through the net. It reportedly does so automatically, using algorithms to look for terms such as “sword of Allah”.

Bob Costas defends Colin Kaepernick and the NFL protests after Trump's attack — Quartz

Kaepernick has repeatedly said that his protest had nothing to do with the US military. But even before Trump became president, American sports, and football in particular, have been increasingly militarized, almost becoming a brand extension of the US armed forces. The Pentagon pays the NFL millions of dollars each year to host patriotic events during games, which include full-field displays of the flag.

“[Patriotism] has been conflated with a bumper-sticker kind of flag-waving and with the military only,” Costas added, “so that people cannot see that in his own way, Colin Kaepernick, however imperfectly, is doing a patriotic thing.”

I find Costas repugnant, but in his own way, however imperfectly, what he is saying here is insightful. The USA is, and has been since we got the bomb, a military machine. War and violence are so ingrained and assimilated into the culture one wonders if it can ever be undone.

Ken Burns' VIETNAM WAR - Limits of 18 hours | HuffPost

"The American involvement in Vietnam began in secrecy. It ended 30 years later in failure. It was begun in GOOD FAITH, by DECENT PEOPLE, out of fateful misunderstanding, American overconfidence and Cold War miscalculation.” (My emphasis added)

Really?

The film is remarkable in its liberal use of the secret recordings of White House conversations. We hear the voices of President Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. These recordings reveal cynicism, paranoia, and deception that have little in common with “good faith” or “decent people.”

Conscious of their audience, the film makers are reluctant to be too harsh in condemning American motives. The theme, in effect, is that the American War in Vietnam was a bi-partisan, well-intended, accumulation of unfortunate mistakes made by six Presidents over 30 years.

Syria: Trump‘s Red Line - WELT

The national security advisers understood their dilemma: Trump wanted to respond to the affront to humanity committed by Syria and he did not want to be dissuaded. They were dealing with a man they considered to be not unkind and not stupid, but his limitations when it came to national security decisions were severe. "Everyone close to him knows his proclivity for acting precipitously when he does not know the facts," the adviser said. "He doesn’t read anything and has no real historical knowledge. He wants verbal briefings and photographs. He’s a risk-taker. He can accept the consequences of a bad decision in the business world; he will just lose money. But in our world, lives will be lost and there will be long-term damage to our national security if he guesses wrong. He was told we did not have evidence of Syrian involvement and yet Trump says: 'Do it.”’

Dyslexic maybe?

Why Obama waited 8 years to take on Netanyahu – Mondoweiss

As Elise Labott said last night on CNN, Obama did not push the settlements/Palestinian state issue before the election out of deference to Hillary Clinton. Labott was saying, without saying it, that Clinton was so dependent on the Jewish establishment and large Jewish donors, that she could not “undermine [the] party’s fundraising capabilities” (as the National Journal says) by saying a word against Israel. Today on NPR Daoud Kuttab said very much the same thing: that presidents take these actions in their last months when they are freed of “domestic, political, lobbying” pressures. This is a central truth of our politics that ought to be explored. But NPR promptly brought on Aaron David Miller to refute it; Miller said it was a “myth” that lobbying affects US policy.

Syria’s “Voice of Conscience” Has a Message for the West

What do you say to those who concede that Bashar al-Assad is a tyrant but argue that he is a lesser evil than ISIS and should be kept in power to preserve stability?

For us, as Syrians, let me be frank: ISIS is the lesser evil. They have killed maybe 10,000 people, whereas Bashar al-Assad has killed hundreds of thousands. Ask yourself how anyone could tolerate such a situation. Could you imagine that in 10 or 15 years, after crushing all opposition, perhaps the son of Bashar al-Assad will proceed to rule the country after him? How horrible. How criminal. If Bashar al-Assad survives, after killing hundreds of thousands of people, expatriating 5 million more, displacing 6 million within the country, inviting the Iranians and the Russians and Shia militias from around the world to invade Syria, if such an abhorrent criminal survives and maintains his political power, the world will be a much worse place for everyone.

President Trump’s First Term - The New Yorker

On rare occasions, a President’s nuclear orders have been too unsettling for his staff to accept. In October, 1969, Richard Nixon told Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird to put nuclear forces on high alert. According to Sagan, the Stanford nuclear-arms specialist, Nixon hoped that the Soviets would suspect that he was willing to attack North Vietnam. Laird was appalled, and he tried an excuse: the alert would conflict with a scheduled military exercise. Sagan recalls, “He understood that Richard Nixon believed in the so-called ‘madman theory’”—deterring aggression by encouraging America’s rivals to suspect that Nixon was irrational. “But Mel Laird believed that the madman theory was pretty crazy, and that threatening to use nuclear weapons over something like Vietnam was not going to be effective, and might actually be dangerous. He tried to delay implementing the President’s orders, in the hopes that Nixon would calm down. Nixon did that a lot; he would make an angry comment, and if you ignored it he wouldn’t come back to it.” In this instance, Nixon did not forget, and Laird eventually complied. The operation, hastily organized, went poorly: eighteen B-52s, loaded with nuclear weapons, flew toward the Soviet Union. Some came dangerously close to other aircraft, an incident that an after-action report ruled “unsafe.”

U.S. Secret Bombing of Cambodia | rabble.ca

The initial operation was authorized by then President Richard Nixon, but without the knowledge or approval of U.S. Congress. The bombings became public knowledge in 1973, after which they were stopped.
The United States dropped upwards of 2.7 million tons of bombs on Cambodia, exceeding the amount it had dropped on Japan during WWII (including Hiroshima and Nagasaki) by almost a million tons. During this time, about 30 per cent of the country's population was internally displaced.

Laos: Thousands suffering from the deadly aftermath of US bomb campaign | World news | The Guardian

It is 50 years since the first US combat troops entered Vietnam in March 1965. During that notorious conflict, the US dropped more than 270 million bombs in Laos as part of a CIA-run, top-secret operation aimed at destroying the North Vietnamese supply routes along the Ho Chi Minh trail and wiping out its local communist allies.

One-third of the bombs failed to explode on impact and have since claimed an average of 500 victims a year, mainly children and farmers forced to work on their contaminated fields to sustain their families. Despite tens of millions of dollars spent, only 1% of Laos territory has been cleared so far.

Undernews: How the Manhattan Project all killed in St Louis as well - Linkis.com

By the mid 1940s, Mallinckrodt Chemical Works had run out of space to store the radioactive waste left behind, so in 1946 they began to ship the leftovers to a relatively underpopulated area north of St Louis, next to a creek by the name of Coldwater. It was here that approximately 250,000 barrels of radioactive material were dumped in shallow pits and exposed to the elements.
...
According to a 1990 article in the New York Times, the toxic waste was dumped secretly with the approval of the federal government.

<irony>Conspiracy theory! To believe this you would have to believe that this has remained a secret for 69 years, involving dozens of people across government and industry! We all know that cannot happen!</irony>

St. Louis Landfill Fire Near Radioactive Waste | Al Jazeera America

A fire smoldering underneath a landfill north of St. Louis since 2010 could reach radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project in as little as three months, according to a report released by Missouri’s attorney general.

Much of the uranium used to make the first nuclear weapons was processed in downtown St. Louis, and the waste was moved around the region for decades. In 1973 a private company that bought some of the waste from the U.S. government illegally dumped it at the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton, Missouri, a northern suburb of St. Louis.

The Mystery of ISIS by Anonymous | The New York Review of Books

The thinkers, tacticians, soldiers, and leaders of the movement we know as ISIS are not great strategists; their policies are often haphazard, reckless, even preposterous; regardless of whether their government is, as some argue, skillful, or as others imply, hapless, it is not delivering genuine economic growth or sustainable social justice. The theology, principles, and ethics of the ISIS leaders are neither robust nor defensible. Our analytical spade hits bedrock very fast.

I have often been tempted to argue that we simply need more and better information. But that is to underestimate the alien and bewildering nature of this phenomenon. To take only one example, five years ago not even the most austere Salafi theorists advocated the reintroduction of slavery; but ISIS has in fact imposed it. Nothing since the triumph of the Vandals in Roman North Africa has seemed so sudden, incomprehensible, and difficult to reverse as the rise of ISIS. None of our analysts, soldiers, diplomats, intelligence officers, politicians, or journalists has yet produced an explanation rich enough—even in hindsight—to have predicted the movement’s rise.

The military tested bacterial weapons in San Francisco - Business Insider

Over the next 20 years, the military would conduct 239 "germ-warfare" tests over populated areas, according to news reports from the 1970s (after the secret tests had been revealed) in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Associated Press, and other publications (via Lexis-Nexis), and also detailed in congressional testimony from the 1970s.

These tests included the large-scale releases of bacteria in the New York City subway system, on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and in National Airport just outside Washington, DC.