Welcome! "What's Happenin'?" is a casual community diary (a daily series, 8:30 AM Eastern on weekdays, 10 AM on weekends and holidays) where we hang out and talk about the goings on here and everywhere.
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Good Morning!
Union Square, NYC. May 1, 2012 (Photo by joanneleon)
“We simply cannot afford more years of elevated troop levels in Afghanistan. We are spending roughly $10 billion in Afghanistan each month at a time when we’re making tough sacrifices at home. Your recent budget calls for $88 billion more for the war in Afghanistan in 2013. If this money is appropriated, we will have spent a total of $650 billion in Afghanistan. A majority of Americans worry that the costs of the war in Afghanistan will make it more difficult for the government to address the problems facing the United States at home. They’re right.”
- Letter from senators to Pres. Obama, March, 2012
News
The Afghanistan US Troop Surge Is Officially Over
68,000: The number of US troops still stationed in Afghanistan.
117,227: The total number of Department of Defense contractors working in Afghanistan.
34,765: The number of US citizens working as contractors in Afghanistan.
Soldier's E-mail Changes House Defense Chair's Position on Afghanistan
"I feel myself and my soldiers are being put into unnecessary positions where harm and danger are imminent," Sitton wrote in an e-mail. "There is no endstate or purpose for the patrols given to us from our higher chain of command, only that we will be out for a certain time standard."
"We are walking around aimlessly through grape rows and compounds that are littered with explosives," he wrote.
On Aug. 2, less than two months after he sent the email, Sitton, 26, was killed by an IED blast. He left behind a wife, a 9-month-old son - and an 81-year-old Congressman with a new perspective on Afghanistan.
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"I think we should remove ourselves from Afghanistan as quickly as we can," Young told the Tampa Bay Times this week. "I just think we're killing kids that don't need to die."
Pentagon Spending: Profits and Politics Trump National Security
You might be wondering, why all the fuss? What's going on? The real driving force behind this fall's Pentagon spending hysteria is not a sober assessment of the nation's defense needs or an honest assessment of the impacts of Pentagon spending reductions. It is a combination of partisan politics and a push to preserve the profits of Pentagon contractors.
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Rather than letting partisan politics and the search for profits dominate the defense debate, we need to get back to basics. We need to talk about how to reshape the military to address the threats of the 21st century, an approach that a majority of Americans support. The discussion needs to be about how to protect the country, not how to protect profits and privilege. We have to demand an end to parochial politics and a beginning of a real debate on what it takes to defend us and our allies.
The Unmentionable War
Rather than experiencing a campaign confrontation about the war’s nonsuccess, Americans have gotten (and so far seemingly accepted) its evasion. Chandrasekaran even talks of “a conspiracy of silence” between Obama and Romney.
This is more certain: No one running for president shows any inclination to talk about what becomes of a broken, corrupt and prospectively dysfunctional country after 2014. Or the enormous costs that would be tied to Afghanistan’s continued maintenance by the United States and its allies. Or, in the end, what the candidates’ flight from focusing more sharply on the war says to the world about the wavering status of America as the single global force able to say no to chaos.
It tells us “that this is a much less safe world.” The phrase belongs to Pierre Lellouche, who served as the former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Three Ploys the Department of Defense Uses When Their Budget Is at Risk
I have been at this for too long. Since I first started looking at the Department of Defense (DoD) and its budget in 1979, I have seen the Pentagon, its largest contractors and its fellow travelers in the Congress predict economic crash and the end of the world as we know it when faced with large or even small budget cuts. With the possibility of the DoD cutting near $500 billion in ten years with the new budget, and near $500 billion in nine years if Congressional "sequestration" happens by the end of this year, the Pentagon is swooning and predicting doom. However, even with the sequestration cuts, the Pentagon would be going back to 2006 levels, where George Bush and Dick Cheney were fighting two wars and threatening other parts of the world while buying giant overrun weapons like the F-22 and the F-35. After all these years monitoring and exposing fraud and waste in the DoD, I am used to promises of doom whenever the DoD bureaucracy does not get exactly what it wants. However, with the unlikely sequestration cuts looming, the Pentagon and its contractors are acting apocalyptic.
Afghan youth to the world's elite, Please behave like adults
State Department attacks CNN for doing basic journalism
The answer to that question is: any journalist worthy of the name. CNN's first obligation is to disclose to the public information that is newsworthy, not conceal it. Had they not reported this information, that would have been an inexcusable breach of their obligation - then the word "disgusting" would have been appropriate. What they reported had nothing to do with Stevens' personal life and everything to do with his role as a government official; his family's "permission" was therefore irrelevant.
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What is actually "disgusting" here is that the State Department is exploiting the grief of Chris Stevens' family in an attempt to suppress and delegitimize reporting that reflects quite poorly on them. As Michael Hastings documented yesterday. the State Department views the revelations from Stevens' journal as threatening to Hillary Clinton's reputation, the legacy of the war in Libya, and possibly Obama's political prospects in an election year:
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Yet again, western military intervention spawns vast instability and leads to the proliferation of weapons into the hands of extremists deeply hostile to the US. As Jonathan Schwarz, referring to the US support of the pre-Al-Qaeda mujahdeen, sardonically noted in the aftermath of the 11 September Benghazi attack: "with practice and better technology, we've really cut down the turnaround time between arming Islamists and them killing Americans on 9/11."
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If the Iraqi government continues to side with Iran, how much longer will it be before calls for regime change in Iraq are renewed? And how much longer will it be before we hear that military intervention in Libya is (again) necessary, this time to control the anti-US extremists who are now armed and empowered by virtue of the first intervention? US military interventions are most adept at ensuring that future US military interventions will always be necessary.
It is no wonder, then, that the State Department is so infuriated that CNN reported the serious concerns expressed by Ambassador Stevens. Those journal entries further impugn the US government's now discredited storyabout the Benghazi attack, and further underscore the profound instability and danger in Libya in the wake of that intervention. [ ... ]
Blog Posts and Tweets of Interest
Poking Our Eyes Out in Libya by emptywheel
Houston Police Kill Mentally Ill Double Amputee Who Was Waving a Pen Around. by jpmassar
Two Years Later, Activists Raided by FBI Demand Grand Jury Investigation Be Closed by Kevin Gosztola
For What it's Worth Buffalo Springfield
We are ready for some serious change. We are ready to take up the tools of a free and analytic press to peacefully undermine the stranglehold of the kleptocrats on our battered democracy. We are ready to expose and publicize their greed, lies and illegal machinations and hold their enablers in government and the media to account. Are you in?
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
~ Margaret Mead
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