posted August 11, 2006 04:08 PM            

------------------
The democratic world believes that it is not the terrorists that are to blame, but us. Us, the westerners.
WRONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And the sooner you eliminate this misconception from your minds, the better.
We are NOT to blame. It is the freaking terrorists and the freaking terrorists only!!!! They are the bad guys. They do not understand concepts like peace, democracy, and respect for human life. They are, pure and simPle, EVIL!!!!! Behind all their political manipulations, if you carefully look at the actions of these MONSTERS, they are EVIL!!

http://www.mideastweb.org/log/archives/00000489.htm

posted August 11, 2006 04:18 PM              

I don't support the ill behavior of a few corrupt soldiers (they will be court martialed or how ever they are dealt with by the Military Court).. that is not the topic here...

the fact that a new line of soldiers is standing up and serving their country, in spite of the bad exposure/world view this war has recieved is what is honorable. Soldiers I have heard are born, it's in their core. They follow a calling...on that note I do not believe in draft...that's a different thing all together.

posted August 11, 2006 04:45 PM              

Does your loyalty make you that blind that my sentence cannot enter your head and make sense?

Human life?

I will repeat. Afghanistan and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

It was already proven. You are using Bush's quotes which he always says after it's been already proven.

The leaders and extremists in Afghanistan and Iraq are the real criminals.

The people who have nothing to do with this are dying. Just like the people on 9/11 died. They had nothing to do with the bull sh*t our government does that makes them hate us so much.

Open up an international paper sometime sweety.

When you are ready to come down from cloud, "Bush is a peaceful Christian"....then we will talk.

P.S - Always remember each time a soldier or innocent civilian is blown into pieces by a missle or an extremist. Because at that moment, Bush will be in his office drinking cocktails with Rumsfield.

posted August 11, 2006 05:08 PM              

Sgt. Frankie Barrios, a tank crewman with A Company, 4th Battalion, 64th Armor, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga., takes a break to pet a few puppies in Baghdad, Iraq. U.S. Army photo by Cpl. Todd Pruden

This is not something you do

Court told US troops gang-raped Iraqi girl

Mon Aug 7, 3:14 PM ET

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A U.S. military court in Baghdad heard graphic testimony on Monday of how three U.S. soldiers took turns raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl before murdering her and her family.
ADVERTISEMENT

At the hearing into whether four U.S. soldiers should be court-martialled for rape and murder, a special agent described what took place in Mahmudiya in March, based on an interview he had with one of the men, Specialist James Barker.

The case, the fifth involving serious crimes being investigated by the U.S. military in
Iraq, has outraged Iraqis and led Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to call for a review of foreign troops' immunity from prosecution under Iraqi law.

Special Agent Benjamin Bierce recalled that Barker described to him how they put a couple and their six-year-old daughter into a bedroom of their home, but kept the teenage girl in the living room, where Barker held her hands while Sergeant Paul Cortez raped her or tried to rape her.

Barker then switched positions with Cortez and attempted to rape the girl but said he was not sure if he had done so, Bierce told the hearing.

Barker also told the special agent he heard shots from the bedroom and shortly afterwards Private Steven Green emerged from the room, put down an AK-47 assault rifle and raped the girl while Cortez held her down.

SHOT HER SEVERAL TIMES

Barker told Bierce that Green then picked up the weapon and shot her once, paused, and shot her several more times.

Military prosecutors are expected to set out their case against Private First Class Jesse Spielman, 21, Barker, 23, Cortez, 23 and Private First Class Bryan Howard, 19, who face charges of rape and murder among others.

If court-martialled after the Article 32 hearing -- the military's equivalent of a U.S. grand jury -- and found guilty, they could face the death penalty. The hearing began on Sunday and is expected to last several days.

Green, 21, faces the same charges in a U.S. federal court in Kentucky, home of the 502nd Infantry Regiment, his former unit. Green, who has pleaded not guilty, was discharged from the army for a "personality disorder."

A fifth soldier, Sergeant Anthony Yribe, is charged with dereliction of duty and making a false statement and will also appear at the hearing at a U.S. base in Baghdad.

Defense Attorney Captain Jimmie Culp was blowing chewing gum bubbles while Yribe, sitting to his left, began sucking on a red lollipop during the testimony.

An Iraqi army medic told the hearing on Sunday he entered the house and found the body of 14-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi naked and burned from the waist up, with a single bullet wound beneath her left eye.

Special Agent Gary Griesmyer recounted Cortez' account of the day. "While they were playing cards and drinking Iraqi whiskey, the idea came to go out to an Iraqi house, rape a woman and murder her family," he testified.

Cortez said Barker told the young girl to "shut up" after she was raped, Griesmyer said.

Bierce said Barker told him he poured kerosene from a lamp on to the girl. It was not clear who set her on fire.

Barker later signed a sworn statement based on the interview, in which he said that on the day of the attack he, Cortez, Spielman and Green had been playing cards and drinking whisky mixed with an energy drink. They then went to the rear of the checkpoint where they were based to hit golf balls.

Green said he wanted to go to a house and kill some Iraqis, Barker wrote in his sworn statement.

After the rape and murders, he wrote that he began to grill chicken wings.

The hearing continues.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060807/ts_nm/iraq_mahmudiya_dc

posted August 11, 2006 06:17 PM              

YES there are bad soldiers that commit crimes such as rape, that is understood by anyone with half a brain...there are cops that profile and abuse their power....there are preiests that use their cover to molest alter boys...

posted August 11, 2006 06:47 PM            

VL doesn't know what she believes in- only that she has to hate or blame someone for something.

She can't help it.. she is strange and heavily medicated. LOL

------------------
The democratic world believes that it is not the terrorists that are to blame, but us. Us, the westerners.
WRONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And the sooner you eliminate this misconception from your minds, the better.
We are NOT to blame. It is the freaking terrorists and the freaking terrorists only!!!! They are the bad guys. They do not understand concepts like peace, democracy, and respect for human life. They are, pure and simPle, EVIL!!!!! Behind all their political manipulations, if you carefully look at the actions of these MONSTERS, they are EVIL!!

http://www.mideastweb.org/log/archives/00000489.htm

posted August 12, 2006 02:01 PM              

it's cool to re-consider Linda's ideas on the United States being the reincarnated Atlantis.

thanks for the reminder!

quote:

---

never before has there been a country founded on the dream of being home to every man and woman, every single Earthling, regardless of nationality, race, faith, creed or color. the dream of our founding fathers was to establish a nation to test the great ideal of brotherhood and sisterhood of all races working together as one.

---

posted August 12, 2006 02:12 PM              

As we all know with that story of Atlantis, it ended tragically, we need to get it right this time! For the whole world, a shining example...alot must change (ahem, weapons trade).. ...I try to stay postive, side step that hater mentality. Put our "mind" where it "matters" (as Linda would say) and make change for the better

PEACE

posted September 02, 2006 06:30 AM              

Henry Kissinger

American diplomat, Nobel laureate and statesman.

He served as National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State in the Nixon administration, continuing in the latter position after Gerald Ford became President in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal.

Kissinger owns a consulting firm, Kissinger and Associates, and is a partner in Kissinger McLarty Associates with Mack McLarty, former Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton. He also serves on various boards of directors including Gulfstream Aerospace[11] and Hollinger International, a Chicago-based newspaper group

In 2002, President George W. Bush appointed Kissinger to chair a committee to investigate the events of the September 11 attacks. This led to criticism from Congressional Democrats who accused Kissinger of being secretive and not supportive of the public's right to know. Leading Democrats insisted that Kissinger file financial disclosures to reveal any conflicts of interest. Both Bush and Kissinger claimed that Kissinger did not need to file such forms, since he would not be receiving a salary. However, following continual Democratic pressure, Kissinger cited conflicts of interest with his clients and stepped down as chairman on December 13, 2002.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Kissinger

associated with ~

National Security Council
Council on Foreign Relations
Trilateral Commission
Bilderberg Group
Bohemian Grove
David Rockefeller
Nelson Rockefeller

to play 'chess games' with human lives...

posted September 02, 2006 02:13 PM            

quote:

---

Military Men Are Just Dumb,
Stupid, Animals To Be Used
As Pawns In Foreign Policy
-Henry Kissinger

---

posted September 02, 2006 02:33 PM              

Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed its Own POWs in Vietnam
by Monika Jenson-Stevenson, William Stevenson

http://www.amazon.com/Kiss-Boys-G oodbye-Betrayed-Vietnam/dp/0771083289/sr=8-1/qid=1157221511/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-4643587-6935308?ie=UTF8&s=books

in this context ~

" Henry Kissinger said after Vietnam when our soldiers came home ill from Agent Orange, "Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used for foreign policy." "

see this thread ~

http://www.linda-goodman.com/ubb/Forum16/HTML/002657.html

Depleted uranium: Dirty bombs, dirty missiles, dirty bullets

"Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy." - Henry Kissinger, quoted in "Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed Its Own POW's in Vietnam"

Vietnam was a chemical war, permanently contaminating large regions and countries downriver with Agent Orange, and environmentally the most devastating war in world history. But since 1991, the U.S. has staged four nuclear wars using depleted uranium weaponry, which, like Agent Orange, meets the U.S. government definition of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Vast regions in the Middle East and Central Asia, but also in Europe (Serbia and Kosovo) have been permanently contaminated with radiation.

And what about our soldiers? Terry Jemison of the Department of Veterans Affairs reported this week to the American Free Press that "Gulf-era veterans" now on medical disability since 1991 number 518,739, with only 7,035 reported wounded in Iraq in that same 14-year period.

This week the American Free Press dropped a "dirty bomb" on the Pentagon by reporting that eight out of 20 men who served in one unit in the 2003 U.S. military offensive in Iraq now have malignancies. That means that 40 percent of the soldiers in that unit have developed malignancies in just 16 months.

Since these soldiers were exposed to vaccines and depleted uranium (DU) only, this is strong evidence for researchers and scientists working on this issue, that DU is the definitive cause of Gulf War Syndrome. Vaccines are not known to cause cancer. One of the first published researchers on Gulf War Syndrome, who also served in 1991 in Iraq, Dr. Andras Korényi-Both, is in agreement with Barbara Goodno from the Department of Defense's Deployment Health Support Directorate, that in this war soldiers were not exposed to chemicals, pesticides, bioagents or other suspect causes this time to confuse the issue.

This powerful new evidence is blowing holes in the cover-up perpetrated by the Pentagon and three presidential administrations ever since DU was first used in 1991 in the Persian Gulf War. Fourteen years after the introduction of DU on the battlefield in 1991, the long-term effects have revealed that DU is a death sentence and very nasty stuff.

Scientists studying the biological effects of uranium in the 1960s reported that it targets the DNA. Marion Fulk, a nuclear physical chemist retired from the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab and formerly involved with the Manhattan Project, interprets the new and rapid malignancies in soldiers from the 2003 war as "spectacular ... and a matter of concern."

This evidence shows that of the three effects which DU has on biological systems - radiation, chemical and particulate - the particulate effect from nano-size particles is the most dominant one immediately after exposure and targets the Master Code in the DNA. This is bad news, but it explains why DU causes a myriad of diseases which are difficult to define.

In simple words, DU "trashes the body." When asked if the main purpose for using it was for destroying things and killing people, Fulk was more specific: "I would say that it is the perfect weapon for killing lots of people."

Soldiers developing malignancies so quickly since 2003 can be expected to develop multiple cancers from independent causes. This phenomenon has been reported by doctors in hospitals treating civilians following NATO bombing with DU in Yugoslavia in 1998-1999 and the U.S. military invasion of Iraq using DU for the first time in 1991. Medical experts report that this phenomenon of multiple malignancies from unrelated causes has been unknown until now and is a new syndrome associated with internal DU exposure.

Just 467 U.S. personnel were wounded in the three-week Persian Gulf War in 1990-1991. Out of 580,400 soldiers who served in Gulf War I, 11,000 are dead, and by 2000 there were 325,000 on permanent medical disability. This astounding number of disabled vets means that a decade later, 56 percent of those soldiers who served now have medical problems.

The number of disabled vets reported up to 2000 has been increasing by 43,000 every year. Brad Flohr of the Department of Veterans Affairs told American Free Press that he believes there are more disabled vets now than even after World War II.

They brought it home

Not only were soldiers exposed to DU on and off the battlefields, but they brought it home. DU in the semen of soldiers internally contaminated their wives, partners and girlfriends. Tragically, some women in their 20s and 30s who were sexual partners of exposed soldiers developed endometriosis and were forced to have hysterectomies because of health problems.

In a group of 251 soldiers from a study group in Mississippi who had all had normal babies before the Gulf War, 67 percent of their post-war babies were born with severe birth defects. They were born with missing legs, arms, organs or eyes or had immune system and blood diseases. In some veterans' families now, the only normal or healthy members of the family are the children born before the war.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has stated that they do not keep records of birth defects occurring in families of veterans.

How did they hide it?

Before a new weapons system can be used, it must be fully tested. The blueprint for depleted uranium weapons is a 1943 declassified document from the Manhattan Project.

Harvard President and physicist James B. Conant, who developed poison gas in World War I, was brought into the Manhattan Project by the father of presidential candidate John Kerry. Kerry's father served at a high level in the Manhattan Project and was a CIA agent.

Conant was chair of the S-1 Poison Gas Committee, which recommended developing poison gas weapons from the radioactive trash of the atomic bomb project in World War II. At that time, it was known that radioactive materials dispersed in bombs from the air, from land vehicles or on the battlefield produced very fine radioactive dust which would penetrate all protective clothing, any gas mask or filter or the skin. By contaminating the lungs and blood, it could kill or cause illness very quickly.

They also recommended it as a permanent terrain contaminant, which could be used to destroy populations by contaminating water supplies and agricultural land with the radioactive dust.

The first DU weapons system was developed for the Navy in 1968, and DU weapons were given to and used by Israel in 1973 under U.S. supervision in the Yom Kippur war against the Arabs.

The Phalanx weapons system, using DU, was tested on the USS Bigelow out of Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in 1977, and DU weapons have been sold by the U.S. to 29 countries.

Military research report summaries detail the testing of DU from 1974-1999 at military testing grounds, bombing and gunnery ranges and at civilian labs under contract. Today 42 states are contaminated with DU from manufacture, testing and deployment.

Women living around these facilities have reported increases in endometriosis, birth defects in babies, leukemia in children and cancers and other diseases in adults. Thousands of tons of DU weapons tested for decades by the Navy on four bombing and gunnery ranges around Fallon, Nevada, is no doubt the cause of the fastest growing leukemia cluster in the U.S. over the past decade. The military denies that DU is the cause.

The medical profession has been active in the cover-up - just as they were in hiding the effects from the American public - of low level radiation from atmospheric testing and nuclear power plants. A medical doctor in Northern California reported being trained by the Pentagon with other doctors, months before the 2003 war started, to diagnose and treat soldiers returning from the 2003 war for mental problems only.

Medical professionals in hospitals and facilities treating returning soldiers were threatened with $10,000 fines if they talked about the soldiers or their medical problems. They were also threatened with jail.

Reporters have also been prevented access to more than 14,000 medically evacuated soldiers flown nightly since the 2003 war in C-150s from Germany who are brought to Walter Reed Hospital near Washington, D.C.

Dr. Robert Gould, former president of the Bay Area chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), has contacted three medical doctors since February 2004, after I had been invited to speak about DU. Dr. Katharine Thomasson, president of the Oregon chapter of the PSR, informed me that Dr. Gould had contacted her and tried to convince her to cancel her invitation for me to speak about DU at Portland State University on April 12. Although I was able to do a presentation, Dr. Thomasson told me I could only talk about DU in Oregon "and nothing overseas ... nothing political."

Dr. Gould also contacted and discouraged Dr. Ross Wilcox in Toronto, Canada, from inviting me to speak to Physicians for Global Survival (PGS), the Canadian equivalent of PSR, several months later. When that didn't work, he contacted Dr. Allan Connoly, the Canadian national president of PGS, who was able to cancel my invitation and nearly succeeded in preventing Dr. Wilcox, his own member, from showing photos and presenting details on civilians suffering from DU exposure and cancer provided to him by doctors in southern Iraq.

Dr. Janette Sherman, a former and long-standing member of PSR, reported that she finally quit some time after being invited to lunch by a new PSR executive administrator. After the woman had pumped Dr. Sherman for information all through lunch about her position on key issues, the woman informed Dr. Sherman that her last job had been with the CIA.

How was the truth about DU hidden from military personnel serving in successive DU wars? Before his tragic death, Sen. Paul Wellstone informed Joyce Riley, R.N., B.S.N., executive director of the American Gulf War Veterans Association, that 95 percent of Gulf War veterans had been recycled out of the military by 1995. Any of those continuing in military service were isolated from each other, preventing critical information being transferred to new troops. The "next DU war" had already been planned, and those planning it wanted "no skunk at the garden party."

The US has a dirty (DU) little (CIA) secret

A new book just published at the American Free Press by Michael Collins Piper, "The High Priests of War: The Secret History of How America's Neo-Conservative Trotskyites Came to Power and Orchestrated the War Against Iraq as the First Step in Their Drive for Global Empire," details the early plans for a war against the Arab world by Henry Kissinger and the neo-cons in the late 1960s and early 1970s. That just happens to coincide with getting the DU "show on the road" and the oil crisis in the Middle East, which caused concern not only to President Nixon. The British had been plotting and scheming for control of the oil in Iraq for decades since first using poison gas on the Iraqis and Kurds in 1912.

The book details the creation of the neo-cons by their "godfather" and Trotsky lover Irving Kristol, who pushed for a "war against terrorism" long before 9/11 and was lavishly funded for years by the CIA. His son, William Kristol, is one of the most influential men in the United States.

Both are public relations men for the Israeli lobby's neo-conservative network, with strong ties to Rupert Murdoch. Kissinger also has ties to this network and the Carlyle Group, who, one could say, have facilitated these omnicidal wars beginning from the time former President Bush took office. It would be easy to say that we are recycling World Wars I and II, with the same faces.

When I asked Vietnam Special Ops Green Beret Capt. John McCarthy, who could have devised this omnicidal plan to use DU to destroy the genetic code and genetic future of large populations of Arabs and Moslems in the Middle East and Central Asia - just coincidentally the areas where most of the world's oil deposits are located - he replied: "It has all the handprints of Henry Kissinger."

In Zbignew Brzezinski's book "The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives," the map of the Eurasian chessboard includes four regions strategic to U.S. foreign policy. The "South" region corresponds precisely to the regions now contaminated permanently with radiation from U.S. bombs, missiles and bullets made with thousands of tons of DU.

A Japanese professor, Dr. K. Yagasaki, has calculated that 800 tons of DU is the atomicity equivalent of 83,000 Nagasaki bombs. The U.S. has used more DU since 1991 than the atomicity equivalent of 400,000 Nagasaki bombs. Four nuclear wars indeed, and 10 times the amount of radiation released into the atmosphere from atmospheric testing!

No wonder our soldiers, their families and the people of the Middle East, Yugoslavia and Central Asia are sick. But as Henry Kissinger said after Vietnam when our soldiers came home ill from Agent Orange, "Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used for foreign policy."

Unfortunately, more and more of those soldiers are men and women with brown skin. And unfortunately, the DU radioactive dust will be carried around the world and deposited in our environments just as the "smog of war" from the 1991 Gulf War was found in deposits in South America, the Himalayas and Hawaii.

In June 2003, the World Health Organization announced in a press release that global cancer rates will increase 50 percent by 2020. What else do they know that they aren't telling us? I know that depleted uranium is a death sentence ... for all of us. We will all die in silent ways.
http://colorado.indymedia.org/newswire/display/12254/index.php

conversation between Kissinger and Nixon ~

In June 2005 the U.S. state department declassified documents concerning the visit of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to the White House. Included in the documents was a transcript of a conversation between Kissinger and President Nixon on the morning of November 5, 1971: [4]

Nixon: "We really slobbered over that old witch"

Kissinger: "They are the most godd@mn aggressive people around."

Nixon: "The Indians?"

Kissinger: "Yeah."

Nixon: "Sure."

Kissinger: "The Indians are b@stards anyway. They are starting a war there. While she was a b*tch , we got what we wanted too. She will not be able to go home and say that the United States didn't give her a warm reception and therefore in despair she's got to go to war."

posted September 02, 2006 03:02 PM            

Whenever I see someone quoted as saying harsh stuff, I like to know who quoted it and the context in which they said it, pretty much no matter who it is. It's mainly because too often people's comments are misquoted or taken out of context (even here in GU LOL). Before I can say, "wow, what a sh*tty thing to say", I like to be sure that it actually was said, and that I know the context in which it was said.

posted September 02, 2006 03:40 PM              

i think it's even more relevant in the context of the whole depopulation and genocide agenda that Kissinger helped orchestrate.

(more on this in the GU thread i referenced.)

from that thread ~

quote:

---

National Security Memo 200, dated April 24, 1974, and titled "Implications of world wide population growth for U.S. security & overseas interests," says:

"Dr. Henry Kissinger proposed in his memorandum to the NSC that "depopulation should be the highest priority of U.S. foreign policy towards the Third World." He quoted reasons of national security, and because `(t)he U.S. economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less-developed countries ... Wherever a lessening of population can increase the prospects for such stability, population policy becomes relevant to resources, supplies and to the economic interests of U.S."

Kissinger prepared a depopulation manifesto for President Jimmy Carter called 'Global 2000' which detailed using food as a weapon to depopulate the third world.

---

posted September 03, 2006 08:14 PM              

RAW STORY

Print This | Email This

Three years after a 2002 Presidential Directive demanding an end to trafficking in humans for forced labor and prostitution by U.S. contractors, the Pentagon is still yet to actually bar the practice, The Chicago Tribune reports. Congress approved a similar ban one year later, which was reauthorized by the Senate just last week.

The President and Congress have demanded that government agencies include anti-trafficking provisions (covering forced labor and prostitution) in all overseas company contracts. It also extended the ban to subcontractors.

According to the Tribune, the concerns of five lobbying groups - including representatives of Halliburton subsidiary KBR and DynCorp - are stalling Pentagon action. These companies are specifically targeting provisions requiring companies to monitor their overseas contractors for violations. Both KBR and DynCorp have been linked to human trafficking cases in the past.

The original Bush order came on the heels of revelations that DynCorp employees had purchased women and girls as sex slaves during the 1990s U.S. military presence in Bosnia. The company responded by firing eight employees over the incidents, as well as involvement in illegal arms sales.

An excerpt from the Tribune piece details Halliburton's role:
#

In a two-part series published in October, the Tribune detailed how Middle Eastern firms working under American subcontracts in Iraq, and a chain of human brokers beneath them, engaged in the kind of abuses condemned elsewhere by the U.S. government as human trafficking. KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary, relies on more than 200 subcontractors to carry out a multibillion-dollar U.S. Army contract for privatization of military support operations in the war zone.

...

The Tribune retraced the journey of 12 Nepali men recruited from poor villages in one of the most remote and impoverished corners of the world and documented a trail of deceit, fraud and negligence stretching into Iraq. The men were kidnapped from an unprotected caravan and executed en route to jobs at an American military base in 2004.

At the time, Halliburton said it was not responsible for the recruitment or hiring practices of its subcontractors, and the U.S. Army, which oversees the privatization contract, said questions about alleged misconduct "by subcontractor firms should be addressed to those firms, as these are not Army issues."

posted September 03, 2006 08:14 PM              

The world's premier rent-a-cop business runs the security show in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the US-Mexico border. They also run the coca crop-dusting business in Colombia, and occasional sex trafficking sorties in Bosnia. But what can you expect from a bunch of mercenaries?

CEO: Van Honeycutt
Military contracts 2005: $2.8 billion

note: CSC sold DynCorp in January 2005

The U.S. State Department awarded DynCorp a multimillion-dollar contract to advise the Iraqi government on setting up effective law enforcement, judicial and correctional agencies. DynCorp will arrange for up to 1,000 U.S. civilian law enforcement experts to travel to Iraq to help locals "assess threats to public order" and mentor personnel at the municipal, provincial and national levels. The company will also provide any logistical or technical support necessary for this peacekeeping project. DynCorp estimates it could recoup up to $50 million for the first year of the contract.

Already armed DynCorp employees make up the core of the police force in Bosnia. DynCorp troops protect Afghan president Hamid Karzai, while DynCorp planes and pilots fly the defoliation missions over the coca crops in Colombia. Back home in the United States Dyncorp is in charge of the border posts between the US and Mexico, many of the Pentagon's weapons-testing ranges and the entire Air Force One fleet of presidential planes and helicopters. The company also reviews security clearance applications of military and civilian personnel for the Navy.
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?list=type&type=18

posted September 03, 2006 08:18 PM              

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - This was the plan in 1973: Dump the draft. Count on volunteers. When something big comes up, rely on the reserves and National Guard.

A special commission had told Richard Nixon the country could suffice with a smaller all-volunteer, active-duty military unless something really big came up.

Only in the case of a long-term, large-scale foreign deployment - define that as more than six months and 100,000 troops - would there be any need to bother with a draft again.

Now three-plus years since tanks rumbled into Baghdad, with more than 150,000 U.S. troops deployed to either Iraq or Afghanistan, the Pentagon is making do with thinly stretched volunteers.

Most recently, the Marine Corps announced the involuntary call-up of 2,500 troops in the individual ready reserves - people clearly obligated to fight if called but also expecting that their days in uniform were behind them.

"Up until now the Marines were able to recruit plenty of people and get them to come back just by asking. They're the most gung ho of all the services," said Lawrence Korb, who specialized in manpower issues as an assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration. "The fact that they're forcing some Marines back into service is indicative of how military and former military people feel about this war."

In a word, tired.

In service now: Already, the Marines had called some 5,000 troops voluntarily back into service. The Army has called back 5,000 soldiers from the ready reserves, most of them involuntarily, since Sept. 11, 2001.

In addition, so-called "stop loss" policies that protect the Army from losing people in high-demand specialties are freezing more than 10,000 soldiers in the service involuntarily and indefinitely. At times during the Iraq war, that number has risen to nearly 14,000.
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/local/15373551.htm