Violence in Iraq Means Profits for Beechcraft, Lockheed, Raytheon and other Weapons Makers
By Steve Straehley | AllGov | June 16, 2014
U.S. companies are reaping big benefits from the Iraqi government’s battle with ISIS militias. Three sales, including some big-ticket items, announced last month will put nearly $1 billion in the pockets of American defense contractors if Congress approves the sales.
- Beechcraft Defense Co. and eight other contractors are selling 24 AT-6C Texan II aircraft, plus spares and other equipment to Iraq. That deal is worth about $790 million. The plane is used for “light attack and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.”
- AM General has a deal to send 200 of its venerable Humvees to help guard oil installations. The contract, which includes spares and equipment such as radios and machine gun mounts, is worth $101 million.
- Raytheon has a $90-million deal for seven aerostats along with 14 Rapid Aerostat Initial Deployment (RAID) Tower systems to be used for command and control by the Iraqi military.
These are just the latest in a string of sales of military equipment to the Iraqi government. Others have included Stinger missiles, C-130J cargo planes, drones and patrol boats.
Since 2005, the U.S. government has provided more than $14 billion in military hardware, services and training to Iraq, according to Global Post. The Iraqi government is now requesting more equipment to battle the Sunni militias, which have taken over large swaths of the country, and American contractors stand to make even more money as the fighting progresses.
To Learn More:
Pentagon Plans To Deliver $1B In Weapons Systems To Iraq. Even Blimps. (by Jill R. Aitoro, Washington Business Journal )
These Are The 9 Weapons The U.S. Is Selling Iraq (by Allison Jackson, Global Post )
Forgotten by Most Americans, Iraq is Still a Source of Profits for U.S. Weapons Makers (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov )
Russia now enemy, so we’ll help Ukraine build up military – NATO chief
RT | June 15, 2014
NATO is preparing a package deal to ramp up the Ukrainian military because it ‘must adapt’ to Russia viewing it as an enemy, the outgoing chief of the military bloc said.
The deal would be submitted to foreign ministers of members states later this month, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told El Pais in an interview. He declined to go into detail, but said it provides for defense industry reform and modernization of the Ukrainian military.
The alliance may also facilitate cooperation with Ukraine over military training, although whatever exercises of NATO member troops would be held in Ukraine is up to individual countries, Rasmussen said.
“We must adapt to the fact that Russia now considers us its adversary,” he explained.
The help that NATO plans to give Ukrainian military comes as the said military are used in a bloody crackdown on the defiant eastern provinces, where local militias defend cities from daily artillery shelling and airstrikes.
Kiev regards the militias as Russia-backed terrorists and refuses any kind of negotiation with them. NATO shares the view, accusing Russia of funneling heavy weapons into Ukraine across the border, although so far no solid evidence of such actions was presented.
The alliance itself is experiencing a sort of revival playing the ‘Russian threat’ card to justify the build-up of troops in Central and Eastern Europe. Moscow sees such deployments as provocative and confirming NATO’s aggressive stance towards Russia.
NATO claims that it has been cooperating with Russia in every way until the Ukrainian crisis sparked the cold war hostilities again. It’s not quite true, considering the alliance’s expansion eastwards in Europe and its plans to deploy a system of anti-ballistic missile defense closer to Russian borders. Both have been done against Russia’s objections that such moves compromise Russian national security.
GAO Audit Accuses Obama Administration of Lowballing Cost of Maintaining Nuclear Arsenal
By Noel Brinkerhoff | AllGov | June 13, 2014
For the second time this year, government auditors have issued a report critical of the Obama administration’s projections for preserving the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons.
In both instances, the cost estimates put forth by the departments of Defense and Energy have been described as far too low, in part because key expenses were not budgeted. The latest audit, performed by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), supported some of the findings of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which concluded six months ago that the administration was off—by hundreds of billions of dollars—in estimating the future needs of maintaining the arsenal.
The Pentagon has claimed outlays will be about $264 billion. But the CBO put the figure closer to $570 billion and perhaps as much as $1 trillion over the next 30 years.
The GAO did not offer its own estimate for maintaining the weapons. But it did question the Defense Department’s claim that modernizing all ballistic missiles and bombers would require only $64 billion over the next 10 years.
In the case of the Minuteman III missile, which has served as the backbone of the nation’s land-based nuclear deterrent since the 1970s, GAO auditors found the administration left out all future funding for replacing these weapons, saying the program was “not yet defined.” As for a new bomber, the Air Force said those costs were “too sensitive” to include in the report.
At the Energy Department (DOE), which oversees all nuclear weapons research, the GAO found that officials had low-balled the cost of modernizing certain warheads for ballistic and cruise missiles.
The agency also reported that DOE had assumed billions of dollars in cost savings from efficiency efforts without determining where the savings would come from, and that Energy officials had left out the cost of revamping or replacing several nuclear-weapons laboratories.
To Learn More:
Federal Auditors Say Obama Administration Underestimates Nuclear Weapons Costs (by R. Jeffrey Smith, Center for Public Integrity)
Ten-Year Budget Estimates for Modernization Omit Key Efforts, and Assumptions and Limitations Are Not Fully Transparent (Government Accountability Office)
Obama Administration Underestimated Cost of Maintaining Nuclear Weapons by $140 Billion (by Noel Brinkerhoff and Danny Biederman, AllGov)
US to blame for Iraq ‘deterioration’ – Lavrov
The BRICS Post | June 13, 2014
Russian officials on Thursday reiterated what they have long held as a mantra of the Kremlin’s foreign policy regarding the Middle East – the US invasion of Iraq created a downward spiral for the whole region.
Alluding to the war for regime change – under the pretext of finding weapons of mass destruction – launched by the US and its allies in March 2003, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that, “the situation in Iraq has been deteriorating at an exponential rate”.
Earlier this week, and following months of continued territorial gains, fighters belonging to a coalition of Islamist militant groups operating under the banner of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) seized the ethnically mixed city of Mosul in Iraq’s northern Nineveh province.
They then followed up by expanding their attacks south and west, seizing Tikrit – the town where executed President Saddam Hussein lived as a child – in Salahudin Province and pushing toward the ancient city of Samarra.
They vowed to advance toward Baghdad and bring the government of Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki down.
Army troops and security forces abandoned their posts at government installations and tore off their uniforms, witnesses said.
With their fighters entrenched in Mosul and most of Nineveh, the former Al-Qaeda affiliates – who have maintained a brutal campaign against the forces of President Bashar Al-Assad in neighbouring Syria – now effectively control a third of Iraq.
“Iraq’s unity has been called into question … Terrorism is rampant there because the occupation forces paid virtually no attention to the internal political processes, and did not facilitate national dialogue, but pursued their own interests exclusively,” Lavrov said in comments carried by the Russian Interfax agency.
“We warned long ago that the adventurism the Americans and the British started there would not end well,” he added.
In June 2013, Russia warned the US of promoting “unconvincing” data on Syria’s alleged chemical weapons use, and thereby repeating the same errors in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Russia has since 2003 said the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a mistake that would haunt the West.
On Thursday, Lavrov did not exclude the UK from his criticism.
“The events that are taking place in Iraq are an illustration of a complete failure of the venture started by the US and the UK that allowed it to spiral out of control completely.”
“We express our solidarity with the Iraqi authorities, the Iraqi people who should restore peace and security in their country, but the actions of our Western partners raise a lot of questions,” Lavrov told reporters.
Moscow Demands Immediate UN Probe Into Use Of Incendiary Bombs in Ukraine
nsnbc | June 12, 2014
Moscow is demanding an immediate UN probe into Kiev’s use of outlawed incendiary bombs in Ukraine’s rebelling southeastern regions. Moscow will present a draft resolution to the UN Security Council, urging the observation of the OSCE roadmap for Ukraine.
The calls come after yesterday’s use of banned incendiary bombs in the village of Semenovka near the Ukraine’s eastern city of Slavyansk. Eyewitnesses to the bombings reported the use of white phosphor bombs on Wednesday night. The Russian RIA Novosty quotes the local self-defense headquarters on Thursday, saying that Semenkova came under an attack that apparently involved fire bombs. The bombs exploded right above the village and split into smoldering fragments, reported eyewitnesses.
The use of phosphor bombs is internationally banned. The burning substance can’t be extinguished and burns through flesh and bones if a person has been hit by the substance. The Itar-Tass news agency quotes Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov as saying:
“We have ordered to our Ambassador to UN Vitaly Churkin to present to the Security Council a draft resolution on the situation in Ukraine, as we are very concerned by the lack of any progress in the efforts to stop the violence, to stop the war, beginning from the end of the punitive operation”.
“In this resolution we have focused on the fact it is necessary to insist the Ukrainian side began implementing the OSCE roadmap, based on the Geneva statement of April 17, and which was presented after the talks with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, … It is a very important moment, as, we see, there are clear attempts to distance from the balanced and fair character of the approaches in the roadmap, and there are attempts to promote certain unilateral plans, which would ignore interests of Ukraine’s southeast.”
Lavrov stressed that only an equal-rights dialog, a complete consideration of interests of all of Ukraine’s regions without exceptions, and a dialog that also includes discussions about constitutional reform, may result in stability and an improvement of the situation in Ukraine.
The draft resolution expresses Russia’s concerns about the continuing violence and the killing of civilians, the destruction of infrastructure, residential areas, as well as attacks against convoys. Lavrov added that Russia does not speak about sending peace keepers and that Moscow still believes President Poroshenko has credibility.
Moscow does, however, demand an immediate and full investigation into the use of incendiary bombs and other prohibited weapons in Ukraine. Lavrov stressed “We are concerned to hear reports that the Ukrainian military forces use incendiary bombs and some other indiscriminate weapons. These reports should be investigated, immediately”.
Nuclear bomb nearly detonated after falling on North Carolina – declassified report
RT | June 11, 2014
In a scenario that could’ve been extremely devastating, the United States narrowly averted a nuclear disaster in 1961 when an atomic bomb nearly detonated after falling out of a B-52 bomber that broke up in the sky.
According to the Washington Post, the incident took place on January 21, 1961 – less than 20 years after nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – and is explained further in a recently declassified report published by the National Security Archives.
When the US Air Force aircraft went into a tailspin and broke up, the two bombs fell towards Goldsboro, North Carolina. The parachute for one of the weapons failed to deploy, and the plane crash had actually pushed the bomb into “armed” mode by the time it hit the ground. Luckily for North Carolina, the plane’s destruction also damaged the switch necessary to trigger detonation.
“The report implied that because Weapon 2 landed in a free-fall, without the parachute operating, the timer did not initiate the bomb’s high voltage battery (“trajectory arming”), a step in the arming sequence,” wrote Bill Burr of the National Security Archives.
“For Weapon 2, the Arm/Safe switch was in the “safe” position, yet it was virtually armed because the impact shock had rotated the indicator drum to the “armed” position. But the shock also damaged the switch contacts, which had to be intact for the weapon to detonate.”
Burr noted in his report just how fine the line was and is between safety and destruction.
“Perhaps this is what Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had in mind, a few years later, when he observed that, ‘by the slightest margin of chance, literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted,” he wrote.
These details are just the latest to surface about the incident, which was first revealed by nuclear weapons expert Eric Schlosser last year in a book titled, “Command and Control.” Through a Freedom of Information Act request, Schlosser was able to obtain documentation regarding the incident for the first time, and helped shed light on just how close the Air Force came to witnessing an atomic bomb explode on US soil.
As RT reported last year, the documents revealed that three of the four safety switches on the other bomb failed to work properly, meaning, as Schlosser noted, that only “one simple, dynamo-technology, low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe.” The parachute on this one deployed, but when the bomb struck the ground the final firing signal triggered, only to be halted by that fourth safety switch.
The bombs contained a payload of four megatons each and could have generated explosions 260 times more powerful than the one that occurred in Hiroshima.
Before the documents related to the Goldsboro incident surfaced, the US government had denied that its nuclear weapons stockpile had ever put the nation at risk.
“The US government has consistently tried to withhold information from the American people in order to prevent questions being asked about our nuclear weapons policy,” Schlosser told the Guardian. “We were told there was no possibility of these weapons accidentally detonating, yet here’s one that very nearly did.”
Russia, China present new joint draft to prevent outer space war
The BRICS Post | June 11, 2014
China and Russia have jointly submitted an updated draft international treaty on banning the deployment of weapons in outer space to a UN-sponsored disarmament conference.
The US and Israel have repeatedly voted against UN resolutions on the prevention of an arms race in outer space.
The updated draft Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space, the Threat or Use of Force Against Outer Space Objects, was presented at a plenary session of the Conference on Disarmament, the world’s sole multilateral forum for disarmament negotiations.
The new draft treaty prepared by Russia and China is a revised version of the one the two allies had presented earlier, including definition and scope of the treaty, organizations as well as mechanisms to solve disputes, said Wu Haitao, China’s ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary for disarmament affairs.
The Treaty on Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space and of the Threat or Use of Force Against Outer Space Objects (PPWT) was first proposed by China and Russia in February 2008 as an international legally binding treaty that would outlaw the weaponization of space.
Wu said this new draft treaty is aimed at advancing the Conference on Disarmament toward negotiations for signing an international legal document.
Space assets like satellites are at increasing threat of being disabled from hostile countries as risk of cyber-warfare grows.
Beijing has warned of the growing risks of the weaponization of outer space with the rapid development of space technology, which the Chinese Ambassador said will “hinder the peaceful use of outer space, break global strategic balance and stability and hamper nuclear disarmament”.
The existing legislation on outer space cannot prevent the use or the threat of force against outer space assets, Wu said.
Telecommunications, GPS navigation systems, power etc could be easily switched off with the disabling of satellites in the backdrop of a militarized outer space.
China has stressed during the UN conference on the urgent need to sign a new international legal document to prevent the weaponization of outer space.
China and Russia are willing to include suggestions and ideas from other parties and continue to improve the draft treat in order to lay a foundation for the start of practical negotiations at the Conference on Disarmament, Wu said.
Bowe Bergdahl and the Moral Rot of American Exceptionalism
By Winston Warfield | CounterPunch | June 6, 2014
“The future is too good to waste on lies,” Bowe wrote. “And life is way too short to care for the damnation of others, as well as to spend it helping fools with their ideas that are wrong. I have seen their ideas and I am ashamed to even be american (sic). The horror of the self-righteous arrogance that they thrive in. It is all revolting.”
From “America’s Last Prisoner of War”, by Michael Hastings. Rolling Stone, June 7, 2012
Nothing exposes the decadence of American militarism and the ideology of American exceptionalism better than the explosion of emotion sweeping the internet, Congress and the news media over the prisoner exchange of Bowe Bergdahl for five Taliban. He is being vilified as a deserter and personally responsible for the deaths of fellow soldiers missioned to find him. The American right-wing located in the Republican party, some liberals like Chris Matthews and Dianne Feinstein and some of his fellow soldiers are all calling for his head in a display of vengeful nastiness bordering on psychotic. Bergdahl’s motivations for walking away from the bizarre U.S. counterinsurgency expedition in Afghanistan, a “dirty war” seemingly without purpose or end, are being lost in the fog of infantile political temper tantrums.
Bergdahl was according to an in-depth Rolling Stone article in 2012 by the late Michael Hastings, an exceptionally competent and motivated soldier during training, serious about preparing himself for combat. So serious and competent, that his fellow soldiers kidded him about being too gung-ho. He was moved in part by what he had read or viewed of reports of atrocities against civilians by the Taliban and other jihadist groups in other countries. His was an honest and heartfelt desire to “serve and protect” the poor and destitute in conflict zones. He was a highly-motivated foot soldier for “humanitarian imperialism”, the perfect youthful idealist falling for the good-vs-evil fairy tale of American exceptionalism.
Bergdahl’s disillusionment started as soon as he joined the U.S. Army, and found that his unit was incompetent to the point of being dysfunctional. The leadership problems and motivation issues never were really resolved in training, and only intensified after deployment to Paktia Province, one of the more volatile and dangerous areas in Afghanistan. He describes an 8-hour mission in an email home to his parents which turned into an extreme military FUBAR (fucked up beyond all recognition), where he and his unit spent multiple days stranded in enemy territory due to what in his view was leadership and bureaucratic incompetence. In a supreme irony, this is the same province in which Pat Tillman, the former Arizona Cardinal football player who joined the Army Rangers out of idealistic and self-sacrificing patriotism, was killed by members of his own unit in a notorious “friendly-fire” incident. That was the result of grossly negligent decision-making on the part of his chain-of-command which committed the cardinal sin of splitting up his unit while similarly stranded, as reported in Counterpunch.
From the Hastings article, Bergdahl’s views seem to go beyond the usual soldierly complaints into an angry indictment of careerism and “covering-your-ass” incompetence:
“Three good sergeants, Bowe said, had been forced to move to another company, and ‘one of the biggest shit bags is being put in charge of the team.’ His battalion commander was a ‘conceited old fool.’ The military system itself was broken: ‘In the US army you are cut down for being honest… but if you are a conceited brown nosing shit bag you will be allowed to do whatever you want, and you will be handed your higher rank… The system is wrong. I am ashamed to be an american. And the title of US soldier is just the lie of fools.’ The soldiers he actually admired were planning on leaving: ‘The US army is the biggest joke the world has to laugh at. It is the army of liars, backstabbers, fools, and bullies. The few good SGTs are getting out as soon as they can, and they are telling us privates to do the same.’”
Bergdahl’s vehemently critical attitude toward his chain-of-command is familiar to many enlisted soldiers who served in the Vietnam War. Officers, especially field-grade, were viewed with deserved contempt, with some exceptions, as corrupt and incompetent careerists who avoided personal risk. The assault on Hill 937, which came to be known as “Hamburger Hill” is one of the more notorious incidents, where soldiers were gratuitously sacrificed by officers in the rear. In what came to be called in the black humor of the soldier “ticket punching”, these kinds of officers were scorned for their career-building tours in Vietnam only to get the necessary medals for upward advancement.
It isn’t clear from Bergdahl’s personal history in the Rolling Stone article whether he joined the Army due to economic difficulties, the “poverty draft” as it’s called. It may have played a role. His parents were certainly not wealthy or privileged, earning an annual income of only $7000 one year according to Hastings.
He did have other personal motivations for wanting to become a soldier, revealing some of the more telling features of militarized American culture, where ignorance of history and the world outside, especially among youth, even those with strong ethical senses, yields startling contradictions. He at one point unsuccessfully tried to join the French Foreign Legion as a mercenary, probably unaware or willfully ignorant of its savage and ruthless record in French imperial history. That ignorance and historic amnesia is coupled with a desire to express one’s youthful need for excitement and adventure by joining the military, and in essence acquiring that excitement by deploying across the planet to combat zones. In the society of the spectacle, where young Americans are immersed in an entertainment culture, the world becomes a theme park or giant (real) video contest, where they can overcome their boredom in a spiritually dead consumerism by testing themselves in what they view as heroic combat in other people’s countries, riding to their rescue. The “others” in those countries in essence become two-dimensional cutouts or foils for a live-action videogame with real risks and danger and excitement. The suffering resulting from American military occupation is not part of the consciousness, and rarely is noticed by soldiers immersed in the demands of survival against lethal dangers. It is instead often replaced with resentment and hatred for the ungrateful locals who either support the insurgents or are caught between them and American forces.
But this isn’t always so, for some don’t lose their moral compass and independent intellect, even in the stifling culture of the military, where mental activity is supposed to be totally directed at focused attention on the mission. Questioning that mission is heresy. As the saying goes in the military, “Those things are ‘way above my pay grade”. Bergdahl was one of those exceptions, a soldier who observed his situation with a critical eye, spent down time reading, and was prone to measuring the stated mission of the U.S. occupation and counterinsurgency, “winning hearts and minds” against actual behavior of his fellow soldiers. It was this independence and strong moral sense that would get him into trouble and set off a political firestorm.
While Bergdahl was motivated initially in part by the desire for adventure, and to escape the confines of small-town Hailey, Idaho and the isolating regime of family life in a religious household, he brought his apparently strong ethical upbringing into the military. He was home-schooled by strict sort of hippie Christian fundamentalist parents who lived mostly off-the-grid, and he got a strong education in ethics and morality, studying Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine. Ironically considering the left-right political paradigm in America, where Christian fundamentalism is viewed as a monolithic ideological construct on the right of the spectrum, the hatred and vitriol directed at him comes mostly (but not exclusively) from the right while his moral and ethical development took place in what could be argued was a Christian fundamentalist home.
In a letter his father wrote, from the Rolling Stone article, he advised his son:
“‘Dear Bowe,’ he wrote. ‘In matters of life and death, and especially at war, it is never safe to ignore ones’ conscience. Ethics demands obedience to our conscience. It is best to also have a systematic oral defense of what our conscience demands. Stand with like minded men when possible.’ He signed it simply ‘dad.’”
There’s another name for the neutral and dispassionate word “counterinsurgency”, or, in our western culture in love with acronyms, “COIN”. It’s “dirty war”, which is a more accurate label for the bitter, ruthless struggle between occupiers and occupied. By now, even with the historic amnesia of the “putting Vietnam behind us” mantra of the national storytellers, the nature of COIN remains the same. Occupation forces are obliged to ferret out insurgents “by whatever means necessary”, tantamount to terror, which includes nocturnal home invasions, “enhanced interrogation” (a.k.a. modernized torture), drone strikes on village compounds, occasionally weddings and funerals (by mistake of course – we never know for sure), and the ruthless practice of sometimes firing missiles into crowds of what we would call “first responders”, the Afghani equivalent of cops, firefighters and ambulances. Insurgents of course respond with ambush and mine warfare (IED’s) against occupation forces and their own brand of terror directed against collaborators.
Not surprisingly, many occupation soldiers, carrying in their heads the bright, shining lie of American benevolence and purity (and by extension their own), bedeviled by constant pressure from an unseen enemy and a civilian population unable or unwilling to cooperate, soon develop very negative attitudes toward those whom they thought they were “saving”. Atrocity stories about American soldiers murdering women and children, desecrating corpses and so forth start percolating into the national consciousness, like skunks at a garden party. Bergdahl hinted at this sinister attitude starting to develop in his own unit in Hasting’s article:
“In the second-to-last paragraph of the e-mail, Bowe wrote about his broader disgust with America’s approach to the war – an effort, on the ground, that seemed to represent the exact opposite of the kind of concerted campaign to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of average Afghans envisioned by counterinsurgency strategists. ‘I am sorry for everything here,’ Bowe told his parents. ‘These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live.’ He then referred to what his parents believe may have been a formative, possibly traumatic event: seeing an Afghan child run over by an MRAP. ‘We don’t even care when we hear each other talk about running their children down in the dirt streets with our armored trucks… We make fun of them in front of their faces, and laugh at them for not understanding we are insulting them.’
Bowe concluded his e-mail with what, in another context, might read as a suicide note. ‘I am sorry for everything,’ he wrote. ‘The horror that is america is disgusting.’”
This remarkable statement comes from a formerly highly-disciplined soldier, trained to carry a SAW (squad automatic weapon) into combat, by all accounts what the national mythology reveres, a poster-boy for the new secular religion of American exceptionalism . It is also what no doubt has driven its true believers and priests into enraged apoplexy, including some in his own unit and possibly many veterans. The rage has turned into an avalanche of hate on social media, intimidating parade organizers in his hometown into cancelling his homecoming.
Yet disaffection in the ranks is not new with Bergdahl. The tragic friendly-fire death of one Pat Tillman, who America fell in love with after he sacrificed a lucrative National Football League career to join the Army Rangers after 9-11, gives us a glimpse into this dissonance. In March 2003 he told his buddy Spc. Russell Baer while serving in Iraq, in a quote which went viral over the internet, “You know, this war is so fucking illegal.” His accidental death in Afghanistan in a botched mission at the hands of his fellow soldiers was assiduously covered up by the military and Bush administration, until through the struggle for truth by his own family it could no longer be. His journal which he kept disappeared.
The discord within the military and veteran community finally coalesced organizationally into resistance through the formation of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) in July 2004 at the annual convention of Veterans for Peace in Boston. IVAW opened its doors to American veterans of the occupation of Afghanistan in 2009. The public disclosure of dissent by veterans, and especially active-duty members, is highly sensitive in this militarized culture and in certain high-profile cases like Bergdahl’s is immediately attacked. The true believers in American mythology, many veterans who have experienced much pain and loss as a result of their military service, are unable to tolerate this kind of dissent, for it raises agonizing questions, “Was it all in vain? Was I used for ulterior motives by my own government?” and lash out at dissenters. They are rounded up by clever political operatives and used to build campaigns of intimidation. This is what is happening now as the established political parties and their corporate media allies attempt to quash dissent.
What must be alarming to those depending on a reliable military for power projection in the neoliberal project of policing the world, is the specter of resistance in the military. During the invasion and occupation of Vietnam an intense, wide and deep GI resistance movement developed which ultimately played a crucial role in bringing the war to an end. This resistance in the military is brilliantly described in David Cortright’s “Soldiers in Revolt”, but has been mostly erased from national memory in the selective amnesia referred to as “putting Vietnam behind us.”
One of the main reasons for the initiation of the all-volunteer military after the debacle in Vietnam was to eliminate the problem of draftees in the military and general draft resistance. It was thought that most of the GI resistance was within the ranks of disgruntled draftees, but this assumption, which has become unquestioned, is declared by Cortwright to be completely untrue. He says, referring to those days:
“Of course, the end of conscription did not halt the GI resistance movement. The assumption that the U.S. military would be free of dissension, that volunteers would be more docile and acquiescent than draftees, proved wrong. In fact, the GI movement had always been primarily a movement of enlistees, and filling the ranks with volunteers thus actually increased the likelihood of internal dissent.”
The political class knows the importance keeping control of the military and thus the story coming out of occupations. All the soldiers in the current occupations are enlisted. Bergdahl’s anguish and desperate escape, especially his reasons, will be snuffed by the orchestrated outrage and “debate” over whether or not he should be deemed a deserter and whether the prisoner swap was a good or bad deal and who is to blame if it’s seen as “bad”. Republican political ambitions will be resurrected by attempts to paint whoever has to preside over the defeat in Afghanistan as “appeasement”. The underlying issues of the criminality of these occupations which Bergdahl’s act called into question cannot be allowed into the discussion.
Winston Warfield is a member of the Smedley D. Butler Brigade of Veterans for Peace, in Boston.
Slavyansk under fire, without water and power as Kiev troops resume shelling
RT | June 08, 2014
Slavyansk residents take shelter in the basement of their house during a heavy artillery shelling on June 8, 2014. (RIA Novosti / Andrey Stenin)
Death and destruction is reported in eastern Ukraine as Kiev’s artillery has resumed shelling the rebellious city of Slavyansk. Locals tell RT they have been without running water and power for days, and that hope is fading.
“The shells broke just near the central square. They hit residential houses, a furniture factory, a cafe and communications post,” an unnamed representative of the local city council told Itar-Tass. “There are victims among the civilians and some people received shrapnel wounds.”
“At this time there were many people in the center because of the Pentecost Mass in the nearby church has just ended,” the source added.
Four people were killed in the result of the shelling, a small girl among them. Seven people were taken to hospital with injuries, RT’s correspondent Andrey Krasnoschyokov reports from the scene.
Kiev’s artillery also has hit a gas pipe in the city, but there was no explosion threat, the city council told RIA Novosti. Another shell struck a petrol station outside Slavyansk, and a blast and fire followed.
Slavyansk residents say their spirits are getting lower, as the city is completely surrounded by Kiev’s armed forces and there is constant shooting and shelling while evacuation is hindered.
“Slavyansk has been attacked by massive shelling overnight,” a local resident told RT, adding that the shelling never stops.
As the man was speaking to RT in the morning, he saw massive columns of smoke coming from the city outskirts. The sounds of shelling were heard distinctly over the phone.
The city is preparing to survive without drinking water and electricity.
“Residents are living a third day without water, some people even the fifth… Half [of the city population] doesn’t have electricity,” the man said.
As shops ran out of drinking water supplies too, Twitter images showed that residents had started scooping the remaining water out of fountains.
According to RT’s witness, those water and electricity lines that have been broken are located in the “war zones,” where most of the fighting takes place, that’s why it is almost impossible to repair them.
“There is an impression that [Kiev forces] are striking in the vicinity of high-voltage lines to disrupt them and leave the city without water and electricity,” he added.
‘Slavyansk is a total nightmare’
Slavyansk residents are leaving the besieged city with shells whistling above their heads, local driver Vladimir, who evacuates at least 10 residents a day, told RT.
“This is a total nightmare what is happening in Slavyansk. They [Kiev troops] only let women and children leave the city – they are forced to walk through the checkpoints,” Vladimir says. “Men are not allowed to leave or enter the city.”
Vladimir, who literally drives through never-ending gunfire, says Slavyansk residents are mostly seeking refuge in Crimea or in nearby regions.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s National Guard has begun artillery fire in the outskirts of Slavyansk, according to a video released on YouTube. The footage shows a huge amount of smoke coming from the hill on the outskirts.
Kiev authorities have recently intensified what Kiev calls an “anti-terrorist” operation with a massive artillery attack on Slavyansk. The plan was to conduct a “clean-up” of Donetsk and Lugansk regions ahead of the presidential inauguration held on June 7.
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The volcanic mineral medicine will not patent — for the toxic burden medicine will not name
Lies are Unbekoming – October 30, 2026
Zeolite is old. It is in Roman concrete that has held for two thousand years. It’s in the water filters of ancient cisterns. It’s in the stomachs of Pacific livestock whose keepers knew, somehow, that this grey crumbling rock made the animals healthier. It’s in Soviet clinical protocols from the 1960s. It’s in the standard emergency response to the Chernobyl explosion.
In 1986, after the Chernobyl reactor failure, the Soviet Union manufactured and distributed natural zeolite at industrial scale — for soil remediation, for livestock feed, for human consumption, for the cleanup itself. Karl Hecht, who had been director of the Institute for Experimental and Clinical Pathophysiology at the Charité of Humboldt University Berlin, spent the six decades after that building the clinical research base — on silicon’s role in human health, on zeolite’s clinical safety, on its applications in ageing. In 2018, Pavelić and colleagues published a comprehensive clinical safety review of natural clinoptilolite in Frontiers in Pharmacology. In 2019, Mastinu analysed its binding affinities. In the Western medical literature, these works sit largely uncited.
What has not been treated at book length, until now, is how a volcanic mineral with six decades of Soviet clinical work behind it, two major peer-reviewed Western reviews, and ongoing clinical use across the former Eastern Bloc, remains almost entirely absent from Western medical practice — and what the toxic burden it’s meant to address actually is.
The Zeolite Book gathers the Soviet clinical record, the Western peer-reviewed studies, three contemporary practitioner voices, and three serious counterviews into one honest treatment. That’s why the book runs to seven appendices. 288 pages, four parts, three practitioner voices, three counterviews, seven appendices. The honest treatment is the argument.
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