Category: Military

House Republicans say they’re going to fix controversial provisions in Obama’s defense spending bill. Don’t believe it.

By Adam Serwer / Mother Jones / May 4, 2012

Facing a serious civil liberties backlash, Congress is considering changing a controversial counterterrorism law it passed last year. Yet the leading fix, backed by House Republicans, may not be a fix at all.

Last year, during consideration of the National Defense Authorization Act, Congress came close to authorizing the indefinite detention of American citizens captured on US soil who were suspected of terrorism. Ultimately, the House, the Senate, and the White House agreed on a compromise that would let federal courts decide whether such detentions were constitutional. That is, when confronted with the knotty question of whether the US government can detain its own citizens within the nation’s borders without charging them with a crime, Congress decided not to decide.

My column last week, “The Fletcher Flim Flam,” got a lot of attention and many comments, the most interesting one coming from Democratic Assemblyman Isadore Hall sent not by the politician himself but by a worried Fletcher campaign staffer who forwarded it to the OB Rag asking that it be posted in response to my blog. Here it is:

On the same day that Jim Miller published his piece against Nathan Fletcher, the right wing group Americans for Prosperity was doing a press conference to attack him as well.

You may have heard about this group, the front group for the Koch brothers. This is the same group that supported the chaos and dysfunction in Wisconsin–a model and vision that Carl Demaio has laid out as his vision for San Diego.

It’s unfortunate that Jim Miller doesn’t know Nathan Fletcher, but I do.

Bob Woodward’s “Obama’s Wars” Gives Us Ringside Seats in How Pentagon “Rolled” the President

It’s amazing, isn’t it, how quickly Afghanistan can fall off the front page or off the news cycle. And then something horrible will bring it back. But only briefly.

Like in this news, an Afghan guy dressed in a soldier’s uniform drove into a crowd that had gathered to see what US and NATO troops were up to in their neighborhood park. The guy donated a bomb – and people were killed – including 3 American soldiers.

Vietnam Has Left Town, Say Hello to the New Syndrome on the Block

By Tom Engelhardt / TomDispatch.com / April 10, 2012

Take off your hat. Taps is playing. Almost four decades late, the Vietnam War and its post-war spawn, the Vietnam Syndrome, are finally heading for their American grave. It may qualify as the longest attempted burial in history. Last words — both eulogies and curses — have been offered too many times to mention, and yet no American administration found the silver bullet that would put that war away for keeps.

(OB Rag Editor: please go to the original post for all the many links – TomDispatch.com )

By Donna Cassata / Huffington Post / March 30, 2012

WASHINGTON — Facing a conservative backlash, House Republicans are working to change a new law that allows the indefinite detention without trial of terrorist suspects, even U.S. citizens seized within the nation’s borders.

Republicans and Democratic lawmakers said this week that the GOP majority on the House Armed Services Committee was weighing several proposals to revise the provision on indefinite detention that was part of the far-reaching defense bill that Congress passed in December and President Barack Obama signed into law.

By Kevin Gosztola / The Dissenter – OpEdNews / March 30, 2012 

At the start of the first hearing on a lawsuit challenging the Homeland Battlefield Act, a federal judge appeared to be “extremely skeptical” that those pursuing the challenge had grounds to sue the US government. However, by the end of the hearing, the judge acknowledged plaintiffs had made some strong arguments on why there was reason to be concerned about the Act, which passed as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on New Year’s Eve last year.

Michael Moore, Chris Hedges, and others to address press following hearing

At 9:00 AM this Thursday, March 29th at the Southern District of New York Federal Courthouse, multiple plaintiffs will testify in support of a worldwide lawsuit against the United States government over the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

The NDAA, also known as the “Homeland Battlefield” law, permanently suspends due process and Habeas Corpus for persons accused by the federal government of being involved in hostilities against the United States, or being an “associated force” of terrorists.

Yes, we need to get the hell out of Afghanistan. Here’s why:

Almost to the day of the 44th anniversary of the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, Sgt. Robert Bales allegedly left his outpost and embarked on a solitary nighttime hike to two nearby Afghan villages where he then methodically massacred 16 mostly women and children sleeping in their beds. This occurred on March 11th.

My Lai occurred on March 16th, 1968, and was the most massive civilian massacre of civilians by American ground soldiers in Vietnam. Its scale of death clearly outmatched this current horrific and monstrous act by Sgt Bales. Between 350 and 500 Vietnamese were killed – mostly women, children – even babies – , and elderly villagers.

Government budgets at every level now include allocations aimed at fighting an ephemeral “War on Terror” in the United States.

By Stephan Salisbury / TomDispatch.com – AlterNet / Originally published March 4, 2012

At the height of the Occupy Wall Street evictions, it seemed as though some diminutive version of “shock and awe” had stumbled from Baghdad, Iraq, to Oakland, California. American police forces had been “militarized,” many commentators worried, as though the firepower and callous tactics on display were anomalies, surprises bursting upon us from nowhere.

There should have been no surprise. Those flash grenades exploding in Oakland and the sound cannons on New York’s streets simply opened small windows onto a national policing landscape long in the process of militarization — a bleak domestic no man’s land marked by tanks and drones, robot bomb detectors, grenade launchers, tasers, and most of all, interlinked video surveillance cameras and information databases growing quietly on unobtrusive server farms everywhere.

By Michael McAuliff / Huggington Post / March 8, 2012

WASHINGTON — A pair of lawmakers on Thursday offered a bill that would repeal laws that allow the indefinite detention of Americans and others by the military without trial.

The power of military authorities to arrest and jail people …

If you have been following the story of the unarmed Marine sergeant gunned down in front of his two daughters last February up in San Clemente, there is some more news and information about the case.

The latest ugly info about this horrific and ugly incident is that Sgt Manny Loggins’ daughters were incarcerated for 13 hours without contact with their mother – this after watching their father being shot in front of them.

Not only that, but a claim that the family is filing against the Sheriffs states that Sgt. Loggins was shot multiple times. Also, Loggins’ wife, Phoebe, who was pregnant at the time of the shooting, just had her baby last Sunday.

The US is sleepwalking into becoming a police state, where, like a pre-Magna Carta monarch, the president can lock up anyone

By Naomi Wolf / guardian.co.uk / Published on Feb. 29, 2012

Yes, the worst things you may have heard about the National Defense Authorization Act, which has formally ended 254 years of democracy in the United States of America, and driven a stake through the heart of the bill of rights, are all really true. The act passed with large margins in both the House and the Senate on the last day of last year – even as tens of thousands of Americans were frantically begging their representatives to secure Americans’ habeas corpus rights in the final version.

It does indeed – contrary to the many flatout-false form letters I have seen that both senators and representatives sent to their constituents, misleading them about the fact that the NDAA destroys their due process rights. Under the act, anyone can be described as a ‘belligerent”.