Month: June 2013

Judge Napolitano thinks he is debating an imposter, this isn’t the John Stossel he knows:

I am reading the heartbreaking suicide note of Daniel Somers, a US combat veteran who spent several years fighting in Iraq. Mr. Somers was only 30 years old when he took his own life, after being tormented by the horrific memories of what he experienced in Iraq. He wrote:

“The simple truth is this: During my first deployment, I was made to participate in things, the enormity of which is hard to describe. War crimes, crimes against humanity. Though I did not participate willingly, and made what I thought was my best effort to stop these events, there are some things that a person simply can not come back from.”

Many who shout the loudest that we must “support the troops” urge sending them off to unwinnable and undeclared wars in which there is no legitimate US interest. The US military has been abused by those who see military force as a first resort rather than the last resort and only in self-defense. This abuse has resulted in a generation of American veterans facing a life sentence in the prison of tortured and deeply damaged minds as well as broken bodies.

The numbers sadly tell the story: more military suicides than combat deaths in 2012, some 22 military veterans take their lives every day, nearly 30 percent of veterans treated by the VA have PTSD.

We should be saddened but not shocked when we see the broken men and women return from battles overseas. We should be angry with those who send them to suffer and die in unnecessary wars. We should be angry with those who send them to kill so many people overseas for no purpose whatsoever. We should be afraid of the consequences of such a foolish and dangerous foreign policy. We should demand an end to the abuse of military members and a return to a foreign policy that promotes peace and prosperity instead of war and poverty.

Copyright © 2013, The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

The first response to Dave Swanson’s “Drones for Christ” report in Sojourners magazine this month is to rub your eyes. This can’t be real, it’s too satirical — a Christian university, sitting on $1 billion of assets in the conservative belt of old Virginia, run by a drawling evangelical preacher with big friends in Washington and the governor’s mansion, offering a concentration in Unmanned Aviation Systems (aka drones)? Calling Slim Pickens!

It gets worse when Swanson gets people on campus to lob on-the-record nuggets like this one: “We want to have graduates serving the Lord in this area of aviation.”

That’s right, Liberty University, founded by televangelist Jerry Falwell and now run by his son Jerry Falwell Jr., is the richest and biggest Christian university in the world and now bills itself as one of the “top military-friendly schools” in the country:

Liberty has been turning out “Christ-centered aviators” for a decade. In fall 2011, Liberty added a concentration in Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS, aka drones), making it one of the first handful of schools to do this. Now at least 14 universities and colleges in the U.S. have permits from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly drones, and many institutions, including community colleges, offer drone training.

If one chooses to concentrate studies on piloting drones, the load will include a half dozen courses on “intelligence.” Liberty students can also pick up a minor in strategic intelligence and take courses in terrorism and counterterrorism. (Liberty’s school of government brags that Newt Gingrich helped develop its course on “American exceptionalism.”) …

Liberty’s School of Aeronautics has six faculty members, five of whom have spent 15 to 30 years in the military—four in the Air Force, one in the Navy. Dave Young, dean of the SOA, spent 29 years in the Air Force and retired as a brigadier general. Last summer, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell appointed Young to serve on the Virginia Aviation Board.

That Liberty is churning out warriors for Christ is not a surprise, of course. For years, described even on these pages, we have known that there is a pretty sophisticated evangelical cabal mustering at the highest levels of the U.S military (Mikey Weinstein over at MRFF calls it the “Fundamentalist-Christian-Para-Church-Military-Corporate-Proselytizing-Complex”). Continue reading “Onward Christian Drone Aviators!”

The Guardian, which was supposedly live-blogging Edward Snowden’s departure from Moscow and his flight to Cuba, is reporting the whistle-blowing computer whiz is not on the plane — much to the dismay of a sizeable contingent of reporters, who hurriedly booked seats on the same flight. And the reporter,  Miriam Elder, adds this startling observation:

“She said Aeroflot officials had told her “with a little smirk” that they had been expecting Snowden too.

“But Miriam pointed out that Snowden had never actually been sighted in Moscow, and there was actually no real evidence that he had ever been in Russia at all.

“Meanwhile a planeload of journalists are now off to spend the day in Cuba.”

Where in the world is Edward Snowden?

UPDATE: 4:15 AM, PST: Interfax reporting Snowden “likely” to take the next flight out to Cuba, but could “stay in transit zone indefinitely.” Whatever that means…

UPDATE: 4:41 AM, PST: Guardian now reporting (ht: Interfax) Snowden is “probably already outside the Russian Federation.” Confused yet?

 

“I really don’t know who WikiLeaks are, other than this Assange person.”
– NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander

If you read through the transcript of NSA Director Keith Alexander’s appearance on ABC this morning, you’re mostly reading deliberately ambiguous nonsense and overt lies, with the uniting theme being things that, if taken at face value, would please a voting majority of Congress.

Except when Gen. Alexander was asked about whether he thought WikiLeaks was real journalism or not. This question has long fascinated the state-endorsed media in America, and there are two ways Alexander could’ve plausibly gone, either insisting WikiLeaks was, as Congressmen so often say, a villainous den of data-thieves, or he could’ve dodged the question by saying, quite correctly, that who is and isn’t a “real” journalist isn’t up to the NSA. Instead we get the above quote, which suggests Alexander has barely even heard the word “WikiLeaks,” other than it being the name of the evil gerbil on South Park or something.

He didn’t just plead ignorance, he pled shocking, implausible ignorance. The titular head of the largest planetary surveillance system in the history of mankind, the guy whose agency reads all our email, has data on every phone call, etc. has never even looked cursorily into WikiLeaks, a huge global clearinghouse of leaked classified information. That’s not the “least untruthful” kind of lie we come to expect from this administration, it’s not even a reasonable lie.

Then again, what if it’s the truth?

As unreasonable as it sounds, suppose Gen. Alexander is just shockingly bad at his job, and knows less about information gathering than your average high-schooler. Suppose the person sitting in this seat of unfathomable, uncheckable power at the dawn of the information age is just a grossly incompetent buffoon who, as is so often in government bureaucracies, failed upward until he found himself at the top.

That shred of hope is sure going to make me sleep a little better at night.