Author: Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

The debate over Syria is on, and it looks like libertarian-leaning Republicans like Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Justin Amash are leading a strong Republican charge against President Obama’s plan for airstrikes in Syria. Much to the consternation of neocon spear points John McCain and Lindsey Graham, the watered-down version of Obama’s proposal passed in the Senate (10 to 7) yesterday is headed for a big fight in the House, thanks in part to Amash and other Republicans who have expressed principled skepticism about the continued use of the U.S military as a global police force.

But we could not let this moment go by without noting (with great irony and perhaps a tiny shiver) that this Republican anti-interventionist movement has been enjoined if not infused with great enthusiasm and support by rightwing elements who could give two Tomahawks about the Constitution or Syrian civilians or the follies of U.S empire. They are the NoBamas — rightwing pols and mouthpieces who reject anything Obama does even if what he is doing is no different from his illustrious predecessor George W. Bush.

Shrillest and most grating among them are the mommas — Sarah Palin and Liz Cheney — both who were unnervingly candid about their bloodlust during and after Bush’s Global War on Terror. One need only to revisit (if you dare) Palin’s 2008 speech at the GOP presidential convention or her creepy sermon at old Glenn Beck Lincoln-side revival in 2010 to realize that war is her religion. Suddenly, with the prospect of a Democrat thumping his chest and reigning down bombs on Muslims, she says, “let Allah sort it out.” Indeed.

Meanwhile, Cheney, who on Tuesday compared herself to Winston Churchill facing down Adolf Hitler, told an audience of captive Wyoming voters that she wouldn’t support Obama because his plan is amateurish. Maybe so, but is this not the same woman who called for the 2010 CPAC audience to heap “thanks and praise” for the CIA torturers, who chided the president — to standing ovation — for not defending his country enough, for in essence, being a sissy?

Excuse me NoBama mommas, but your slips are showing, and your claws.

No matter, they are in great company with Ann Coulter and  Laura Ingraham, both of whom were zealous champions for war in Iraq and used their extraordinary access to the mass media to promote war for a decade. They now say it is not in our national interest to pursue it under Obama. Indeed. Maybe Ingraham hopes we forget her gushing 2006 embed diary in Iraq, where she shamelessly played military apparatchik, parroting the Bush democracy-building line and cooed things like, “(Gen. George Casey) talked of incremental steps toward victory — a slow, tough road but one that is vital to our security back home. The time frame is still so short, he said, from dictatorship to free elections. We’re making progress.”

Ingraham now joins (reformed?) 101st Flying Keyboard Brigade Commander Jonah Goldberg in whining over the use of the term “isolationist,” hurled lately by their own kind at other conservatives who oppose military action. Welcome to the party people, but please, don’t insult our intelligence by implying you never used that invective or at least condoned it when Ron Paul was running for president in ’08 and ’12. We have memories too.

And we cannot forget the Jabba the Hutt of  radio hosts, Rush Limbaugh, who has also found his inner anti-interventionist and (we guess Paul and Amash should thank him here) is whipping up minions of NoBamas against strikes on Syria as we speak.

“I get into arguments with people about this who still do not understand that no matter what the issue, no matter what day of the week, the either No. 1 or No. 2 objective in the world of Barack Obama is the elimination of any opposition,” Limbaugh said. “You cannot take the 2014 midterm elections out of this equation. You cannot remove from this equation just how desperate the Democrats are to win the House in 2014, anything that can be done to blame the Republicans.”

Come On, Rush, you know as well as we do that your biggest radio paydays are when Dems win elections, so what are you up to? Never mind, he’s joined by a fleet of eager B-team jocks like Dana Loesch, who actually said Syria “will be Obama’s Iraq.” Hey now, we thought you and your friends loved Iraq, in fact, every chance you get you all wheel out your savior David Petraeus and say what a “victory” he led for us. What’s changed?

The sad truth is, even if what they are doing is right, we know they are doing it for the wrong reasons and it’s greasy. If their new-found sentiments had been applied to Iraq in 2003, and the Afghan “Surge” in 2009, tens of thousands of lives could have been saved. If they had applied their new aversion to the surveillance state to Bush in 2006 when it mattered, Obama wouldn’t have been able to blow it out in 2008. They are hypocrites and their hypocrisy has consequences. It can’t hurt to keep that in mind when the mommas roar.

Not more than a year ago Lockheed Martin’s Bob Stevens was all but pulling at his hair and gnashing his teeth in anticipation of sequestration. Clearly doing the Republican warhawks’ bidding ahead of the presidential election, he warned that Lockheed may not be able to support U.S forces in the field and that working families might be devastated by layoffs — 123,000 in fact — if congress didn’t do something to stave off the $459 billion in prospective budget cuts over the next decade.

Stevens, who took home more than $23 million in compensation in 2011, wasn’t the only defense contractor CEO to play chicken little last year, but he was one of the most melodramatic, threatening to issue 123,000 layoff notices before the major contractor even scheduled any. He also joined an immense lobbying effort that peddled the hyper-narrative (based in part on this industry-generated report)  that sequestration would shave  1% off the U.S. gross domestic product, raise the unemployment rate by 0.7%, and kill 1 million jobs.

Well we knew the layoff notices were a kabuki dance from the beginning, and that was confirmed when Stevens’ abruptly withdrew the threat just before the election. We also got an inkling that things couldn’t be so bad when it was reported in April that CEOs from all these major contractors were getting raises, including Stevens, whose compensation went up to $27.5 million in 2012.

Now, according to The Washington Post this morning, we’ve learned that these defense contractors have been “weathering the federal budget sequester far more easily than they projected, in part because they have gradually eliminated jobs over the past few years in anticipation of spending cuts.”

That’s right, while they tried to keep our attention on the falling sky, these cry babies had been trimming budgets for years (plenty of people were reporting this, by the way) to whether the storm. The bloviation and bluster was all a political show. In fact, good old Lockheed reported $859 million in profit in the second quarter of 2013, a 10 percent increase year-over-year.  It also reported $1.6 billion in profit for the last six months ending in June, up 12 percent over the year before. In addition:

Lockheed Martin had predicted that sequestration would wipe out $825 million in revenue this year, but it no longer expects such a big hit. In fact, the company said, profit will be higher than initially projected.

Of course, none of the contracts that were already set before sequestration were affected, a small fact that also got lost amid the roar of lamentations inside the Beltway last summer and fall. So far, no major programs have been eliminated or big cuts exacted where it could really count. All that is still being deliberated with much hand wringing and more political theater. But for right now, the only ones who seem to be really suffering are the 650,000 civilian defense workers slapped with 11 days of unpaid leave, resulting in a 20 percent cut in their paychecks from now until September or maybe longer.

That includes people like LaWanda White, a DoD employee and single mom, who says she is struggling to keep up with her bills and had to seek help through the Federal Employee Education & Assistance Fund to pay the rent. Maybe she is in a better place than say, the Lockheed workers who had been laid off over the last five years, but she is infinitely worse off than CEO Bob Stevens and his multimillion dollar pay package.

Interestingly, The Washington Post story noted that while being at a standstill, the Beltway defense contractor job market is holding relatively steady.

“..the region and the industry are not experiencing anything close to the economic cataclysm that defense lobbyists warned about,” the paper said.

Yeah, the real pain may be “trickling down” as analysts note, but let’s face it, “trickling up” might be a better phrase right now. Basically, the whole thing just exposes the industry for what it is: a bunch of crybabies who turn blue to get what they want, and then play “baby alright now” when no longer politically necessary or when soothed and coddled by their nanny benefactors.

Yuck.

So the planned furloughs for some 650,000 civilian workers at the Department of Defense have begun. Roughly speaking, this will mean about a 20 percent cut in each paycheck until September. This is supposed to save the Pentagon $1.8 billion, which is a drop in the bucket in the savings they are supposed to be making elsewhere (and could be — like in runaway health care and retirement costs, over-extended and unnecessary weapons programs, rampant redundancies and war waste) in the budget. But putting workers on the chopping block appears to be the politically expedient way for the Pentagon to get headlines in protest of sequester, and really, who cares about civilian pay anyway? They’re just federal drones who probably make more money than they deserve, right?

Well, truth is, while Planet DoD may have created too many jobs sucking up our dwindling taxpayer resources, the civilian jobs range from the executive all the way down to the secretary, with every pay scale in between. They also include, as we’re reading today, mental health care providers for servicemembers suffering from traumatic brain injury (TBI) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). From Stars and Stripes today:

Due to sequestration, furloughs that affected a variety of civil service employees including behavioral and mental health providers began last week. The mental health directorate of Naval Hospital Camp Lejeune sees more than 1,500 patients between civil service employees, active duty service members and contract employees. Prior to the furloughs civil service employees accounted for 425 of those appointments. Now they will only be able to render 365.

“My provider is a civilian facing furlough,” (Cpl. Eric )Smith said. “Before the furloughs she wanted to see me once every 10 days, but that couldn’t happen because of her patient load. Now the furlough is just going to push my treatment days even further apart.”

Smith, who suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury during one of his two deployments to Afghanistan, was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder and major depressive disorder in 2010.

Smith compared a cognitive therapy group he attends to Alcoholics Anonymous but for service members suffering from PTSD — and says it has been the most therapeutic treatment he has been afforded.

“I’m not nervous about what will happen to me with these furloughs — I’m over the hump in treatment,” Smith said. “I’m worried about the one’s just starting out. They’re the one’s we need to watch out for.”

As this one writer points out, the size of the civilian workforce has gotten out of control. We know that, and something needs to be done about it before we can bring the defense budget back into balance with reality. But it would seem there is no serious plan for reducing it in any practical way that tackles real waste and redundancy first, while protecting individuals from abrupt financial strain and from losing necessary services to boot. As this story today about one of the latest soldier-suicides suggests, politically expedient Band Aids may not have quite the effect the spinmeisters in the E-Ring were looking for. In fact, in some quarters, it may make things a whole lot worse.

Despite new rules put into place by Congress in 2009 prohibiting the use of open air trash-burning pits on U.S overseas bases — yes, the same pits that countless numbers of Iraq and Afghanistan vets, and their doctors, say have caused irreparable harm to their health  — an inspector general’s (SIGAR) report released today say they are still in commission at Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan.

Camp Leatherneck is in Helmand Province and has been a launching pad for Marine expeditionary forces and other American servicemembers and contractors since 2008. As recently as 2012  it was the temporary home for some 18,000 at one time — which means a lot of people have been exposed to the huge smouldering pit there. Today, as Camp Leatherneck is  dismantling ahead of withdrawal, it houses about 13,500 U.S military and civilian personnel, according to the letter to U.S Central Command from the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John F. Sopko, dated July 11.

In that letter, Sopko says the Camp Leatherneck actually spent $11.5 million in taxpayer money to purchase and install two 12-ton and two 24-ton capacity incinerators for clean burning (what the bases were supposed to be doing in the wake of the 2009 legislation). Best let Sopko explain in his own words the rest:

My inspectors made several visits to the camp and found that the 12-ton incinerators were not being used to full capacity and the 24-ton incinerators were not being used at all because a contract for their operation and maintenance had not been awarded. As a result, the camp was relying heavily on open-air burn pit operations to dispose of its solid waste. However, Department of Defense guidance and a U.S. Central Command regulation limit the use of open-air burn pit operations. Camp Leatherneck is in violation of this guidance and regulation.

Camp officials advised that they are planning to eventually use all four incinerators and are looking into the feasibility of contracting to have any excess solid waste hauled to a local landfill. In mid-June 2013, my office was notified that a contract was about to be awarded for operating and maintaining the two 24-ton incinerators and that a contract for hauling trash off-site should be in place by the end of July 2013.

These are positive steps toward the cessation of open-burn pit operations. However, if the base incinerators were used to their full capacity,hauling trash off-site may not be necessary.

Bottom line, the IG’s report found that Camp Leatherneck was violating the new Department of Defense regulations passed in 2009 and furthermore “as a result, possible long-term health risks to the camp’s personnel continue.”

This is a bold statement, considering that the DoD has been dancing around the issue of whether the burn pits are causing health problems for years. We here have documented much of their two-stepping, plus a lot of new funny business with how the VA has been surveying troops coming home with issues ranging from asthma to lung lesions. Doctors who have done lung biopsies on returning vets say they they have have toxic exposure. Others have gone public with their belief that the pits are blame. Yet more and more we hear these reports of bases taking half-baked measures to shut the monsters down — and we’re playing for the privilege! In April we reported another IG report on Camp Salerno, where their two $5 million incinerators have not only gone unused, but are now rotting in place.

Congress has managed to pass a requirement that the VA start collecting information on sick vets for a Burn Pit Registry (the VA initially resisted such a registry, but now is seeking comment and providing details). Soon we may see the repercussions of the Pentagon not taking these risks on U.S bases so seriously.