Author: Brandon

Remarks given at rallies in Columbus March 19 and Cleveland March 20, 2005
by Mike Ferner

As we gather here this afternoon, our colleagues in Toledo are debuting “Arlington at Toledo,” a cemetery with over 1700 white, wooden tombstones to commemorate each U.S. soldier killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Over the past weeks, my wife and I painted a few hundred of these in our kitchen. Last Saturday we started putting labels on them with the name, age, rank and home state of each G.I. killed. As we sat on our living room floor, surrounded by stacks of tombstones representing so many young men and women, we listened to an old Dire Straits album. The track titled “Brothers in Arms” came on with these telling lines: “Every man has to die/But it’s written in the starlight/And in every line on your palm/We’re fools to make war/On our brothers in arms.”
Sue looked at the tombstone with a 19 year-old soldier’s name on it she was holding and dissolved into sobs crying, “He was someone’s baby…”
We are here today to recommit ourselves to ending this slaughter of someone else’s babies, whether American or Iraqi. We are here to demand an end to George Bush’s criminal war.
We must end Bush’s war to prevent more deaths and traumatic amputations of arms and legs, more quadriplegics who will be bedridden the rest of their lives. We must end Bush’s war because every day it continues, it produces more injuries we will never see until they explode years later at home. I’m talking about thousands MORE soldiers who will return from Iraq with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), the injury that leaves minds riddled with flashbacks, anxiety, unpredictable outbursts of anger, depression, addictions and suicide. Continue reading “Iraq Second Anniversary”

Greg Jaffe had a piece a few days ago in the War Street Urinal about the new planning document Donald H. Rumsfeld has released, a result of a major review conducted by the Pentagon every four years, and its implications for the future of the US military. The report, according to Jaffe, marks “a significant departure from recent reviews.” How is this report different? Jaffe says

At its heart, the document is driven by the belief that the U.S. is engaged in a continuous global struggle that extends far beyond specific battlegrounds, such as Iraq and Afghanistan. The vision is for a military that is far more proactive, focused on changing the world instead of just responding to conflicts such as a North Korean attack on South Korea, and assuming greater prominence in countries in which the U.S. isn’t at war.

And why would the US military need a greater presence in friendly countries?

The U.S. would seek to deploy these troops far earlier in a looming conflict than they traditionally have been to help a tottering government’s armed forces confront guerrillas before an insurgency is able to take root and build popular support. Officials said the plan envisions many such teams operating around the world.

Get it? Rummy wants the new military of the future to help train storm troopers in countries where the governments are not very popular with their slaves, er I mean subjects. That way destructive revolutions such as, for instance, the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) will be prevented. At this point the libertarians reading this are no doubt screaming with rage, rightly so. On the positive side, Jaffe notes that this philosophy change will be bad news for the Military Industrial Complex, hurting great American merchants of death such as Lockheed Martin. That might be good news, but my cynical tendencies make me suspicious. Don’t these foreign governments need weapons to keep the people in line?

“It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.” – Mark Twain

Expanding on what Eric just said, I would like to lend a hand to good ol’ Schwartz. Since he seems to lack basic Web understanding, here’s a good definition from wikipedia (They have all kinds of evil links there, Schwartz.) Follow that link and read the entire thing very, very carefully. Especially this part;

One can then follow hyperlinks on each page to other documents or even send information back to the server to interact with it. The act of following hyperlinks is often called “surfing” or “browsing” the web. Web pages are often arranged in collections of related material called “web sites.”

Now, Schwartz, repeat after me, anchor hypertext reference equals”universal resource locator” text to display close anchor. If you don’t understand that, you’re not in the game, and you should take Twain’s advice.

Time for yet another attack on my favorite adversary: The Pentagon. Their new project is not quite as silly as their numerous others. This one represents a legitimate and serious threat to the survival of the species. According to a new story carried here by the Washington Post, the Pentagon is ready to test a launcher for;

an unmanned maneuverable spacecraft that would travel at five times the speed of sound and could carry 1,000 pounds of munitions, intelligence sensors or other payloads.

The story goes on to say;

The use of space “enables us to project power anywhere in the world from secure bases of operation,” says the Pentagon’s national defense strategy, which Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld signed on March 1. Among the key goals in the strategy paper are “to ensure our access to and use of space and to deny hostile exploitation of space to adversaries.“

That sounds like a ‘space war’ to me. There’s virtually no way to shoot something like this down (The US may already have a hypersonic spy plane called the ‘Aurora’. If so, it would have been in service for at least a decade without having been shot down.). Five times the speed of sound? And in sub-orbital space? Put yourself in the position of one of the US’s ‘enemies’; You have to find some way to defend against this thing. Now suppose that this hypersonic space glider is armed with nuclear bombs or tactical missiles. How can the Bush administration’s systematic militarization of space fail to start a new and fantastically dangerous arms race?

According to a report from the American Forces Press Service, The US military has “conducted 10 major reviews, assessments and investigations”, and “these reviews represent more than 1,700 interviews and more than 16,000 pages of information”.
All of this in a desperate effort to convince the public that such incidents as the Abu Ghraib scandal won’t ever happen again. It makes me wonder though, why do you need 10 major reviews and 16,000 pages of documentation to know enough not to torture and sexually molest prisoners? The US military needs 1700 interviews and 16,000 pages of documentation to know enough not to do this;

The expansion includes;

training rooms, offices for special operations and military communications, backup generators, a barbershop, shower rooms for those who work round-the-clock shifts and a 10-car garage for commanders.

The key to the expansion seems to be an attempt to avoid base closure;

The Defense Department’s hit list, due in May, isn’t likely to omit bases from closure just because they’ve had recent construction projects, he said, because a $50 million investment is “chicken feed” compared with the billions of dollars the Pentagon wants to save by closing a quarter of the nation’s bases.

However, referring to the new project, Hellman said, “It seems they’re making themselves pretty cozy there.”