posted on March 10, 2004 07:12:24 PM new
This just came in to Salon.com. It was written by a retired Lt. Colonel who was assigned to the NSA. It has the making of a real sticky one for the President and his handlers. The author has impressive credentials:
In July of last year, after just over 20 years of service, I retired as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force. I had served as a communications officer in the field and in acquisition programs, as a speechwriter for the National Security Agency director, and on the Headquarters Air Force and the office of the secretary of defense staffs covering African affairs. I had completed Air Command and Staff College and Navy War College seminar programs, two master's degrees, and everything but my Ph.D. dissertation in world politics at Catholic University. I regarded my military vocation as interesting, rewarding and apolitical.
posted on March 10, 2004 08:43:44 PM new
That is astounding, Profe. Now that I want to print it, my printer isn't working. Guess I'll try turning the computer off and on.
posted on March 10, 2004 09:30:33 PM new
I hope that everyone reads that article...and the links.
A hundred years war.....and the draft will begin soon.
There are twin bills in Congress and the Senate right now to get ready for the draft. after the 2004 presidential election.
The draft plan is not being publicized but there is pending legislation in the House and Senate now that would provide for a draft to begin as early as Spring 2005.
Bills H.R. 163 and S. 89 --To provide for the common defense by requiring that all young persons in the United States, including women, perform a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes.
posted on March 11, 2004 08:18:49 AM newAnd you are trying to mislead everyone about Kerrys plan. This is a discription of what you deceptively termed a draft. It's not a draft in preparation for war.
A New Era of National Service
John Kerry will call on Americans of all ages – from
students to America’s seniors - to serve in our classrooms,
after school programs, nursing homes and nursery schools.
We will fight to allow students to earn four years of college
tuition in exchange for two years of national service. His
plan will require mandatory national service for high school
kids and enlist a million Americans in service a year.
End
[ edited by Helenjw on Mar 11, 2004 08:21 AM ]
posted on March 11, 2004 08:19:03 AM new
This is a dynamite piece has it been sent to members of Congress and to the News media-? If not how come? Senator Kerry was heard calling them a bunch of liars and crooks when his mike was supposed to be off-This just means he has to say it out loud-
posted on March 11, 2004 08:39:43 AM newWe need the draft... kids today have no discipline or purpose...
Statements like that sound like some rhetoric from a crotchety old man and even now you don't hear many of them saying that anymore. Those are the same thoughts of the leaders when they don't value youth and can just send them out to slaughter and consider that their "purpose".
I'm sorry you live in an area where you have that impression of "kids today", Twelvepole. Most of the kids I know work at jobs after school each day. During the summer months many of them work at two or more jobs a day. They get good marks at school and even do volunteer work and participate in lots of other things.
I think most of these kids have hopes and dreams of a bright future. I'm sure that there are lots like them in your area also, if you would just crawl out of your box and take a good look around you.
posted on March 11, 2004 09:26:30 AM new
no....but rather this part I took from kerry's website.
Finally, there is the form of service that has made and kept this country free, defended it from mortal dangers, and literally saved the world from the most monstrous forms of tyranny. Military service is honorable and noble. So often, it is the highest form of sacrifice. As President, I will seek to strengthen our armed forces by recruiting more active duty personnel at a time when the military is having retention and recruiting problems. The difficult missions we face and the complex technologies we depend on demand that.
President Bush has not led in recruiting young people into the military. I will.
I also believe no university that receives federal aid should be allowed to ban the ROTC from campus. It hurts our students; it hurts our colleges; it hurts our country. It is wrong - and under a Kerry Administration, it will be illegal.
I learned about duty and obligation from my parents - through their words and by their example. My father was on the front end of the Greatest Generation. He set aside his career and volunteered even before America entered World War II.
It was my generation that in our youth heard that call - and I remember shortly afterwards my own period of service. We did not think we were special. We just thought we were doing our part.
----------------
So far I've only seen TWO current democratic candidates that have called for a form of 'forced service', not the current administration. But the thread implies Bush is considering the necessity of a 'draft' without so much as ONE form of proof he's even said so. right......
posted on March 11, 2004 09:39:32 AM new
getting back to topic:
This is quoted from a paper published in December by the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College. It was written by Professor Jeffrey Record, professor in
the Department of Strategy and International Security at the US Air Force’s Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama.
In the wake of the September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on the United States, the U.S. Government declared a global war on terrorism (GWOT). The nature and parameters of that war, however, remain frustratingly unclear. The administration has postulated a multiplicity of enemies, including rogue states; weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferators;terrorist organizations of global, regional, and national scope; and terrorism itself. It also seems to have conflated them into a monolithic threat, and in so doing has subordinated strategic clarity to the moral clarity it strives for in foreign policy and may have set the United States on a course of open-ended and gratuitous confl ict withstates and nonstate entities that pose no serious threat to the United States.
Of particular concern has been the confl ation of al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat. This was a strategic error of the first order because it ignored critical differences between the two in character, threat level, and susceptibility to U.S. deterrence and military action. The result has been an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable al-Qaeda. The war against Iraq was not integral to the GWOT, but rather a detour from it.
___________________________________
posted on March 11, 2004 10:37:53 AM newKerry is not planning a never ending war in the middle east. Is he???
Helen
God only knows what kerry will or won't do, since he says so many conflicting things everytime he speaks.
But he has called for recruiting 40,000 more army troops.....wonder what they might be needed for.
----------------
Profe - Imo we are fighting a world battle against terrorist. Look at the bombings in Spain today. Some believe they are A-Q related. Many dead, many injured. This is NOT some 'made up threat' our world/our nation faces.
Terrorism is a reality some believe we need to confront.
posted on March 11, 2004 10:43:51 AM new
Linda - if the Spain bombings today are ETA bombings - we are nigt fighting them any more than we would be fighting the IRA. ETA is trying to blame AQ apparently buut considering that that the recent explsives finds in ETA posession I find it doubtful.
~~~ • ~~~ • ~~~ • ~~~ • ~~~
If it's really "common" sense, why do so few people actually have it?
posted on March 11, 2004 10:54:42 AM new
fenix - I agree we don't yet know for sure. But that was a statement made when who could have been behind this was questioned. Some think it may be AQ because Spain has supported the US.
posted on March 11, 2004 12:31:32 PM new Profe - Imo we are fighting a world battle against terrorist
I agree that's what we ought to be fighting. But what does Iraq have to do with it? Did you read my links? All 5 pages? There are now US Military members who seriously question our involvement there.
For the first time, an insider who was there is telling what she knows about how the lie was crafted, the lie that made us believe we needed to attack Iraq. These aren't "un-american lefties", they're high ranking military people. As professor Record says:
The war against Iraq was not integral to the GWOT, but rather a detour from it.
posted on March 11, 2004 01:05:53 PM new
No, profe - I clicked on your link, saw who wrote this story....did a google search to find out who she was and was taken to an LA Times article that claims she's pretty much on the 'fringe' of politics. Now the LA Times can't be accused of being a 'right-winged' newspaper.
--------------
long but here's the LA Times article that address you initial post.
---
Ted Kennedy delivered another stemwinder last week, accusing the Bush administration of lying its way into Iraq for political gain. Ho-hum. Nothing new there. But one paragraph caught my attention.
In trying to buttress his charge that the president twisted intelligence about Saddam Hussein, Kennedy cited "Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a recently retired Air Force intelligence officer who served in the Pentagon during the buildup to the war." He quoted her as follows: "It wasn't intelligence ? it was propaganda … they'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, usually by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together."
Sounds pretty damning, doesn't it? Those aren't the words of a political opponent; that's the judgment of a presumably disinterested military professional. [/b]Except that Kwiatkowski's judgment doesn't look so disinterested when you examine her views more closely[/b].
Since her retirement in March 2003, she has become a prolific contributor to isolationist publications like the American Conservative, Pat Buchanan's magazine, and lewrockwell.com, an ultra-libertarian website. Pretty much all her work is devoted to uncovering "neoconservative warmongers" who have supposedly taken over U.S. foreign policy.
She is not subtle in denouncing "Dickie Cheney, Richie Perle and Dougie Feith" (as well as, occasionally, "my pal, Max Boot", whose "neoconservative philosophy is hateful to humanity, anti-American, statist and anti-free trade." (Anti-free trade?) She thinks the United States is a "maturing fascist state." And she predicts a dire fate for those who led us into the Iraq war: "Some folks on the Pentagon's E-ring may be sitting beside Hussein in the war crimes tribunals."
Kennedy's speechwriters must have been familiar with Kwiatkowski's oeuvre ? how else could they have dredged up that quote? ? but it did not stop them from holding her up as a trustworthy source. This isn't unusual. Many retired national security bureaucrats claiming President Bush lied about Iraq have a not-so-hidden agenda.
The best-known example is Joseph C. Wilson IV, the former ambassador who has accused the administration of spreading misinformation about Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium and of deliberately outing his wife, Valerie Plame, as an undercover CIA operative. Wilson is now notorious as a world-class publicity hound who makes Paris Hilton look meek by comparison. Since l'affaire Plame broke last summer, Wilson has been making paid speeches denouncing the president, writing a memoir and even appearing with his wife in a Vanity Fair photo spread.
Wilson is motivated by more than a desire for fame and fortune. He's also an ideologue. On March 3, 2003 ? long before the contretemps over his wife ? he was denouncing the invasion of Iraq in the Nation, a leftist magazine. He claimed that "the underlying objective of this war is the imposition of a Pax Americana on the region and installation of vassal regimes that will control restive populations." Since then, Wilson has emerged as an active Democrat who has advised John Kerry on foreign policy. He was quoted last year explaining what he's up to: "Neoconservatives and religious conservatives have hijacked this administration, and I consider myself on a personal mission to destroy both."
Equally biased are the former CIA officers who call themselves Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity ? a name that implies the administration, which they oppose, is insane. Ray Close, David MacMichael and Ray McGovern, who make up VIPS' steering committee, have many decades of intelligence experience among them, which is why they are often cited as sources by news organizations like the New York Times when they write stories about how the Bush team has run roughshod over "objective" CIA analysts.
What is seldom mentioned is where the VIPS-ters publish most of their anti-Bush screeds: on Counterpunch.org, a conspiracy-mongering website run by Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn. VIPS even has an e-mail address at
Counterpunch, which is so extreme that it has run an article suggesting that the only major difference between George W. Bush and Adolf Hitler is that "Bush simply is not the orator that Hitler was." But then, that wouldn't bother someone like VIPS' McGovern, who in an interview equated the administration's selling of the Iraq war with the techniques employed by "Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels [who] said, if you repeat something often enough, the people will believe it."
Simply because Kwiatkowski, Wilson, McGovern, et al have flaky views doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong in all the charges they make against the administration. But those who hear their vituperative accusations should at least be aware of where they're coming from. Citing them out of context gives them an authority that their own intemperate words undermine.
Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes a weekly column for the Los Angeles Times.
JEFFREY RECORD joined the Strategic Studies Institute in
August 2003 as Visiting Research Professor. He is a professor in
the Department of Strategy and International Security at the US
Air Force’s Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama. He is the
author of six books and a dozen monographs, including: Making
War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force
from Korea to Kosovo; Revising US Military Strategy: Tailoring Means
to Ends; Beyond Military Reform; Hollow Victory, A Contrary View of
the Gulf War; War The Wrong War, Why We Lost in Vietnam; and Failed
States and Casualty Phobia, Implications for U.S. Force Structure and
Technology Choices. Dr. Record has served as Assistant Province
Advisor in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War, Rockefeller
Younger Scholar on the Brookings Institution’s Defense Analysis
Staff, and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis,
the Hudson Institute, and the BDM International Corporation. He
also has extensive Capitol Hill experience, serving as Legislative
Assistant for National Security Affairs to Senators Sam Nunn and
Lloyd Bentsen, and later as a Professional Staff Member of the Senate
Armed Services Committee. Dr. Record received his Doctorate at the
Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
"Something’s got to give
in the coming years, and that something may well be a reduction
of U.S. ambitions in Iraq. Such a reduction would be especially
likely if more and more Americans come to see a cause and effect
relationship between outlays for Iraq, spiraling federal defi cits, and
bad economic news at home (such as sharply rising interest rates).
Military."
But already, Rumsfeld is making a plea for more funds to fight a GWOT.
posted on March 11, 2004 01:11:49 PM new
These basic suggestions are further explained in the article.
(1) Deconflate the threat. This means, in both thought and policy,
treating rogue states separately from terrorist organizations, and
separating terrorist organizations at war with the United States
from those that are not.
(2) Substitute credible deterrence for preventive war as the primary
policy for dealing with rogue states seeking to acquire WMD.
Dr. Condoleezza Rice got it right in 2000: “The first line of
defense [in dealing with rogue states] should be a clear and classical
statement of deterrence--if they do acquire WMD, their weapons
will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national
obliteration.”120
(3) Refocus the Global War On Terrorism first and foremost on
al-Qaeda, its allies, and homeland security.
(4) Seek rogue-state regime change via measures short of war. Forcible
regime change of the kind undertaken in Iraq is an enterprise
fraught with unexpected costs and unintended consequences. Even
if destroying the old regime entails little military risk, as was the case
in Iraq, the task of creating a new regime can be costly, protracted,
and strategically exhausting.
5.Be prepared to settle for stability rather than democracy in Iraq, and
international rather than U.S. responsibility for Iraq.
(6) Reassess U.S. force levels, especially ground force levels.
Professor Jeffrey Record, professor in
the Department of Strategy and International Security at the US Air Force’s Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama.
posted on March 11, 2004 01:17:17 PM new
Then there's this short statement on the WSJ today also.
Who Is Karen Kwiatkowski?
She's the author of an article Salon hypes as "The New Pentagon Papers." (Blogress Ana Marie Cox, who is witty even though left-wing, had the best take on this: Kwiatkowski's account "will undoubtedly surprise the three or four Salon readers who don't already believe that 'neoconservative agenda bearers . . . suppress[ed] and distort[ed] . . . intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods.' "
---------
so no, profe, there really was no point in going past page one because I don't go in much for the 'fringe' on either side.
posted on March 11, 2004 01:56:43 PM new
Re: Kwiatkowski
"She is not subtle in denouncing -"
Please consider - if the truth is as many believe that the foreign policy of the United States has been hijacked by an administration that came into office under a shadow for voter irregularities so bad it had to be judicially seated. A stink that still leaves many saying it was a coup - a stolen election.
Now we find a religeous view of governance that many of us find fringe at best if you want to talk fringe. And an arrogant desire for world dominion that has called for an open ended war on whomever it pleases for reasons that turn out to be lies.
How subtle should we be in denouncing any of these serious levels of concern?
How long do we have before it will cost your freedom to speak up at all?
Many are expecting an effort to steal this election no matter how obvious the vote goes the other way.
Once it has control for another 4 years how wide will it's war on everyone become?
How soon before the dead are draftees instead of volunteers?
How far in hock will we go to take out Iran and Syria and N. Korea?
posted on March 11, 2004 02:27:23 PM newso no, profe, there really was no point in going past page one because I don't go in much for the 'fringe' on either side.
In other words, your mind is made up and there is no need of any further, first hand information which might cause it to change.
Obviously, you didn't even bother to read her bio above, or the bio of the War College Professor I linked to. I hoped you might be able to see that these are not "fringe" people. They are mainstream, career military, people at the center of it all. War College, National Security Agency. Ring any bells?
Mind like a steel trap, Linda.
___________________________________
posted on March 11, 2004 04:01:55 PM new
Great article, Profe. Thanks for posting that.
Max Boot is a signatory to some PNAc letters, and a virulent neocon.
"Highlights & Quotes
Max Boot, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations and former editor for The Wall Street Journal, occupies the extremist end of the neoconservative ideological spectrum. While figures like William Kristol and Robert Kagan call for a “benevolent hegemony,” Boot flat out states that the United States should “unambiguously . . . embrace its imperial role.” (2)
In an interview with The Washington Monthly’s Joshua Micah Marshall, Boot said: “We need to be more assertive and stop letting all these two-bit dictators and rogue regimes push us around and stop being a patsy for our so-called allies, especially in Saudi Arabia.” In a worst-case scenario, he said, the United States may end up “occupying the Saudi’s oil fields and administering them as a trust for the people of the region.” (3)"
Great Flaming Bubbas! I know liberals, and that's no liberal!
Link You have the right to an informed opinion -Harlan Ellison
, whose "neoconservative philosophy is hateful to humanity, anti-American, statist and anti-free trade." (Anti-free trade?) She thinks the United States is a "maturing fascist state." And she predicts a dire fate for those who led us into the Iraq war: "Some folks on the Pentagon's E-ring may be sitting beside Hussein in the war crimes tribunals."