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Our Poor, Defenseless Military Industrial Complex

It is a sign of our times that our media attempt to decipher future government policy by analyzing the president’s tweets, like some bizarre game of telephone. Throughout November, there was speculation of a coming reduction in military spending, and when Donald Trump took to Twitter (12/3/18) to describe the $716 billion budget as “crazy,” media took this as confirmation. The prospect of a cut to the military elicited a storm of condemnation across the media landscape. The National Review (11/17/18) wrote that “cutting the resources available to the Pentagon is a bad idea,” noting that, “for decades, America has short-changed defense” meaning “America’s ability to defend its allies, its partners, and its own vital interests is increasingly in doubt.”

Why Trump Decided To Remove U.S. Troops From Syria

Last Friday President Trump had another long phonecall with the Turkish President Erdogan. Thereafter he overruled all his advisors and decided to remove the U.S. boots from Syria and to also end the air war. This was the first time Trump took a decisive stand against the borg, the permanent neoconservative and interventionist establishment in his administration, the military and congress, that usually dictates U.S. foreign policy. It was this decision, and that he stuck to it, which finally made him presidential.

Don’t Hold Your Breath On US Troop Withdrawal From Syria

The announcement on Wednesday that the U.S. will withdraw all remaining troops from Syria within the next month looked at first like a rare victory for Donald Trump in his admittedly erratic opposition to senseless wars of adventure. “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there,” the president tweeted with an unmistakable air of triumph. Don’t get your hopes up. Just about everything in these initial reports is either wrong or misleading. One, the U.S. did not defeat the Islamic State: The Syrian Arab Army, aided by Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah militias did. Two, hardly was ISIS the only reason the U.S. has maintained a presence in Syria. The intent for years was to support a coup against the Assad government in Damascus...

An Empire Of Bases Poisons Water, Threatening Its Own Collapse

Per-flouro octane-sulfo-nate or PFOS, and Per-flouro-octa-noic acid or PFOA, are the active ingredients in the foam routinely used to train soldiers to extinguish aircraft fires at U.S. military bases around the world. The toxic chemicals are allowed to leach into surrounding soil to poison groundwater. The result is one of the greatest water contamination epidemics in human history. Doubt that?  Click on Google News and enter: “PFOS PFAO Military Base.” Then, come back and read the rest of this article – and brace yourself. It’s bad. The water in thousands of  wells in and around U.S. military installations across the globe have been tested and have been shown to contain harmful levels of PFOS and PFOA.

Black Internationalists Demand Closure Of Hundreds Of U.S. Military Bases

NOVEMBER 21, 2018—The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP), a founding member of the Global Campaign Against U.S./NATO Military Bases, joined 300 attendees from 36 countries at a historic conference last weekend that re-committed anti-war activists to closing U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military bases throughout the world. The Global Campaign Against U.S./NATO Military Bases held its first international conference November 16-18 at Liberty Hall in Dublin, Ireland. The conference’s Unity Statement was endorsed by more than 700 individuals and organizations. The Dublin conference convened several months after the U.S.-based Coalition Against U.S. Foreign Military Bases held its first conference in Baltimore, Maryland, in the United States.

Global War To Infinity And Beyond

American militarism has gone off the rails -- and this middling career officer should have seen it coming. Earlier in this century, the U.S. military not surprisingly focused on counterinsurgency as it faced various indecisive and seemingly unending wars across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa. Back in 2008, when I was still a captain newly returned from Iraq and studying at Fort Knox, Kentucky, our training scenarios generally focused on urban combat and what were called security and stabilization missions. We’d plan to assault some notional city center, destroy the enemy fighters there, and then transition to pacification and “humanitarian” operations. Of course, no one then asked about the dubious efficacy of “regime change” and “nation building,” the two activities in which our country had been so regularly engaged.

Trump’s Military Deployment To The US-Mexico Border Is Illegal

Passed in 1878 to end the use of federal troops in overseeing elections in the post–Civil War South, the Posse Comitatus Act forbids the use of the military to enforce domestic US laws, including immigration laws. For this reason, Trump’s decision to deploy the military to the border to enforce US immigration law against thousands of desperate migrants from Central America — who have undertaken the perilous journey over 1,000 miles through Mexico to the US border in order to apply for asylum — is an unlawful order. Kathleen Gilberd, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild’s Military Law Task Force, told Truthout, “The deployment of US troops to the Southern border is an illegitimate political ploy and a serious misuse of the military. This action casts shame on a government that treats refugees seeking asylum as enemies.”

America’s Permanent-War Complex

What President Dwight D. Eisenhower dubbed the “military-industrial complex” has been constantly evolving over the decades, adjusting to shifts in the economic and political system as well as international events. The result today is a “permanent-war complex,” which is now engaged in conflicts in at least eight countries across the globe, none of which are intended to be temporary. This new complex has justified its enhanced power and control over the country’s resources primarily by citing threats to U.S. security posed by Islamic terrorists. But like the old military-industrial complex, it is really rooted in the evolving relationship between the national security institutions themselves and the private arms contractors allied with them.

Another Amazing Coincidence: Man Trained To Mass Murder Commits Mass Murder

The suspect in today’s mass shooting (well, the biggest one I’ve heard of thus far this morning; the day is young) is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. Another mass shooter in Florida last week just happens to have beenin the military. The man who killed with a van in Toronto this year had been briefly in the Canadian military and promoted his crime on Facebook beforehand as a military operation. The mass-killing in a Florida High School earlier this year was also promoted by the killer as a military operation, in the sense that he wore his JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps) shirt and killed in the same school where the U.S. Army had trained him to shoot and instructed him in war-supporting views of the world and its history.

Armed Militia Groups Head To The Border, Sparking Military Concerns

Armed bands of civilian militia members are traveling to the southern U.S. border, where President Donald Trump has ordered thousands of active-duty troops to rebuff the approaching migrant caravan. About “200 unregulated armed militia members [are] currently operating along the southwest border,“ says a planning document for Army commanders leading the 5,200 troops Trump has deployed at the border, according to Newsweek. The groups “operate under the guise of citizen patrols supporting” border officials, the document says, pointing out “reported incidents of unregulated militias stealing National Guard equipment during deployments.”

Chicanos Welcome Central American Caravan

Los Angeles, CA – On October 26, as the caravan of refugees from Central America traveled through Mexico, they were welcomed with food, festivity, aid, and clothing. As Chicanos, we must do the same when the caravan arrives at U.S. border. Attacking Mexicans, and by extension Chicanos, Trump has dispatched the U.S. military to the U.S.-Mexico border to block the caravan. We say down with Trump, down with him hiding like a coward behind the U.S. military, down with the continued militarization, killings and abuses at the border, down with the injustices to the undocumented in the U.S., and down with the U.S. destabilization of Central America. We must demand legalization for all current 11 million undocumented people in the U.S., and asylum now for the caravan refugees when they arrive at the border.

Trump’s Rules Of Engagement For Troops At US-Mexico Border Mirror Those Used By The IDF In Gaza

WASHINGTON  — Since President Donald Trump first directed the outrage of his supporters at a Central American migrant caravan making its way towards the United States a little over a week ago, his plan to deploy between 5,200 and 15,000 active-duty U.S. soldiers to the border has provoked mixed reactions within the United States. However, Trump’s more recent announcement that armed U.S. soldiers have been instructed to target any migrants who resort to throwing stones as though they were firing rifles has evoked an even wider range of reactions. On Thursday afternoon, Trump detailed in a speech that “Anybody [in the caravan] throwing stones, rocks, like they did to Mexico and the Mexican military, Mexican police, where they badly hurt police and soldiers of Mexico, we will consider that a firearm.”

Your Commander-in-Chief Is Lying To You: Veterans Issue Open Letter To Active Duty US Soldiers

Your Commander-in-chief is lying to you. You should refuse his orders to deploy to the southern U.S. border should you be called to do so. Despite what Trump and his administration are saying, the migrants moving North towards the U.S. are not a threat. These small numbers of people are escaping intense violence. In fact, much of the reason these men and women—with families just like yours and ours—are fleeing their homes is because of the US meddling in their country’s elections. Look no further than Honduras, where the Obama administration supported the overthrow of a democratically elected president who was then replaced by a repressive dictator.

Does Domestic Use Of The Military For Immigration Violate The Posse Comitatus Act?

The US is sending thousands of troops to “harden” the border with Mexico, Pentagon officials said today (Oct.29), as thousands of asylum-seekers approach on foot from Central America. The armed forces will send 5,200 personnel, three helicopters, several military planes, and more than 150 miles of razor wire to border locations, starting in Texas, Air Force Gen. Terrence J. O’Shaughnessy, commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command and US Northern Command, told reporters Monday (Oct. 29) afternoon, confirming earlier reports. Customs and Border Protection officers will continue to enforce immigration law on the border...

5,200 U.S. Troops Being Sent To The Border

WASHINGTON — A week out from the midterm elections, the Pentagon said Monday it is sending 5,200 troops, some armed, to the Southwest border this week in an extraordinary military operation to stop Central American migrants traveling north in two caravans that were still hundreds of miles from the U.S. The number of troops is more than double the 2,000 who are in Syria fighting the Islamic State group. President Donald Trump, eager to focus voters on immigration in the lead-up to the elections, stepped up his warnings about the caravans, tweeting: “This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!” His warning came as the Pentagon began executing “Operation Faithful Patriot,” described by the commander of U.S. Northern Command as an effort to help Customs and Border Protection stiffen defenses at and near legal entry points.
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