Oh, for all that's right, please watch this and pass it on...

This is an incredibly eye-opening and fact-rich article by Michael Klare, author of the book, Blood and Oil.

via Tom Dispatch

Sixteen gallons of oil. That's how much the average American soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan consumes on a daily basis -- either directly, through the use of Humvees, tanks, trucks, and helicopters, or indirectly, by calling in air strikes. Multiply this figure by 162,000 soldiers in Iraq, 24,000 in Afghanistan, and 30,000 in the surrounding region (including sailors aboard U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf) and you arrive at approximately 3.5 million gallons of oil: the daily petroleum tab for U.S. combat operations in the Middle East war zone.

Multiply that daily tab by 365 and you get 1.3 billion gallons: the estimated annual oil expenditure for U.S. combat operations in Southwest Asia. That's greater than the total annual oil usage of Bangladesh, population 150 million -- and yet it's a gross underestimate of the Pentagon's wartime consumption.

Such numbers cannot do full justice to the extraordinary gas-guzzling expense of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. After all, for every soldier stationed "in theater," there are two more in transit, in training, or otherwise in line for eventual deployment to the war zone -- soldiers who also consume enormous amounts of oil, even if less than their compatriots overseas. Moreover, to sustain an "expeditionary" army located halfway around the world, the Department of Defense must move millions of tons of arms, ammunition, food, fuel, and equipment every year by plane or ship, consuming additional tanker-loads of petroleum. Add this to the tally and the Pentagon's war-related oil budget jumps appreciably, though exactly how much we have no real way of knowing.

And foreign wars, sad to say, account for but a small fraction of the Pentagon's total petroleum consumption. Possessing the world's largest fleet of modern aircraft, helicopters, ships, tanks, armored vehicles, and support systems -- virtually all powered by oil -- the Department of Defense (DoD) is, in fact, the world's leading consumer of petroleum. It can be difficult to obtain precise details on the DoD's daily oil hit, but an April 2007 report by a defense contractor, LMI Government Consulting, suggests that the Pentagon might consume as much as 340,000 barrels (14 million gallons) every day. This is greater than the total national consumption of Sweden or Switzerland.

This is a very big and important post from Mr. Klare, and I'm not overstating the value of reading it, and all of the linked reports and articles within it. Bush is destroying our Military in ways we never imagined-- PNAC's Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century plan was first thought to be simply a Foreign Policy disaster in the making... It is a plan that will destroy the very Infrastructure of our Military, by grossly increasing it's energy needs at a time of rapidly declining available energy. Get vocal, folks-- this ain't gonna go away. The Newshogs have a bit more, today, as backgrounder.

Written and Directed by Dalton Trumbo.

If you've not read the book, I highly recommend it as a must read...

Part 1:


Part 2:


Click through for full-screen.

Can any of you military guys tell me if this happens with any frequency?

A senior officer serving with the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet in the Gulf was relieved of his command on Monday due to a ‘loss of confidence’ in his abilities, the US navy said.

Commander Christopher Rankin, who headed the Electronic Attack Squadron aboard the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier, was relieved of command by Captain Scott Stearney due to a ‘loss of confidence in his ability to command,’ the statement said.

‘Rankin has been temporarily assigned to Commander, Carrier Strike Group 8 pending further review of the matter,’ the statement added.

A US Navy spokesperson told AFP that an investigation was underway but declined to give further details.

We'll probably never find out the details. The story strikes me as odd for some reason.

I went looking around this morning for mention in the blogosphere about the story I posted last night, and I don't see a single post about it elsewhere.

You'd think that holding all active duty troops an extra 3 months in Iraq would have alarm bells ringing all over the place, but the silence is absolutely deafening.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is weighing a proposal to extend the tour of duty for every active-duty soldier stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to ABC News.

Jonathan Karl reports that "deployments for active duty soldiers would be extended from the current 12 months to 15 months." He says that's because policymakers have concluded that the so-called "surge" in Iraq should be extended through the end of the year.

"Defense officials say extending the surge is simply impossible to do without either extending the tours of those troops already there, or dramatically cutting the time soldiers spend back home," Karl reports.

He says Army officials are "proposing an across-the-board extension in part because it is considered to be fairer than imposing piecemeal extensions on individual units."

Are we so far gone into this futile effort in Iraq that a wholesale screwing of every active duty soldier barely merits a mention? That's pretty fucked up if you ask me - our soldiers deserve so much better than they're getting.

ABC News is reporting that the Army is considering extending the tour of duty of all active duty soldiers in Iraq by three months.

This is the 'temporary surge' that Bush sold us on. Another goddamn lie.

(Via Raw Story).

Perfectly safe, "non-lethal" crowd-control device... BlahBlahBlah...



via Army Times

An airman received second-degree burns April 4 during a test of the Defense Department’s nonlethal millimeter-wave heat beam at Moody Air Force Base, Ga., according to Marine Corps Maj. Sarah Fullwood, spokeswoman for the Advanced Concept Technology Demonstrator program, Quantico, Va.

The airman was burned as the Air Force’s 820th Security Forces Group was testing a demonstrator version of the Active Denial System, a Humvee-mounted system that produces an intense heat beam.

He was being treated at Doctors Hospital in Augusta, Ga., and is expected to make a full recovery, Fullwood said.

Fullwood said more than 600 people have been exposed a total of more than 10,000 times to the beam, and there has only been one other injury that required medical attention: a case of second-degree burns that occurred during lab testing in 1999.

Lovely.

...Colonel Ralph Kohlmann, who is the presiding judge in the David Hicks military commission at Guantanamo Bay.

Hicks appeared in court wearing an olive green outfit, and thongs on his feet. The judge warned his defence counsel that in future he should not appear in prison-type clothes, in order to make sure that his presumption of innocence was maintained.

I could cry just reading that shit...

...or ‘I can see this one coming a mile off’.

An Islamist group urged Germany and Austria in a video to withdraw troops from Afghanistan to prevent attacks against the two nations. It appeared on the same day as Iraqi militants threatened to kill German hostages.

The group, which calls itself "The Voice of the Khalifate," said Germany and Austria were provoking attacks by cooperating with the US.

"The Voice of the Khalifate” - you’ve gotta be kidding me.

No - I say, watch out for something that can be construed as a ‘terror attack’ and you’ll see the pressure in and on Germany and Austria mounting to associate more closely with Dubya rather than desert him. Messages like this are not the warning they make out to be but rather warnings of things to come, in this case some sort of ‘terror attack’. Nah, sorry folks, I don't buy it for one minute.

Let there be no doubt. I don’t advocate any attack nor I am I hoping for one! Here's to hoping I am wrong...

Various blogs have pointed out how the Bush administration has been fudging the numbers between what they said they needed for Bush's 'surge' and how many soldiers are actually being sent. But where are they getting the extra soldiers from?

According to this report, they are taking soldiers who have been judged undeployable and deploying them.

"This is not right," said Master Sgt. Ronald Jenkins, who has been ordered to Iraq even though he has a spine problem that doctors say would be damaged further by heavy Army protective gear. "This whole thing is about taking care of soldiers," he said angrily. "If you are fit to fight you are fit to fight. If you are not fit to fight, then you are not fit to fight."

As the military scrambles to pour more soldiers into Iraq, a unit of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Benning, Ga., is deploying troops with serious injuries and other medical problems, including GIs who doctors have said are medically unfit for battle. Some are too injured to wear their body armor, according to medical records.

On Feb. 15, Master Sgt. Jenkins and 74 other soldiers with medical conditions from the 3rd Division's 3rd Brigade were summoned to a meeting with the division surgeon and brigade surgeon. These are the men responsible for handling each soldier's "physical profile," an Army document that lists for commanders an injured soldier's physical limitations because of medical problems -- from being unable to fire a weapon to the inability to move and dive in three-to-five-second increments to avoid enemy fire. Jenkins and other soldiers claim that the division and brigade surgeons summarily downgraded soldiers' profiles, without even a medical exam, in order to deploy them to Iraq. It is a claim division officials deny.

The 3,900-strong 3rd Brigade is now leaving for Iraq for a third time in a steady stream. In fact, some of the troops with medical conditions interviewed by Salon last week are already gone. Others are slated to fly out within a week, but are fighting against their chain of command, holding out hope that because of their ills they will ultimately not be forced to go. Jenkins, who is still in Georgia, thinks doctors are helping to send hurt soldiers like him to Iraq to make units going there appear to be at full strength. "This is about the numbers," he said flatly.

There are many words that come to mind upon reading this article - words like heinous and sadistic and sickening and dangerous.

Oh, and one more - criminal. The Bush administration is effectively signing the death warrants of these soldiers. Congress better get off the goddamn dime and stop this, or more Americans are going to die.

{buckle up... This is a long and personal post. I hope it helps you reader, to understand what these Freshly-Minted Disabled Veterans are going through, and well... my hopes for the Dole/Shalala Commission.... sigh}

I need to admit that I was jaw-dropped by the announcement of the Dole/Shalala Commission from George's Oval Office. (today, he added seven more-- where's Tammy Duckworth and Max Cleland?)

Bob Dole, and Dr. Donna Shalala? Working together? Productively? F'real? Yagaddabekiddinme.

But then...

Read more below the fold-- click below.

'Yeah, go fight in Iraq. You won't have a goddamn rifle.

“We’re behind the power curve, and we can’t piddle around,” Maj. Gen. Harry M. Wyatt III, commander of the Oklahoma National Guard, said in an interview. He added that one-third of his soldiers lacked the M-4 rifles preferred by active-duty soldiers and that there were also shortfalls in night vision goggles and other equipment. If his unit is going to be sent to Iraq next year, he said, “We expect the Army to resource the Guard at the same level as active-duty units.”

Capt. Christopher Heathscott, a spokesman for the Arkansas National Guard, said the state’s 39th Brigade Combat Team was 600 rifles short for its 3,500 soldiers and also lacked its full arsenal of mortars and howitzers.

What a fucking joke. What a pathetic, sad joke.

Bush and his GOP minions have always made a big show over how they revere and value family values (unless your family happens to be gay, but that's another story), puffing their chests over how they alone have the family values market cornered.

But their war policy is destroying American families.

Most families and soldiers cope, sometimes heroically. But these separations have also left a trail of badly strained or broken unions, many severed by adultery or sexual addictions; burdened spouses, some of whom are reaching for antidepressants; financial turmoil brought on by rising debts, lost wages and overspending; emotionally bruised children whose grades sometimes plummet; and anxious parents who at times turn on each other.

Hardest hit are the reservists and their families, who never bargained on long absences, sometimes as long as 18 months, and who lack the support network of full-fledged members of the military.

“Since my husband has been gone, I have potty-trained two kids, my oldest started preschool, a kid learned to walk and talk, plus the baby is not sleeping that well,” said Lori Jorgenson, 30, whose husband, a captain in the Minnesota National Guard, has been deployed since November 2005 and recently had his tour extended another four months. “I am very burnt out.”

In the next couple of months, Ms. Jorgenson, who has three young children, has to get a loan, buy a house and move out of their apartment.

Even many active-duty military families, used to the difficulties of deployments, are reeling as soldiers are being sent again and again to war zones, with only the smallest pause in between. The unrelenting fear of death or injury, mental health problems, the lack of recuperative downtime between deployments and the changes that await when a soldier comes home hover over every household.

They 'honor the military' and 'support our troops' by stretching the military infrastructure to the breaking point. They pay lip service to 'family values' while families are being shattered by their clusterfuck of a war. And soldiers are coming home to deplorable aftercare for the wounded, incentives that aren't being paid, and a VA system that is on the verge of collapse.

In a just world, Americans would be taking up torches and pitchforks. But since barely 1 per cent of Americans are affected, the war rolls on, and lives are destroyed in every way you can imagine.

This is what George Bush and Dick Cheney have wrought. This is their war, and these are tragedies that they alone will need to answer for.

...but actually pay them what they're owed? You're fuckin' joking, right??

More than one-fifth of 500 Connecticut National Guard soldiers of the 102nd Infantry serving in war zones are owed thousands of dollars in incentive pay that is months overdue.

The Assignment Incentive Pay of $1,000 a month is paid to Reserve or National Guard soldiers who volunteer to extend active duty beyond 24 months.

Lt. Col. John Whitford of the Connecticut National Guard confirmed that about 110 soldiers are owed amounts between $2,000 and $17,000. He attributed the delay to a “bureaucratic-administrative issue” at the federal level.

Now, Connecticut is a pretty small state, and this article says that roughly 20% of that state's Guard are owed money. I wonder if that can be extrapolated to all states - and if 20% of all National Guard are owed money, then you're talking about, as Everett Dirksen once said, real money. Why are they not getting it? If the government doesn't have the money to pay these guys, where the fuck did the money go? (The article does mention that other states are 'in the same boat,' but doesn't say how many).

And one more question - why is Lieberman (R-CT) silent on this? Does he not have a responsibility to intervene for the brave Guardsmen of his state? Or is he afraid that it may offend his Republican masters in DC? Just askin'.

Slight Update: Eagle-eyed B3 reader Ed Rone points out that it was Everett Dirksen, not Barry Goldwater, who is the source of the 'real money' quote. Correction made.

Found at CMM News