stolen DIRECTLY from the New York Times (FUCK SUBSCRIPTION NEWS ONLINE)

The United States military charged a New York Army National Guard member yesterday with murdering his commanding officers last week at a base near Tikrit, Iraq.

The officers, Capt. Phillip T. Esposito, 30, and First Lt. Louis E. Allen, 34, of the 42nd Infantry Division, New York Army National Guard, were first believed to have died after indirect fire hit the window of a building they were in on June 7.

A criminal investigation opened, however, soon after the attack found that the blast pattern was inconsistent with a mortar attack, the military said in a statement announcing the charges against Staff Sgt. Alberto B. Martinez, 37, of Troy, N.Y.

The military offered no motive.

HINT: WAR SUCKS

The Associated Press quoted a neighbor of Sergeant Martinez as saying that he had recently lost his home to a fire and moved back to his childhood residence with his father. His mother also had died in recent years, the neighbor, Barbara Prevost, said. “They’ve had a lot of tragedy already,” she said.

According to the military, he now is being held in a military facility in Kuwait and has been assigned a military lawyer, though he can hire a civilian lawyer. Military records show he joined the New York Army National Guard in December 1990. His job title is supply specialist.

Captain Esposito was his company commander and Lieutenant Allen was a company operations officer.

The leadership of the 42nd Infantry Division was deployed to Forward Operating Base Danger near Tikrit at the beginning of the year and was entrusted with the security of four northern provinces, an area nearly half the size of New York State.

The division’s members have been supplemented by soldiers from other National Guard, Army Reserve and active duty units. The entire patchwork, numbering about 23,000 troops, falls under the division’s command.

The base, long and windswept, is on the Tigris River, built on the site of what had been a sprawling resort belonging to Saddam Hussein. After the invasion, coalition forces took up residence in the resorts’ dozens of ornate, though shoddily built palaces and villas built around a large, manmade lake. The site is now heavily fortified within a perimeter of tall concrete blast walls, fences and guard posts.

Most of the troops there spend most if not all of their time within the walls attending to various duties in support of the military’s operations throughout the four provinces, though the base also includes combat teams that make daily forays into the surrounding territory, and transportation teams that carry supplies and prisoners from base to base.

Some reports suggested that Sergeant Martinez’s case is the first known allegation in Iraq of fragging, military slang for the murder of a superior officer, often with a grenade, but that could not be confirmed.

The news of the charges came on the day of the burial of Lieutenant Allen, who lived in Milford, Pa., and left those who mourned them shaken.

“Today we’re just focused on Lieutenant Allen,” said Denis M. Petrilak, the principal of George F. Baker High School in Tuxedo in Orange County, N.Y., where the lieutenant taught science for the last five years. He declined to discuss the charges.

At the home of Captain Esposito’s parents in Pearl River, a hamlet of Orangetown in Rockland County, a handwritten sign taped over a doorbell said, “Please do not ring bell.”

A police officer posted in front of the house shooed visitors away.

On Saturday, Captain Esposito’s mother said in an interview that her son’s wife, Siobhan, and 18-month-old daughter, Madeline, deserved to know the full details surrounding his death as soon as possible. She said that her son, who lived nearby in Suffern, N.Y., had wanted to be a soldier since the third grade.

A close family friend, Barry Lennihan, called him a “very, very solid individual.” He said Captain Esposito had attended space camp as a boy and might have been an astronaut if not for his less-than-perfect eyesight.

On Saturday, Joseph P. Zanetti, superintendent of the Tuxedo Union Free School District, where Lieutenant Allen taught physics and earth science, said he was dedicated to his wife, Barbara, and four young sons and took them to high school basketball games whenever he could.

alan must have skipped his zoloft today

By STAN GOFF

I was a soldier for most of the time between 1970 and 1996. I signed out on my retirement from 3rd Special Forces in Ft. Bragg. I had also served in 7th Special Forces, on three Ranger assignments, with Delta for almost four years, as a Cavalry Scout for a while, and in the 82nd Airborne Division as an infantryman. I started my career in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne Brigade.

I thugged around in eight different places in East Asia, Latin America, and Africa, where I pointed guns at people. Like you, I was an instrument of American foreign policies policies controlled, then as now, by the rich.

In the course of that career, I heard everything you have heard and felt everything you have felt about “loyalty.”

Tricky thing, loyalty.

Nowadays, when I talk with some of you, or when I hear conversations recorded with you, I hear many who have very serious reservations about these wars of occupation. I had more than reservations from the get-go about Iraq and Afghanistan, and I opposed them as hard as I could, and so did millions of other people around the world.

But that brain-dead piece of shit in the White House who is legally your boss, and all his handlers, starting with Vice President Dick “Halliburton” Cheney they sent you to do this thing anyway.

They talked themselves into believing this would be and these are their words a cakewalk. They surrounded themselves exclusively with others who echoed what was already in their minds; and they punished and villified and isolated anyone who told them what they didn’t want to hear. Because they made up their minds to conduct these invasions years ago, and with the attacks of September 11 in which Iraq’s role was exactly nothing they figured now was their chance to conduct the re-disposition of the old Cold War military into their new plan to build permanent bases in Southwest Asia.

Since they’d made up their minds, they didn’t want to hear anything except rosy scenarios for their plans, because these reptile-minded, preppy gangsters are like spoiled children who can’t abide anyone fucking up their toy-emperor fantasies.

But when those fantasies did get fucked up, by the realities they ran so hard to escape, they continued to pursue their grim agenda in spite of the mounting consequences, because they don’t pay those consequences.

If I had my way, we would issue the whole shriveled, manicured lot of them their assault rifles, put them aboard an Air Force transport, tighten the leg straps on their static line parachutes, and boot their sorry asses out from 800 feet right over the middle of Ramadi where they could drop their harnesses in the street and explain democracy to the locals.

But that’s just ranting, because I do so despise them. I hate people who get away with shit just because they have money and power. And I hate people who sacrifice the lives of others to amplify or protect that power.

But I’m not telling you anything. You all already know by now what generation after generation has learned the hard way. When the rich start their wars, it’s not the rich that get sent to fight them. Yeah, a few go get their time as part of putting together a political career, but we know who does the heavy lifting.

And in these conversations that many of you have with me and thousands of other people, we hear you say more and more often now that you know this war is wrong, but that you have to “do your job,” because you are loyal to your buddies; because you feel that you have to back them up; and because if you don’t go, someone else will have to. And I respect that sentiment.

But I have to challenge this loyalty thing, and I do it out of respect for you, and because I care about you, and because my own son is back there for his second go-around.

A young friend of mine, Patrick Resta, who recently returned from Iraq, and who is now a member of an organization called Iraq Veterans Against the War, recently told me, “My platoon sergeant tried to get us to violate the Geneva Convention, and when we resisted, he threatened us with punishment. He told us that’the Geneva Convention doesn’t exist in Iraq, and that is in writing at the Brigade level.’”

You all know that this is bullshit, and if you didn’t know, let me give you a news flash about some not all, but some military lifers; and this is coming from a military lifer. Some of them are dumber than dog shit. Some of them say things when they don’t have the foggiest fucking idea what they are talking about. Some of them will say any goddamn thing to get you to do what they want you to do.

But then again, there wasa memorandum that came down that suggested the Geneva Conventions were void in Iraq. It didn’t come from the Brigade level, though;it came from fucking George W. Bush’s office. And it’s a lie. That’s why they sat there in front of Congress before they made the author of that memo into the Attorney General of the United States get your head around that and denied that they meant it.

But it is a lie.

You do not have to follow illegal orders EVER, under any circumstances, and you ARE bound by International Law. You should also be bound by what you know is right, by your sense of plain common decency.

One of the ways they will get you to do things that you will not want to live with for the rest of your lives is to impose that group-think on you. If one of us is guilty, we are all guilty. And “what happens in Iraq stays in Iraq.” This is one of the many ways they take that buddy-to-buddy loyalty and twist it into a way to control you, even when they are trying to get you to violate the law and not only the formal law, but to violate what you know is right, to violate your own conscience and jeopardize your own peace of mind for the rest of your life.

And I’m telling you that you do not owe them or anyone else that kind of loyalty.

They know that many of you know that you were sent to do this thing for a pack of lies about weapons of mass destruction and mushroom clouds over New York City and phony al Qaeda connections (and then when that fell apart, you were there to deliver democracy at gunpoint). So they know that many of you can’t stay committed to this violent occupation out of loyalty to that gang of thugs in Washington DC, who are busy every day at home undermining the same Constitution you swore to protect (from all enemies foreign and DOMESTIC).

They know that you know that plenty of the officers are out there trying to get new fruit salad medals on their Class-A uniforms, and bucking for promotion, by risking your asses on pointless glory patrols. So they know that they can’t rely on the loyalty of many of you to the chain of command any more either.

Where do they have to go with this, then, after all? What do they tell you?

“You get out there on that Humvee, and face those IEDs ­ together, as loyal buddies.”

“You get out there and ransack people’s houses in the middle of the night, and make their babies cry together, as buddies.”

“You get out there and set up a road block without Arabic signs or interpreters and get put into that situation where you are tense and don’t know, and you shoot up that car and kill parents in front of their children, and you have to live with that for the rest of your lives together, because you are loyal buddies.”

“You get out there and lose life, limb, or eyesight face mental and physical ailments for the rest of your lives together, as an act of loyalty to your buddies.”

That’s the pressure you have on you today. Cover your buddies, and for some of you, go to Iraq so someone else doesn’t take your place.

But let’s look at the bigger picture here, and for that I’ll take you back to Vietnam, before many of you were born. We heard this same bullshit then. Almost verbatim. And do you know what one of the main contributing factors was for getting us out of that war?

We quit being good soldiers.

The United States military got to the point where it was no longer an effective fighting force, because US soldiers quit taking orders. It got to the point where an officer who was using his men’s bodies to chase medals might find himself on the wrong end of a Claymore mine. Now I’m not advocating that again, and I hope we can stop this before it goes that far.

The other thing many soldiers did was become part of the political resistance at home. They looked at this question of looking out for their buddies and for fellow soldiers in the short term, but staying ina barbaric and immoral war. And they realized that the best thing they could do for their buddies not as soldiers, but as human beings was to enlist in the opposition to the war and bring it to an end.

In the process, many of them discovered that it took a lot more endurance and a lot more courage to oppose the war than it did to demonstrate that macho bullshit they were expected to display as they continued to do terrible things to those other human beings whose country they occupied.

Here’s how you can exercise a deeper loyalty to the troops there now, and to all those who will continue to go as long as this obscenity continues:

Do everything you can to stop the war.

Question every order, and base those questions on the Geneva Conventions and the Law of Land Warfare. Let them see you keeping a detailed journal of your experience. Send your stories home in letters. Open up discussions about the legitimacy of the war when you are in your billets, even if it does spark controversy. Spread around information you get about the war from sources other than those loud-mouthed news-mannequins on FOX. And email or mail your anonymous membership in to Iraq Veterans Against the War. The link is at the end of this letter.

The day this war stops and they put the last of you on an airplane home, is when you will never again have to smell that fresh-blood smell that stays in your head for hours after you’ve loaded someone onto a stretcher or rolled them into that big Ziploc bag. The day will come when you all pull out, because this was a losing proposition from the outset, but Bush and his crew were too fucking stupid to know it.

The best thing is that this war of occupation ends sooner than later, and as an exercise of loyalty to your own conscience, of loyalty to those who are there and those who may go there, and loyalty to the principle of human decency you can find ways to hasten that day. You can find ways to bring closer the day when the Iraqis can get on about the business of taking control of their own destiny, and you and your buddies can sleep in security and comfort in your own homes, play with your children, make love with your partners, and walk down familiar streets unencumbered by the rattling luggage of war.

If bringing this day closer for all of you is the goal, how much more loyal can you get?

Yours for walking unencumbered,

Stan Goff

US Army (Retired)

I AM A GULLIBLE ASSHOLE

Republished from Agencie France Presse

Senator: U.S. Will ‘Have to Face’ Military Draft Dilemma

The United States will “have to face” a painful dilemma on restoring the military draft as rising casualties result in persistent shortfalls in US Army recruitment, a top US senator warned.
Joseph Biden, the top Democrat of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, made the prediction after new data released by the Pentagon showed the US Army failing to meet its recruitment targets for four straight months.

“We’re going to have to face that question,” Biden said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” television show when asked if it was realistic to expect restoration of the draft.
“The truth of the matter is, it is going to become a subject, if, in fact, there’s a 40 percent shortfall in recruitment. It’s just a reality,” he said.
The comment came after the Department of Defense announced Friday the army had missed its recruiting goal for May by 1,661 recruits, or 25 percent. Similar losses have been reported by army officials every month since February.

But experts said even that figure was misleading because the army has quietly lowered its May recruitment target from 8,050 to 6,700 people.
That has prompted charges that the real shortfall was closer to 40 percent, which in turn has led to questions about the future viability of the army as a force, if it continues to be plagued by lack of new recruits.

Since October, the army has recruited more than 8,000 fewer people that it had hoped to, which amounts to a loss of about a modern brigade.
The army, navy and marine corps reserves also fell short of their monthly goals by 18 percent, six percent and 12 percent respectively, according to the figures.
Recruitment at the Army National Guard was down 29 percent while the Air National Guard fell short 22 percent.
The United States abandoned the military draft in 1973, following mass protest during the Vietnam War, and switched to an all-volunteer force.
Mandatory registration for the draft was suspended in 1975 but resumed in 1980 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. About 13.5 million men are currently registered with the US government as potential draftees.
During the 2004 election campaign, Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry repeatedly accused President George W. Bush of planning to re-instate “a back-door draft,” charges the president vehemently denied.

But while admitting that restoring the draft would be politically “very difficult,” Senator Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said something will have to be done because the situation with recruitment was not likely to improve.
“If you think you have trouble getting recruits today, you’re going to have far more trouble six months from now,” Leahy predicted on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program. “It is not going to get better. That’s going to get worse.”
Republican Representative Curt Weldon called the recruitment shortfalls “troublesome” and “unacceptable.”
But he urged the military “to find ways to fix the current system” and to attract more recruits with the help of new incentives.
Nearly 1,900 US troops have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere since the beginning of the war on terror in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

In the latest phase of Bolivia’s “gas wars”, President Carlos Mesa resigned on June 6 under heavy pressure from social movements to nationalize hydrocarbons.

Peasant farmers are taking over oil fields, transportation is paralyzed and the U.S. Embassy has begun evacuating personnel.

The government of the previous president of Bolivia, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozado, was toppled in October 2003 after Lozado signed contracts with transnational corporations giving away the gas and oil resources of Bolivia, Latin America’s poorest country, for nearly free.
Mesa, vice-president at the time, came into office promising to implement the “October agenda” of nationalization of hydrocarbons and convoking a constituent assembly to rewrite the Bolivian constitution in a way that includes the indigenous majority.

However, since then Mesa has stalled, calling a national referendum on gas resources that did not include the option of nationalization–which, according to polls, was favored by a majority of Bolivians.
On May 17, under pressure from social movements, Mesa passed a bill increasing taxes on multinationals but falling short of popular demands for nationalization of gas and oil, sparking a major wave of marches and strikes throughout the country.

Despite Mesa’s call for a constituent assembly on June 2, protests demanding “nationalization now” have only grown in strength.

For ongoing and archived coverage, see: Narco News(en) and The Democracy Center(en)
For background, see: “Bolivia on the Brink”(en), “New Uprising in Bolivia”(en) and ZNet’s BoliviaWatch(en)

citx say: this is the future..get ready kansas!!

Here is the City Paranoiac.

Statement of Dr. William F. Schulz, Executive Director, Amnesty International USA

New York, NY) – Today Dr. William F. Schulz, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, made the following statement in response to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:
Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush Administration ignored or dismissed Amnesty International’s reports on the abuse of detainees for years, and senior officials continue to ignore the very real plight of men detained without charge or trial. Amnesty International first communicated its concerns at the treatment of prisoners to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld in January 2002 and continued to raise these concerns at the highest levels as allegations of abuse mounted from Afghanistan, Guantanamo and Iraq. The response was to bar AI’s human rights investigators from visiting U.S. detention facilities, in contrast to countries as diverse as Libya and Sudan, where governments have accepted the value of independent monitoring.
Twenty years ago, Amnesty International was criticizing Saddam Hussein’s human rights abuses at the same time Donald Rumsfeld was courting him. In 2003 Rumsfeld apparently trusted our credibility on violations by Iraq, but now that we are criticizing the United States he has lost his faith again. [see quotes below]
The deliberate policy of this administration is to detain individuals without charge or trial in prisons at Guantanamo Bay, Bagram Air Base and other locations, where their treatment has not conformed to international standards. Donald Rumsfeld personally approved a December 2002 memorandum that permitted such unlawful interrogation techniques as stress positions, prolonged isolation, stripping, and the use of dogs at Guantanamo Bay, and he should be held accountable, as should all those responsible for torture, no matter how senior.
There has yet to be a full independent investigation, and the content of some of the government’s own reports into human rights violations in these prisons remain classified and unseen. If this administration is committed to transparency, it should immediately open the network of detention centers operated by the United States around the world to scrutiny by independent human rights groups. It is also worth noting that this administration eagerly cites Amnesty International research when we criticize Cuba and extensively quoted our criticism of the violations in Iraq under Saddam Hussein in the run up to the war.

————————————-
Rumsfeld quotes (compiled by thinkprogress.org)
On March 27, 2003, Rumsfeld said:
We know that it’s a repressive regime…Anyone who has read Amnesty International or any of the human rights organizations about how the regime of Saddam Hussein treats his people…
The next day, Rumsfeld cited his “careful reading” of Amnesty:
…[I]t seems to me a careful reading of Amnesty International or the record of Saddam Hussein, having used chemical weapons on his own people as well as his neighbors, and the viciousness of that regime, which is well known and documented by human rights organizations, ought not to be surprised.
And on April 1, 2003, Rumsfeld said once again:
[I]f you read the various human rights groups and Amnesty International’s description of what they know has gone on, it’s not a happy picture.

citx- they HANG war criminals..don’t they?…THATS a happy picture-donny!