Unitarian Universalist Buddhist Sufi Marxist Fatwa.
No one inducted in to the military forces of a democratic country will be required to take an oath to obey the lawful orders of their supirior officers.

(They could be discharged, with out loss of benifits, if they do not.)

Just out of curiosity where did anyone come up with the assinine idea that a military force run like a dictatorship is a more effective force than any possible alternative?
The fact that this idea has not been challenged except by Native Americans shows how closed minded people are about challenging well funded assumptions.
The Native Americans did not loose because they had a different way of organizing a military force. They lost because they did not have the industrial infrastructure of the European invaders.
That this infrastructure did not exist in their culturals has a simple Marxist explination. It was not yet needed.

A question (hopefully not too stupid)—What will happen to these creatures in the process of the long, slow (maybe not so slow—we’ll see) train wreck that is the “terminal triangle”, and how can we deal with them?

http://content.hamptonroads.com/story.cfm?story=119833&ran=88794

Who authorized this violation? It had to come from somebody very important or somebody very incompetent or somebody up to no good.

So, I think “Killing people is good for Business” but, it also is putting us on a path where “the slaughter of civilians is exactly the object of the exercise”.

read it and weep:

According to the residents of Datta Khel, a town in Pakistan’s North Waziristan, three missiles streaked out of Afghanistan’s Pakitka Province and slammed into a Madrassa, or Islamic school, this past June. When the smoke cleared, the Asia Times reported, 30 people were dead.

The killers were robots, General Atomics MQ-1 Predators. The AGM-114 Hellfire missiles they used in the attack were directed from a base deep in the southern Nevada desert.

It was not the first time Predators had struck. The previous year a CIA Predator took a shot at al-Qaeda’s number two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, but missed. The missile, however, killed 18 people. According to the Asia Times piece, at least one other suspected al-Qaeda member was assassinated by a Predator in Pakistan’s northern frontier area, and in 2002 a Predator killed six “suspected al-Qaeda” members in Yemen.

These assaults are part of what may be the best kept secret of the Iraq-Afghanistan conflicts: an enormous intensification of US bombardments in these and other countries in the region, the increasing number of civilian casualties such a strategy entails, and the growing role of pilot less killers in the conflict.

According to Associated Press, there has been a five-fold increase in the number of bombs dropped on Iraq during the first six months of 2007 over the same period in 2006. More than 30 tons of those have been cluster weapons, which take an especially heavy toll on civilians.

The U.S. Navy has added an aircraft carrier to its Persian Gulf force, and the Air Force has moved F-16s into Balad air base north of Baghdad.

Balad, which currently conducts 10,000 air operations a week, is strengthening runways to handle the increase in air activity. Col. David Reynolds told the AP, “We would like to get to be a field like Langley, if you will.” The Langley field in Virginia is one of the Air Force’s biggest and most sophisticated airfields.

The Air Force certainly appears to be settling in for a long war.

[...]

Besides increasing the number of F-16s, B1-Bs, and A-10 attack planes, Predator flight hours over both countries have doubled from 2005. “The Predator is coming into its own as a no-kidding weapon verses a reconnaissance-only platform,” brags Maj. Jon Dagley, commander of the 46th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron.

The Air Force is also deploying a bigger, faster and more muscular version of the Predator, the MQ-9 “Reaper” – as in grim – a robot capable of carrying four Hellfire missiles, plus two 500 lb. bombs.

The Predators and the Reapers have several advantages, the most obvious being they don’t need pilots. “With more Reapers I could send manned airplanes home,” says North.

At $8.5 million an aircraft – the smaller Predator comes in at $4.5 million apiece – they are also considerably cheaper than the F-16 ($19 million) the B1-B ($200+ million) and even the A-10 ($9.8 million).

The Air Force plans to deploy 170 Predators and 70 Reapers over the next three years. “It is possible that in our lifetime we will be able to run a war without ever leaving the US,” Lt Col David Branham told the New York Times.

The result of the stepped up air war, according to the London-based organization Iraq Body Count, is an increase in civilian casualties. A Lancet study of “excess deaths” caused by the Iraq war found that air attacks were responsible for 13% of the deaths – 76,000 as of June 2006 – and that 50% of the deaths of children under 15 were caused by air strikes.

We knew all this 40 years ago.

We can conclude either (a) they learn nothing and repeat the same mistakes, or (b) there is no mistake involved and the slaughter of civilians is exactly the object of the exercise. Or we could step back and conclude (c) the real object of the exercise is to sell guns and planes, and the civilian slaughter (and indeed the war itself) are merely side effects of the manufacture and marketing of weapons, the largest industrial sector left in the mostly-paper US economy and its only net-positive (in money terms) trade with the world.

Killing people is good for business;
isn’t that nice to know?
Killing people is good for business;
Fred and Charlie told you so…

A recent op-ed about the war in Iraq charged that upbeat official reports amount to “misleading rhetoric.” It said the “most important front in the counterinsurgency [had] failed most miserably.” And it warned against pursuing “incompatible policies to absurd ends.”

Five years into a controversial war, that harsh judgment in a New York Times opinion piece might not seem surprising, except for this: The authors were seven US soldiers, writing from Iraq at the end of a tough 15-month combat tour.

In books and professional journals, blogs, and newspapers, active-duty military personnel are speaking publicly and critically as never before about an ongoing war.

Respectfully, but with a directness and gritty authenticity that comes from combat experience – sometimes written from the battlefield – they offer a view of current strategy, military leadership, and the situation on the ground that is more stark than Pentagon and White House pronouncements.

Part of this reflects weariness with the war. But it also represents a shift in military culture where speaking up publicly is more usual and acceptable than in previous conflicts, experts say, thanks to changes in technology and society.

I loathe the smarminess and historical revisionism of this CSM story — speaking up publicly is more acceptable? soldier dissent is a novelty? — but the more of this dissent the better.

I was also wondering what this was in reference to:

“…Agent Orange poisoning — which the US government denied and covered up for as long as it possibly could [sound familiar?].”

Any help would be much appreciated.

“The Great Iraq Swindle”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18261.htm