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Military Corruption Media Articles

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

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Weapons Makers Hold Lavish Lovefest for Pentagon Official Who Manages Arms Sales
2016-09-19, The Intercept
https://theintercept.com/2016/09/19/weapons-makers-hold-lavish-lovefest-for-p...

Heres what passes for funny in a room packed full of weapons-industry executives and lobbyists: When Vice Adm. Joseph Rixey the man in charge of the Pentagon agency that administers foreign arms sales said I know you dont go after human rights violators for potential customers. The line produced chuckles in the room. Rixey was the guest of honor at a reception Wednesday hosted by the Senate Aerospace Caucus, a group of more than a dozen senators who work to ensure a strong, secure, and competitive American aerospace sector. The event ... was cohosted by the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), the lobbying group for weapons contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. Rixey is the director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA), the Pentagon agency charged with overseeing the Pentagons relations with the militaries of U.S. allies. Over the past year, the DSCA has approved upwards of $47 billion in such contracts, for weapons transfers to countries like Egypt, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. In his own remarks, Rixey lauded the relationship between the DSCA and industry. We at DSCA are thankful that we have the support of our counterparts within the United States government and with defense industries, he said. Rixey was joined by caucus co-chairs Sens. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., and Patty Murray, D-Wash., who praised the industry for its role in overseas weapons sales on both foreign policy and economic grounds.

Note: The Pentagon is the only segment of US government that doesn't balance its books, and Pentagon auditors are heavily pressured to look the other way on blatant corruption. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing military corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.


What 80 million unexploded US bombs did to Laos
2016-09-06, CNN News
http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/05/asia/united-states-laos-secret-war/

For two years after the accident, Yei Yang refused to leave his home. "I couldn't farm, I couldn't go to see friends, as they might be afraid of me," Yang tells CNN. "I didn't want to live." Yang was just 22 and burning rubbish near his village in the province of Xieng Khoung in north-eastern Laos, when a bomb blast tore off one of his eyelids, his top lip and an ear, mutilated one of his arms, and left him with severe scarring from the waist up. His wounds were not caused by a modern day conflict, but by the remnants of a war that was waged more than 40 years ago, and is still destroying lives in this small Southeast Asian nation. Some 80 million unexploded bombs are scattered across the country - the deadly legacy of what became known as America's "secret war" in Laos - a CIA-led mission during the Vietnam War. In total, between 1964 and 1973, the US dropped more than two million tons of bombs - one of the heaviest aerial bombardments in history. Most of the munitions dropped were cluster bombs, which splinter before impact, spreading hundreds of smaller bomblets. To this day, less than 1% of the bombs have been removed, according to US-based NGO Legacies of War, which is spearheading the campaign to clear them. More than 20,000 people have been killed or maimed by the unexploded ordnance (UXOs) since the war ended, and currently, 50 people are maimed or killed every year. Around 40% of those are children.

Note: Big banks profited immensely from the cluster bomb trade. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources.


How Many Guns Did the U.S. Lose Track of in Iraq and Afghanistan? Hundreds of Thousands.
2016-08-24, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/23/magazine/how-many-guns-did-the-us-lose-trac...

The Pentagon provided more than 1.45 million firearms to various security forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, including more than 978,000 assault rifles, 266,000 pistols and almost 112,000 machine guns. Many of the recipients of these weapons became brave and important battlefield allies. But many more did not. The weapons were part of a vast and sometimes minimally supervised flow of arms from a superpower to armies and militias often compromised by poor training, desertion, corruption and patterns of human rights abuses. The Pentagon said it has records for [about 700,000] firearms. This is an amount ... that only accounts for 48 percent of the total small arms supplied by the U.S. government that can be found in open-source government reports. By this year, various internet arms traders, including many on Facebook, were hawking a seemingly unending assortment of weapons of obvious American origin. Facebook closed many pages in the Middle East that were serving as busy arms bazaars, including pages in Syria and Iraq on which firearms with Pentagon origins accounted for a large fraction of the visible trade. But many new arms-trading Facebook pages have since cropped up, including, according to their own descriptions, virtual markets operating from Baghdad and Karbala. The procession of arms purchases and handouts has continued to this day.

Note: A 2015 report describes how the US armed ISIS in Iraq. This eye-opening report shows how the US was involved in the creation of ISIS. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources.


U.S. Army fudged its accounts by trillions of dollars, auditor finds
2016-08-19, CNBC/Reuters
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/19/reuters-america-us-army-fudged-its-accounts-by...

The United States Army's finances are so jumbled it had to make trillions of dollars of improper accounting adjustments to create an illusion that its books are balanced. The Defense Departments Inspector General ... said the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year. The amounts dwarf the Defense Departments entire budget. The "forced" adjustments rendered the statements useless because "DoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions." [This] is the latest example of the severe accounting problems plaguing the Defense Department for decades. As a result, there has been no way to know how the Defense Department far and away the biggest chunk of Congress annual budget spends the publics money. "Where is the money going? Nobody knows," said Franklin Spinney, a retired military analyst for the Pentagon. For years, the Inspector General - the Defense Department's official auditor - has inserted a disclaimer on all military annual reports. The accounting is so unreliable that "the basic financial statements may have undetected misstatements that are both material and pervasive." DFAS [Defense Finance and Accounting Services] also could not make accurate year-end Army financial statements because more than 16,000 financial data files had vanished from its computer system.

Note: CNBC strangely removed this article, though you can still find it on this Reuters webpage. $6.5 trillion is the equivalent of $20,000 for every citizen of the US. If any business or other branch of government had balance sheets like this, it would be all over the news with people demanding reform. Why does the military get away with this year after year? See the actual Department of Defense report for more. Then see concise summaries of deeply revealing military corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.


Bolivia opens 'anti-imperialist' military school to counter US foreign policies
2016-08-17, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/17/bolivia-anti-imperialist-milita...

Bolivias president Evo Morales has opened a new anti-imperialist military academy to counter US policies and military influence in Latin America. If the empire teaches domination of the world from its military schools, we will learn from this school to free ourselves from imperial oppression, the countrys first indigenous president said. We want to build anti-colonial and anti-capitalist thinking with this school that binds the armed forces to social movements and counteracts the influence of the School of the Americas that always saw the indigenous as internal enemies, he told a crowd that included the defense ministers of Venezuela and Nicaragua. Some Latin American officers trained at the US-based School of the Americas went on to commit atrocities under 20th century military dictatorships. In 2000, the academy at Fort Benning, Georgia, was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Morales, who expelled the US ambassador and counter-narcotics agents in 2008, accused Washington of encouraging congressional coups such as the impending impeachment trial of suspended President Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. He also said the US promotes global terrorism through military interventions, citing the rise of the Islamic State group as an example. The re-inaugurated school carries the name of General Juan Jose Torres, a leftist who was Bolivias de facto president in 1970 and who expelled the Peace Corps for allegedly sterilizing indigenous women.

Note: The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly known as the School of the Americas, graduated more than 500 human rights abusers. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing government corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.


Does the U.S. Ignore Its Civilian Casualties in Iraq and Syria?
2016-08-17, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/opinion/does-the-us-ignore-its-civilian-cas...

As the United States and its allies continue their bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, many more noncombatants are perishing than they seem prepared to admit. Airwars, the organization I lead, at present estimates that at least 1,500 civilians have been killed by the United States-led coalition. Similar or higher tallies are reported by other monitoring groups, like Iraq Body Count and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. But coalition officials have publicly admitted just 55 deaths. It may just be a matter of looking. Our policy is not to go out and seek allegations of civilian casualties, a senior official from United States Central Command, or Centcom, which oversees the bombing campaign, told me recently when I asked about the discrepancy between reports of noncombatant deaths and official investigations. It took about 15 months into the war for any admission of civilian deaths in Iraq - despite thousands of airstrikes and more than 130 reported incidents. An average of 173 days still passes between a civilian casualty in Iraq or Syria and any public admission of responsibility. The Pentagon is not alone in its accounting failures. Russia still denies the more than 2,000 deaths it has most likely caused in Syria, while all 12 of the United States coalition partners insist they have killed only bad guys. This then is a systemic problem, one that suggests militaries are at present unfit - or unwilling - to count the dead accurately from above.

Note: The above was written by Chris Woods, author of Sudden Justice: Americas Secret Drone Wars. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources.


How the Pentagon became Walmart
2016-08-09, Chicago Tribune/Foreign Policy
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-pentagon-comment-8cdb317e-5e7e-11e6...

By the time I started working at the Defense Department in the early years of the Obama administration, the Pentagon's 17.5 miles of corridors had sprouted dozens of shops and restaurants catering to the building's 23,000 employees. And, over time, the U.S. military has itself come to offer a similar one-stop shopping experience to the nation's top policymakers. As retired Army Lt. Gen. Dave Barno once put it to me, the relentlessly expanding U.S. military has become "a Super Walmart with everything under one roof" - and two successive presidential administrations have been eager consumers. The military's transformation into the world's biggest one-stop shopping outfit is ... at once the product and the driver of seismic changes in how we think about war, with consequent challenges both to our laws and to the military itself. We've gotten into the habit of viewing every new threat through the lens of "war," thus asking our military to take on an ever-expanding range of nontraditional tasks. But viewing more and more threats as "war" brings more and more spheres of human activity into the ambit of the law of war, with its greater tolerance of secrecy, violence, and coercion - and its reduced protections for basic rights. Meanwhile, asking the military to take on more and more new tasks requires higher military budgets, forcing us to look for savings elsewhere. As budget cuts cripple civilian agencies, their capabilities dwindle, and we look to the military to pick up the slack, further expanding its role.

Note: As the Tribune has strangely removed this article, here's an alternate link. Another cutting article shows that according to the latest report on public relations spending from the Government Accountability Office, the US government PR apparatus has spent over $1 billion annually $626 million of which the Pentagon allots to employ a massive propaganda army. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources.


Guantnamo detainee who wrote a book about his torture to be released
2016-07-20, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/20/mohamedou-ould-slahi-release-...

One of the most tortured men in the history of Guantnamo Bay has received clearance from the wartime prisons quasi-parole board to leave after nearly 14 years of detention without charge. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian citizen whose harrowing account of his torture at Guantnamo Bay became an international bestseller in 2015, will soon leave behind the Cuban detention center where US military personnel contorted his body; bombarded him with noise; deprived him of sleep; stuffed his clothing with ice during a nighttime boat ride meant to to convince him he was headed to an even worse place; threatened his life; and threatened his mother with rape. A nonlegal panel representing various US security agencies tasked with assessing threats posed by Guantnamos 76 residual detainees, found Slahi to represent no continuing significant threat to the security of the United States. The consensus decision, reached on 14 July, was made public on Wednesday. A federal judge in 2010 [had previously] ordered him freed for lack of evidence untainted by torture to justify his detention, yet the US justice department appealed. In the summer of 2003, senior Guantnamo officials, believing Slahi was an important link to al-Qaida, sought and received permission from the Pentagon to torture him. US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld personally approved Slahis torture. In his book, Slahi recalled ... that he would tell his tormentors whatever they wished to hear. I dont care, as long as you are pleased, Slahi informed his interrogators.

Note: By the time Slahi's bestselling book Guantanamo Diary was published, leaked documents obtained by BBC News had revealed that more than 150 innocent people were detained at Guantanamo after being rounded up for no reason. For more along these lines, read about how the torture program fits in with a long history of human experimentation by corrupt intelligence agencies working alongside unethical scientists.


Army General Fund Adjustments Not Adequately Documented or Supported
2016-07-06, US Department of Defense Inspector General (PDF Report)
http://www.dodig.mil/pubs/documents/DODIG-2016-113.pdf

Longstanding financial management challenges prevent the Army from issuing auditable financial statements. Army and Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) Indianapolis personnel did not adequately support $2.8 trillion in third quarter adjustments and $6.5 trillion in yearend adjustments made to Army General Fund data during FY 2015 financial statement compilation. In addition, DFAS Indianapolis did not document or support why the Defense Departmental Reporting System Budgetary (DDRS-B) ... removed at least 16,513 of 1.3 million records during third quarter FY 2015. DFAS Indianapolis did not have detailed documentation ... or have accurate or complete system reports. As a result, the data used to prepare the FY 2015 AGF third quarter and yearend financial statements were unreliable and lacked an adequate audit trail. Until the Army and DFAS Indianapolis correct these control deficiencies, there is considerable risk that AGF financial statements will be materially misstated and the Army will not achieve audit readiness by the congressionally mandated deadline of September 30, 2017.

Note: Underneath its technical jargon, the above report shows that the Pentagon has lost track of trillions of dollars and thousands of accounting records. Despite its outrageous administrative expenses, the Pentagon remains literally unable to account for itself. Could it be that the real reason the Pentagon is the only branch of US government that doesn't balance its books is that they don't want us to know where the money is going? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing military corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.


The FDA is stockpiling military weapons and its not alone
2016-06-26, Boston Globe
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/06/25/the-fda-stockpiling-military-we...

The [FDA] amassed a stockpile of pistols, shotguns, and semiautomatic rifles, along with ample supplies of ammunition, liquid explosives, gun scopes, and suppressors. Between 2006 and 2014, [the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, an agency of the USDA] spent nearly $4.8 million to arm itself. And far from being an outlier, it is one of dozens of federal agencies that spends lavishly on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment. A report issued this month by American Transparency ... chronicles the explosive - and expensive - trend toward militarizing federal agencies, most of which have no military responsibilities. Between 2006 and 2014, the report shows, 67 federal bureaus, departments, offices, and services spent at least $1.48 billion on ammunition and material one might expect to find in the hands of SWAT teams, Special Forces soldiers - or terrorists. The Internal Revenue Service, for example, now spends more than $1 million annually on firearms, ammunition, and military gear. Since 2006, the Department of Veterans Affairs ... has poured nearly $11.7 million into guns and ammo. Even the Smithsonian Institution and the Social Security Administration have each devoted hundreds of thousands of dollars to weaponry. There are now fewer US Marines than there are officers at federal administrative agencies with the authority to carry weapons and make arrests.

Note: The Washington Post in 2009 reported that military influence over US civilian authorities was quietly increasing, and the militarization of US police has been well-documented. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about government corruption and the erosion of civil liberties.


Australian commission: Military cadets raped as initiation
2016-06-22, CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/21/asia/australia-military-abuse/index.html

Teenage recruits were raped by staff and forced to rape each other as part of initiation practices in the Australian military going back to 1960, a public inquiry heard on Tuesday. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse is hearing evidence from men and women who say they were sexually abused when they were as young as 15, in certain divisions of the Australian defense force. This commission is focusing on alleged abuse at the naval training center HMAS Leeuwin in Western Australia and the army apprentice school Balcombe in Victoria during the 1960s, '70s and '80s and also among cadets with the Australian defense force since 2000. In total, 111 victims came forward to report abuse. More than a dozen of them will give evidence to the inquiry. "On multiple occasions, I was snatched from my bed in the middle of the night by older recruits and dragged to a sports oval," said one male witness who wasn't named. The witness said he was forced to rape other recruits, and was raped himself by older recruits and staff. "The environment made it useless to resist," he said. "One could stand only so much abuse before realizing that saying 'no' was pointless." Many survivors say that when they reported the abuse, they were ignored, punished, or told it was "a rite of passage" in their initiation period. The inquiry also will hear evidence from former and current staff members, and examine the handling of complaints and the responses to claims for compensation.

Note: Watch videos providing powerful evidence rape has also been used to initiate future officers in the US Marine Corps. Watch an excellent segment by Australia's "60-Minutes" team "Spies, Lords and Predators" on a pedophile ring in the UK which leads directly to the highest levels of government. A second suppressed documentary, "Conspiracy of Silence," goes even deeper into this topic in the US. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.


Veterans of Atomic Test Blasts: No Warning, and Late Amends
2016-05-29, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/30/us/veterans-of-atomic-test-blasts-no-warni...

Several hundred thousand [soldiers] took part in atmospheric nuclear tests conducted in the Pacific and in Nevada. They were posted within range of exploding bombs in effect made to be guinea pigs in studies of how combat troops might stand up in a war fought with nuclear arms. Many among these atomic veterans suffered cancers and other diseases. Frank Farmer ... witnessed 18 atomic detonations in 1958. Its so bright you actually see your bones in your hands. He and his shipmates were issued no protective gear. Despite government assurances that their exposure to radiation had been insufficient to inflict physical harm, veterans could see they were getting sick in disproportionate numbers. Some began to speak out, ignoring oaths they had signed never to discuss their experiences. More and more I heard about guys that had prostate cancer and lung cancer and all kinds of cancers, said Mr. Farmer, who suffered hearing loss and a body rash that did not go away. Decades passed before corrective measures were taken. Issues raised by [these] difficulties resound in modern wars. As with the atomic veterans, officialdoms default position has generally been to wave off any suggestion of a link between a soldiers illness and a command-level decision. That was the case with Agent Orange ... in Vietnam. Years passed before the government accepted a presumptive connection between herbicides and cancers afflicting Vietnam veterans. Soldiers who served in Afghanistan and Iraq and in the 1991 Persian Gulf war complain of breathing problems, neurological damage, gastrointestinal disorders and other illnesses. Many suspect that blame lies with practices off the battlefield.

Note: Don't miss a profoundly moving 22-minute documentary in which several atomic veterans describe in detail what happened, how they suffered, and how the government denied responsibility for decades. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on war corruption from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our War Information Center.


The Army Chaplain Who Quit Over 'Unaccountable Killing' of Obamas Secretive Drone Program
2016-05-28, ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/army-chaplain-quit-unaccountable-killing-obama...

As a witness to the removal of fallen U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Army Chaplain Christopher John Antal cant recall a time when that solemn ceremony wasnt conducted without the presence of drones passing along the horizon. On April 12, Antal resigned his commission as an officer in the Army because of his conscientious objection to the United States drone policy. In a letter addressed to ... Barack Obama, Antal wrote, The executive branch continues to claim the right to kill anyone, anywhere on Earth, at any time, for secret reasons, based on secret evidence, in a secret process, undertaken by unidentified officials. I refuse to support this policy of unaccountable killing. In doing so, he joined other previous members of the armed forces who have addressed Obama to criticize his drone strike policy, including four former members of the Air Force who penned a letter in November of 2015 warning the president that the strikes served as a recruitment tool similar to Guantanamo Bay. Antals resignation concluded nearly eight years of service as an Army chaplain. He publicly voiced [his concerns about the targeted killings] in a Veterans Day sermon Nov. 11, 2012, when he gave a lyrical sermon criticizing drones on his base in Afghanistan and posted it online. Antal ... was called into the office of a general who told him to take down the sermon. He told me that my message did not support the mission, Antal said. He worried that his views about drones could land him in a military prison if did not leave his post.

Note: Drone strikes almost always miss their intended targets and reportedly create more terrorists than they kill. Casualties of war whose identities are unknown are frequently mis-reported to be "militants". For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources.


The Atomic Bomb Didn't End the War
2016-05-27, US News & World Report
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-05-27/its-time-to-confront-painfu...

It was Soviet intervention, not the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that caused Japan to surrender. Most Americans cling to the myth that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 [forced] Japan's surrender without a U.S. invasion. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. As the National Museum of the U.S. Navy makes clear, the atomic bombs ... "made little impact on the Japanese military. However, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria ... changed their minds." As shocking as this may be to Americans today, it was well known to military leaders at the time. In fact, seven of America's eight five-star officers in 1945 said that the bombs were either militarily unnecessary, morally reprehensible or both. Following the defeat at Saipan in July 1944, many Japanese leaders realized the war could not be won militarily. Telegrams going back and forth between Japanese officials in Tokyo and Moscow made it clear that the Japanese were seeking an honorable way to end what they had started. The U.S. had been firebombing and wiping out Japanese cities since early March. Destruction reached 99.5 percent in the city of Toyama. Japanese leaders accepted that the U.S. could and would wipe out Japan's cities. It didn't make a big difference whether this was one plane and one bomb or hundreds of planes and thousands of bombs. The atomic bombs contributed next to nothing to U.S. victory, but they did slaughter hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Note: Read a detailed description of how the New York Times suppressed and skewed the facts about the effects of the atomic bomb in order to forward the war-profiteering agenda. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about government corruption and the manipulation of public opinion.


Pentagon Official Once Told Morley Safer That Reporters Who Believe the Government Are Stupid
2016-05-20, The Intercept
https://theintercept.com/2016/05/20/pentagon-official-once-told-morley-safer-...

Morley Safer, who was a correspondent on CBSs 60 Minutes from 1970 until just last week, died Thursday at age 84. In 1965, Safer was sent to Vietnam by CBS. That August he filed a famous report showing American soldiers burning down a Vietnamese village. The next year, he wrote a newspaper column about a visit to Saigon by Arthur Sylvester, the ... head of all the U.S. militarys PR. Sylvester, [who] had arranged to speak with reporters for U.S. outlets, [said] that American correspondents had a patriotic duty to disseminate only information that made the United States look good. A network television correspondent said, Surely, Arthur, you dont expect the American press to be the handmaidens of government. Thats exactly what I expect, came the reply. An agency man raised the problem [of] the credibility of American officials. [Sylvester], the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, [responded]: Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then youre stupid. Did you hear that? Stupid. A Democratic senator from Indiana, entered Safers article into the Congressional Record, and ... a Republican representative from Missouri called for Sylvester to resign. For its part, the Pentagon told CBS executives: Unless you get Safer out of there, hes liable to end up with a bullet in his back. Moreover, Sylvester absolutely meant what he said [to] the journalists in Saigon. [By that time], hed already told some of the key U.S. government lies about the Cuban missile crisis.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about military corruption and the manipulation of public opinion.


Drones and the conscientious objector
2016-05-19, Boston Globe
https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2016/05/18/drones-and-conscientious-objecto...

When the guilt of our roles in facilitating this systematic loss of innocent life became too much, all of us succumbed to PTSD, [said] an open letter to the Obama administration, crafted by four former Air Force servicemen, each of whom played a role in the nations targeted killing program. The moral pang of the letter reflects a very basic ethical tenet. Concluding the letter, the former soldiers write that after suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, We were cut loose by the same government we gave so much to - sent out in the world without adequate medical care, reliable health services, or necessary benefits. Some of us are now homeless. Others of us barely make it. Several years ago now, The New York Times published an op-ed by one of the authors titled Drones, Ethics, and the Armchair Soldier, which argued that the physical remove of drone warfare would give pilots the space to engage in moral reflection ... that the urgency and danger of traditional warfare often preclude. In the United States, conscientious objection to engaging in war is permitted on secular and moral ground - but only if the individual objects to war on the whole. Members of the US armed forces are not allowed to [refuse] to engage in particular wars or ... military assignments on the basis of a moral objection. Drones [open] up both moral dilemma and moral opportunity. Every soldier is in fact required to disobey illegal orders (to deliberately kill civilians, for example). But this is different from conscientious objection.

Note: Drone strikes almost always miss their intended targets and reportedly create more terrorists than they kill. Casualties of war whose identities are unknown are frequently mis-reported to be "militants". For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources.


Military Sexual Assault Victims Discharged After Filing Complaints
2016-05-18, Time Magazine
http://time.com/4340321/sexual-assault-military-discharge-women/

The scariest part of Emily Vorlands relatively uneventful 2009 deployment to Iraq was that the enemy wore Army green. When a higher-ranking male officer sexually harassed her, her commander told Vorland to file a formal complaint. So she did. The investigation ... concluded she had acted inappropriately, engaged in consensual sex and was lying about it. A lesbian, she was concerned that her best defense was one that would end her military career. The Army [discharged her] for unacceptable conduct. Even as the military scrambles under congressional pressure to prevent future cases of sexual abuse, past victims are suffering for having stood up for themselves. Thousands of victims have been pushed out of the service with less-than-honorable discharges, which can leave them with no or reduced benefits, poor job prospects and a lifetime of stigma. Worse, when they try to rectify their situation, as Vorland did, fewer than 10% of them succeed, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch estimates. Military personnel who report a sexual assault frequently find that their military career is the biggest casualty, the group says in a new report. 163 veterans [were] ousted from the military between 1966 and 2015 after complaining about sexual abuse, ranging from harassment to rape. Our interviews suggest that all too often superior officers choose to expeditiously discharge sexual-assault victims rather than support their recovery and help them keep their position, the study says.

Note: A 2015 Associated Press article states that: "the true scope of sex-related violence in the military communities is vastly underreported." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.


Drones fly controlled by nothing more than people's thoughts
2016-04-22, The Independent/Associated Press
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/drones-brain-thoughts-controlled-bc...

The world's first race for drones controlled by people's thoughts involved 16 pilots flying drones over a course of just 10 yards in an indoor basketball court. "With events like this, we're popularizing the use of BCI (brain-computer interface) instead of it being stuck in the research lab," said [PhD student] Chris Crawford. Mind-controlled technology already is helping paralyzed people move limbs or robotic prosthetics. The technology ... works by using an EEG headset that has been calibrated to identify the electrical activity associated with particular thoughts in each wearer's brain. Programmers write code to translate these ... signals into commands that computers send to the drones. Professor Juan Gilbert, whose computer science students organized the race, [wants] to know how mind-controlled devices could expand and change the way we play, work and live. But as the technology moves toward wider adoption, ethical, legal and privacy questions remain unresolved. The US Defence Department - which uses drones to kill suspected terrorists ... from vast distances - is looking for military brain-control applications. A 2014 Defence Department grant supports the Unmanned Systems Laboratory ... where researchers have developed a system enabling a single person with no prior training to fly multiple drones simultaneously through mind control.

Note: Read an article which dives deep into the use of neuroscience as a weapon. And since drone strikes almost always miss their intended targets and reportedly create more terrorists than they kill, is it really a good idea to make drone fleets easier for the military to deploy?


Pentagon misled Congress about militarys handling of sexual assault cases, report says
2016-04-19, Washington Post/Associated Press
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/04/19/to-stop-bill-tha...

Since 2013, lawmakers have tried to pass a bill that would reform key parts of how the military justice system deals with sexual assault, but during key stages of the legislative debate, the Pentagon misled Congress by cherry picking information, later disproved, about a hundred cases, according to a report released by a watchdog group Monday and provided to the Associated Press. At issue is the Military Justice Improvement Act, or MIJA, [which] aimed to change how the military treated sexual-assault cases by basically removing unit commands from the judicial process that decided whether cases should move forward. During testimony to Congress, Navy Adm. James Winnefeld, then the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that if the bill passed, fewer sexual-assault cases in the military would go to trial. He claimed that between 2010 and 2013 there were 93 instances of civilian prosecutors refusing to take certain sexual-assault cases, prompting military commanders to insist on taking them to court-martial. Winnefelds claims, echoed by at least four senators, were largely untrue. Out of 81 of the 93 cases, there was not one example of a commander insisting a case be prosecuted, the report says. In each case, military investigators or military attorneys requested the case from civilian authorities. The report goes on to say that in two-thirds of the 93 cases, there was no sexual-assault allegation, civilian prosecutors never declined the case, or the military failed to prosecute for sexual assault.

Note: A 2015 Associated Press article states that: "the true scope of sex-related violence in the military communities is vastly underreported." The above article shows that corrupt military officials have lied to Congress to keep it that way. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.


Vile sex abuse by UN peacekeepers is leaving the United Nations in tatters
2016-04-14, The Telegraph (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/politics/the-vile-sex-abuse-by-un-peacekeepe...

Sexual violence in war is as destructive as any bomb or bullet, the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said a couple of years ago. As he was uttering these words, the UNs own peacekeepers were themselves carrying out the most appalling abuse. In 2014, when Mr Ban was speaking out on behalf of the victims, three girls in the Central African Republic have alleged they were tied up and forced to have sex with a dog by a French military commander. There were no fewer than 99 allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation by the blue helmets as UN military personnel are nicknamed last year, and there have been 25 new claims this year. This isnt the first time such claims have surfaced about the conduct of UN peacekeepers. There was an alleged paedophile ring in the Democratic Republic of Congo, UN police officers in Bosnia were paying for prostitutes and trafficking young women from Eastern Europe, and Pakistani peacekeepers were found guilty of sexual abuse in Haiti. Theres a track record going back decades. In January, an independent review into the abuses accused the UN of failing to respond to allegations of child abuse against the peacekeepers. The UNs response? Last month, the Security Council passed its first ever resolution to tackle sexual abuse by its peacekeepers. Military or police units would be repatriated where there is credible evidence of widespread or systemic sexual exploitation and abuse. Is that really the best the UN can do?

Note: Watch an excellent segment by Australia's "60-Minutes" team titled "Spies, Lords and Predators" on a pedophile ring in the UK which leads directly to the highest levels of government. A second suppressed documentary, "Conspiracy of Silence," goes even deeper into this sad subject in the US. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.


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