yeah by then anyone remaining in the military will be 70 year old. you don't think any kids are going to volunteer after this fiasco do you?

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Our nation 'jumped the shark' when Bush lost the election in Y2K and was appointed President by a Supreme Court that had no standing in the case, did not follow the law and shat all over the Constitution. This is but one more symptom of the disease that is the Neo-Con infestation of our government.

Read Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson and see how this sad story will probably end.

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And we all share in it.

We, the people, not just the families of the men and women over there, but all of us. We should never have accepted the excuses.

There should have been some way we could have turned it up loud enough so that the vermin in the White House and the house plants in Congress got it through their pea brains and rhizomes that it wasn't good enough, that we wouldn't tolerate it, that first-class equipment for the safety of the people who had to fight their god-forgotten war was NOT AN OPTION, but a necessity.

If they wouldn't listen, we should have turned it up, and up and up. After that cockroach was put back to crawl on the White House walls, we should have found some way to make him afraid to go against the will of the people.

This government is so corrupt at its core that it's going to take McCain's hundred years just to get the filth out and air the rooms. It makes me physically ill to think about it, and I blame myself for not doing enough. Every one of us could have done more.

Obama can get them out of there, but he can't make up for the dead who shouldn't have died because we didn't insist.

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With Iran as the next target to be hit before the next elections, dont count on it.
How many men and weaponry is needed in order to attack iran?
You are soon going to wage a poor's war. That's to say: more men (possibly managed by general drafting) and less technology.
The worst of all is that the bloody USA will rapidly call for NATO, and therefore our own sons will soon be fighting wars we deeply disapproved from the beggining. That's the price of being a vassal.

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Why is there no national movement to impeach Bush-Cheney? Perhaps people are waiting for the attack on Iran and the reinstitution of the draft.

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If you look at the U.S. prior to WWII, its population and occasionally its leaders focused on domestic affairs and preferred to avoid foreign entanglements. It was probably our success in WWII that turned the country to its current willingness to fund a big military well beyond any rational need. Perhaps the hollowing out of our army will lead to us to again emphasize our domestic needs over our imperial appetites.

But there is another possible reaction that worries me and that is that the country will put even more emphasis on its mercenary army. In Iraq, approximately half of the U.S. force consists of military contractors and this is bad enough, but could Bush or a successor turn to a 100% privatized force in the next bloody battle?. I find that a quite frightening possibility.

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Correction: "I put commanders on the ground who tell me what I want to hear." Petraeus is on the way out. Abazaid went quiently into the night. Several before him. They're always the 'best there is' until they begin to do their real job. They take their moral responsibility to the soldiers very seriously. George doesn't understand that. Or just doesn't like it. He has far too much power. Thanks, ANNA

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"The Bush administration led America into its Iraq folly nearly five years ago. And the troops that are there still aren't receiving the proper equipment..."

Half a trillion dollars has been spent and still they say the troops do not have the equipment they need. We must demand an answer to this question: Where did all the money go?

The Pentagon cannot tell us because it has NEVER passed an audit. All government agencies are required to pass yearly audits; the Pentagon is the only one that fails its audit year after year -- why? And why is Congress willing to give it increasingly greater amounts of money when it knows the Pentagon can't manage money?

With its inability to track the money it receives and the products it buys, the Pentagon has to be a thief's favorite candy store. It would not surprise me in the least to learn that a good chunk of that half trillion dollars is in an off-shore bank account.

As far as I'm concerned, the Pentagon should not receive another dime until it can do what Wal-Mart does -- namely, account for every dollar and every item in its inventory. Shoveling more tons of greenbacks at the Pentagon is asking for a bankrupt nation.

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This country doesn't have to look far for the real terrorist; they only need to look at the American White House and American Congress! The fools running our country are "the terrorist"!
AMERICA IS VERY SICK! Citizen's must unite against these fools and vote while you still can to remove these liars at every future election. START A VOTER REVOLUTION!

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My heart goes out to you. This isn't the way it's supposed to be with our national "leadership" using you as an expendable asset in order to become rich and ever more powerful. When the crooks in power order you to turn against us, I hope you remember (as I do) your oath to protect us against "all enemies, foreign and domestic". This includes the demented thugs who stole the presidency in 2000. My brother,my sons, my granddaughter, and I have an agregate of some fifty plus years of service to our country in the Navy, and I must say, outside of Viet Nam, I've NEVER seen our armed forces put to a more sorry use or neglected as badly as now.

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I wrote, as in picked up a pen, to Obama and Clinton. I do that--I've got nice personal stationery with my name on and everything, and someone around here pointed out that a letter is the best way to get to those guys, because it's a physical thing.

I sent them each some money, (I write CHECK ENCLOSED on the envelope, always a good idea) and I told them that I and a few hundred million other people out here expect our soldiers to be given the most elite protective equipment available, and to do anything else is to disgrace the office of Commander-in-Chief, disgrace the men and women who sacrifice for us in the military, and disgrace the American people.

I sent a copy of the letter to Ted Kennedy, John Kerry and John Olver.

It's not enough. We need to join together so they all hear one huge , angry bellow!

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Rumsfeld Sept 10, 2001: The Pentagon cannot account for $2.3 TRILLION

On Sept. 10, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared war. Not on foreign terrorists, "the adversary's closer to home. It's the Pentagon bureaucracy," he said.

He said money wasted by the military poses a serious threat.

"In fact, it could be said it's a matter of life and death," he said.

Rumsfeld promised change but the next day – Sept. 11-- the world changed and in the rush to fund the war on terrorism, the war on waste seems to have been forgotten.

Just last week President Bush announced, "my 2003 budget calls for more than $48 billion in new defense spending."

More money for the Pentagon, CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales reports, while its own auditors admit the military cannot account for 25 percent of what it spends.

"According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," Rumsfeld admitted.

$2.3 trillion — that's $8,000 for every man, woman and child in America. To understand how the Pentagon can lose track of trillions, consider the case of one military accountant who tried to find out what happened to a mere $300 million.

"We know it's gone. But we don't know what they spent it on," said Jim Minnery, Defense Finance and Accounting Service.

Minnery, a former Marine turned whistle-blower, is risking his job by speaking out for the first time about the millions he noticed were missing from one defense agency's balance sheets. Minnery tried to follow the money trail, even crisscrossing the country looking for records.

"The director looked at me and said 'Why do you care about this stuff?' It took me aback, you know? My supervisor asking me why I care about doing a good job," said Minnery.

He was reassigned and says officials then covered up the problem by just writing it off.

"They have to cover it up," he said. "That's where the corruption comes in. They have to cover up the fact that they can't do the job."

The Pentagon's Inspector General "partially substantiated" several of Minnery's allegations but could not prove officials tried "to manipulate the financial statements."

Twenty years ago, Department of Defense Analyst Franklin C. Spinney made headlines exposing what he calls the "accounting games." He's still there, and although he does not speak for the Pentagon, he believes the problem has gotten worse.

"Those numbers are pie in the sky. The books are cooked routinely year after year," he said.

Another critic of Pentagon waste, Retired Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan, commanded the Navy's 2nd Fleet the first time Donald Rumsfeld served as Defense Secretary, in 1976.

In his opinion, "With good financial oversight we could find $48 billion in loose change in that building, without having to hit the taxpayers."




more info here
http://www.whereisthemoney.org/

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Related: Reps Murtha and Moran don't even know about missing trillions! http://benfrank.net/blog/2006/01/07/incompetent_or_traitors/

The 'blogosphere' has been talking about this story for years, and two Congressmen have never heard of it. They are shielded from info, living in a bubble, just like Bush.

Related links:

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