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Why the Pentagon is a multitrillion-dollar fraud.

The defense budget of the United States is grotesquely large, its $877 billion dwarfing the $849 billion spent by the next ten nations with the largest defense expenditures. And yet, the Pentagon cannot fully account for the $3.8 trillion in assets and $4 trillion in liabilities it has accrued at US taxpayer expense,

 https://www.rt.com/news/588750-us-pentagon-failed-annual-audit/ Scott Ritter, 12 Dec 23

The US Department of Defense has failed its sixth annual audit in a row, but taxpayer money will keep going down that drain

Recently, the Pentagon admitted it couldn’t account for trillions of dollars of US taxpayer money, having failed a massive yearly audit for the sixth year running.

The process consisted of the 29 sub-audits of the DoD’s various services, and only seven passed this year – no improvement over the last. These audits only began taking place in 2017, meaning that the Pentagon has never successfully passed one.

This year’s failure made some headlines, was commented upon briefly by the mainstream media, and then just as quickly forgotten by an American society accustomed to pouring money down the black hole of defense spending.

The defense budget of the United States is grotesquely large, its $877 billion dwarfing the $849 billion spent by the next ten nations with the largest defense expenditures. And yet, the Pentagon cannot fully account for the $3.8 trillion in assets and $4 trillion in liabilities it has accrued at US taxpayer expense, ostensibly in defense of the United States and its allies. As the Biden administration seeks $886 billion for next year’s defense budget (and Congress seems prepared to add an additional $80 billion to that amount), the apparent indifference of the American collective – government, media, and public – to how nearly $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars will be spent speaks volumes about the overall bankrupt nature of the American establishment. 

Audits, however, are an accountant’s trick, a series of numbers on a ledger which, for the average person, do not equate to reality. Americans have grown accustomed to seeing big numbers when it comes to defense spending, and as a result, we likewise expect big things from our military. But the fact is, the US defense establishment increasingly physically resembles the numbers on the ledgers the accountants have been trying to balance – it just doesn’t add up. 

Despite spending some $2.3 trillion on a two-decade military misadventure in Afghanistan, the American people witnessed the ignominious retreat from that nation live on TV in August 2021. Likewise, a $758 billion investment in the 2003 invasion and subsequent decade-long occupation of Iraq went south when the US was compelled to withdraw in 2011– only to return in 2014 for another decade of chasing down ISIS, itself a manifestation of the failures of the original Iraqi venture. Overall, the US has spent more than $1.8 trillion on its 20-year nightmare in Iraq and Syria. 

These numbers are mind-numbingly large – so large that they become meaningless to the average person. The US defense enterprise is so massive that it is literally a mission impossible to speak of balancing the books. The American people might be willing to shrug off an accounting error or two. But the defense budget equates to American military power and the perceptions of national worth that translate into notions of American exceptionalism.

The fact of the matter is that our cavalier approach to defense spending has resulted in fraud of a massive scale. The American people were sold a bill of goods – a military capable of projecting power world-wide to sustain the so-called “rules based international order” upon which the notion of American exceptionalism has been premised. As it turns out, the US military is as hollow as the numbers on the Pentagon ledgers. The American people have bought an apparatus that is incapable of fighting and winning a major war against any of the potential opponents arrayed against it. We failed to defeat Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban. And we are not able to defeat either China or Russia, let alone regional powers like North Korea and Iran. And yet we will simply continue to invest, in seemingly unquestioning fashion, into this enterprise, expecting somehow that a system that cannot pass an audit will somehow magically produce a different result despite the fact that we, the American people, are doing nothing to demand such a result.

In short, the defense budget is the equivalent of “pay-to-play,” in which the American people pay the US government to produce the results necessary to sustain their overinflated sense of self-worth. We Americans have become so accustomed to being the biggest, baddest bully in the global arena that we assume that simply by pouring money into a system that had produced the desired results for more than seventy years that we could keep the good times rolling. But when you allocate money to a system that has been allowed to become conditioned to operate without accountability, don’t be surprised when the shiny mansion on the hill you thought you were buying turns out to be little more than a house of cards.

December 14, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Causing Gaza Blackouts, Israel Benefits from Media Double Standards

JULIANNE TVETEN, https://fair.org/home/causing-gaza-blackouts-israel-benefits-from-media-double-standards/ 13 Dec 23

As part of its escalating siege and bombing campaign against Palestinians—in which more than 18,000 people have been killed and roughly 1.9 million displaced—Israel has repeatedly disabled internet and phone service throughout Gaza. Israel’s airstrikes and fuel blockades have devastated the region’s communications infrastructure, depriving more than 2 million Gazans of access to lifesaving information, emergency services and contact with those outside their immediate vicinity, while preventing journalists from reporting on the situation. Since the first blackouts occurred shortly after Hamas’s attacks on October 7, residents have suffered multiple outages.

Israel as innocent bystander 

In recent weeks, Israel-allied media have minimized Israel’s culpability, portraying the shutoffs more as an unforeseeable act of nature than a deliberate act of military aggression.

News sources have rightfully informed readers of the telecommunications void in Gaza. A headline from the Washington Post (10/28/23) read, “No Text, No Talk: Palestinians Plunged Into Digital Darkness in Gaza.” The following month, an Associated Press (11/16/23) dispatch covering a separate shutoff announced that “Under a Communication Blackout, Gaza’s 2.3 Million People Are Cut Off From Each Other and the World.” But judging by these passive-voice alerts, one would have no idea Israel was involved.

Additionally, though the Post promptly alluded to the shutoffs as a “tool of war,” the paper waited 10 paragraphs to assign blame to Israel, noting that “Israel knocked out cell towers, cable lines and infrastructure…creating the near-blackout of connectivity.” AP also hedged and buried its mentions of Israel’s responsibility, explaining that a lack of fuel—caused by Israel’s obstruction of fuel deliveries to Gaza, which AP waited two dozen paragraphs to address—paralyzed the region’s internet and phone network.

To further obscure the cause-and-effect relationship of Israel’s violence and Gaza’s infrastructural ruin, media have presented the two as parallel occurrences. Wired (10/27/23) announced that cables, cell towers and other equipment “have been damaged or destroyed as Israel launched thousands of missiles in response to Hamas.” The New York Times (10/29/23) offered a similar construction: “As Israeli forces entered Gaza on Friday to fight Hamas, phone and internet service was severed.” NPR (10/30/23) contributed its own version, stating, “At the same time Israel intensified its assault on Gaza, internet and phone service suddenly dropped.”

‘Complete siege’

These framings are astonishingly charitable to Israel, given the available documentation of its actions. After promising a “complete siege” of Gaza in early October, Israeli officials ordered cuts to electricity, fuel supplies, food and water (Guardian, 10/11/23), amounting to a war crime. On October 10, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs confirmed that Israeli airstrikes “targeted several telecommunication installations” in Gaza. Days later, an Israeli Communications Ministry press release listed “an ongoing examination and preparation for the shutting down of cellular communications and internet services to Gaza” in a summary of its operations.

This aggression is enabled by Israel’s seizure and decades-long weakening of Palestinian communications infrastructure, which has rendered Palestinian networks highly vulnerable to damage. According to the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media:

Since the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967, Israel took complete control of the [Information and Communication Technologies] infrastructure and sector in the West Bank and Gaza, impeding development and blocking the establishment of an independent network, instead making Palestinians entirely dependent on the Israeli occupation authorities.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Palestinian telecom companies have attributed the outages to “deliberate actions perpetrated by Israeli authorities.”

Enemies as sinister masterminds

In contrast to their Israel coverage, US and US-allied media waste no time identifying alleged culprits of internet shutdowns in non-allied countries.

Reporting on protests over rising fuel prices, the New York Times (11/17/19) ran the headline “Iran Blocks Nearly All Internet Access.” The active voice in the story’s lead clearly indicated responsibility: “Iran imposed an almost complete nationwide internet blackout on Sunday,” in order to “cut off Iranians” amid “widespread government unrest.” 

An adjective elsewhere in the lede—“draconian”—which, though it undoubtedly applies to Israel, is almost unimaginable in corporate media discussions of the 75-year US ally (FAIR.org, 10/20/23, 11/15/23, 11/17/23).AP (7/12/21) adopted equally decisive language in a piece scolding Cuba for supposedly blocking social media sites during a protest. The agency insisted that “restricting internet access has become a tried-and-true method of stifling dissent by authoritarian regimes around the world,” a category under which China and North Korea, too, evidently fell.

And, months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, media were swift to caution of the occupying force’s ambitions to wrest control of Ukrainian networks. According to Wired (6/15/22), Russia was “Taking Over Ukraine’s Internet” by rerouting Ukraine’s online traffic through “Vladimir Putin’s powerful online censorship machine.” The New York Times (8/9/22) echoed these charges, characterizing the action as “part of a Russian authoritarian playbook that is likely to be replicated further if they take more Ukrainian territory.”

Defying evidence (or lack thereof)

In many cases, US and Western media’s assertions of enemies’ digital repression lack or contradict evidence. The AP (7/12/21) report on Cuba, for example, called the disruption an instance of a “go-to tactic to suppress dissent.” The agency’s quantitative source was data from NetBlocks, a London-based internet monitoring organization commonly cited in Western reporting on global online access, including that in Gaza (Al Jazeera, 12/4/23).

But the referenced information didn’t support all of the AP’s claims. The tech-news site Rest of World (7/14/21)—hardly a Castroite publication—found no conclusive proof that the outage was planned. A source from network monitoring company Kentik told the site that the interruption “could either happen deliberately or due to a technical failure,” adding that “internet measurement data alone”—which NetBlocks and Kentik used to gauge online activity in Cuba—“can’t tell the difference.” (The AP also neglected to mention the US’s record of limiting Cuban internet access.)

In a particularly egregious example, Foreign Policy (2/21/23) accused China of muffling internet service for Taiwan’s Matsu Islands, in what “looks like targeted harassment by Beijing.” This assumption was based on reported incidents in which a Chinese fishing vessel and freighter cut undersea cables on separate occasions. No conspiracy was confirmed; Foreign Policy itself acknowledged that a Taiwanese official “told reporters that there was no indication the incidents were intentional.” Still, this didn’t deter the magazine from trumpeting, “China Is Practicing How to Sever Taiwan’s Internet.”

Meanwhile, Western media have access to ample evidence that Israel willfully throttles, disables and bombs the communications networks it has usurped—in part to mute those who might challenge its official narratives (Al Jazeera, 11/9/23; NBC News, 11/11/23)—and displaces and kills the people who depend on them.

And yet those same media contort and trivialize that evidence to obfuscate Israel’s offenses. Apparently, sabotage of essential lines of communication for a beleaguered population doesn’t constitute subjugation—as long as the saboteur is a friend of the right countries.

December 14, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

As nuclear powers restart the arms race, unarmed nations call for reason

The Hill, BY STEPHEN BLANK, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR – 12/13/23

For advocates of arms control and nuclear nonproliferation, these are times of great foreboding. The arms control edifice, painstakingly erected by the U.S. and the USSR during the Cold War, seems to be dead in the water. Virtually all the existing treaties are being broken, ignored, bypassed or terminated.  

In February, Russia suspended its participation in the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, and revoked its ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which the U.S. Senate also refused to ratify. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons that has just entered into force is in danger of being sidelined by the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. Simultaneously, the international nuclear security architecture is under pressure from the expanding nuclear arsenals and tense negotiations between Beijing and Washington.

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was to be the result of the idealism of smaller, non-nuclear powers, such as Austria, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Mexico and South Africa, which would create a legal and actionable means of prohibiting nuclear weapons. Nobody can deny that moving humanity away from collective nuclear suicide is a good thing. In an ideal world, it would be a commendable step forward.

It is also no coincidence that this treaty’s signatories have suffered directly from nuclear testing and associated ecological damage. Their visceral understanding that nuclear testing is a threat to humanity is not just born out of a desire to improve international security architecture, but also a deep-seated reaction against past tragedy. The fallout of past nuclear tests provides stark evidence of what happens when nuclear nonproliferation becomes an afterthought.

One of the key champions of the new treaty is Kazakhstan. The country was home to Semipalatinsk, the massive test site for the Soviet nuclear program, and its ecology has been forever scarred by the Soviet Union’s wanton disregard for public health via mismanagement of the fallout and the disposal of nuclear waste.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin withdrew Russia’s ratification of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and hinted at restarting nuclear testing, Kazakhstan’s citizenry responded with a solemn warning: “Let us be a lesson.” Russia’s walkout from the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty reopens possibilities for it to test nuclear weapons in the open air. Indeed Putin has warned that he is prepared to resume nuclear testing.

This specific threat of atomic weapons testing and the more general growing threat of nuclear use caused the signatories of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons to come together. Their concern is not just ethical but quite realistic. In the face of rising nuclear buildups and doctrinal precepts pointing to potential nuclear use among the permanent five members of the U.N. Security Council, the signatories, especially countries like Kazakhstan that are adjacent to those nuclear-armed states, face a growing threat to their security. 

To the extent that nuclear powers can be persuaded to adhere to this treaty — so far, an arduous quest by the signatories — it enhances their security and reduces the chance of their being vulnerable to and victims of nuclear threats.  ………………………………………. more https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/4356196-as-nuclear-powers-restart-the-arms-race-unarmed-nations-call-for-reason/

December 14, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment