military

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing


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Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing


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Cross-posted from Bloviations.

Today, the U.S. Senate blocked the McCain-backed military education program.

The McCain/Graham plan calls for would give only $2,000 a month for service members that have more than 12 years of military service and was offered as an alternative to the much more effective Webb plan which would give service members 36 months of tuition, book costs, and a stipend.

Here are the top stories this week related to our soldiers here and abroad, taken from the Our Troops Newsladder.

Here are the top stories this week related to our soldiers here and abroad, taken from the Our Troops Newsladder.

In which we begin an assessment of the problem of Nonstrategic Nuclear Weapons

by Aileen at My Blog

Way back in early September I posted about a strange incident at Minot AFB in North Dakota, where 5 (now increased to 6) stockpiled nuclear warheads were taken out of storage, armed, attached to supposedly decommissioned Advanced Cruise Missiles, loaded onto the pilons of a B-52 strategic bomber, and flown to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana - a forward staging base for deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq.

My analysis at that time was that the whistleblowers who reported the incident to The Army Times - which then broke the story - were just doing their job, which had to do with some rather obvious "Saber-Rattling" by the Bush administration against Iran. In that post I noted that ex-CIA analyst Larry Johnson> agreed with my analysis on his blog.

The Moyock-based mercenary firm Blackwater USA has had a bad week. First, its employees shot into a crowd of Iraqis on Sunday, killing at least 11 people. A preliminary report by the Iraqi government states that "the murder of citizens in cold blood in the Nisour area by Blackwater is considered a terrorist action against civilians just like any other terrorist operations."

Now Blackwater is being investigated for shipping illegal weapons into Iraq. Today the News and Observer reported that

Two former Blackwater employees have pleaded guilty in Greenville to weapons charges and are cooperating with federal officials investigating Blackwater, based in the tiny town of Moyock in North Carolina's northeastern corner.

Take action now on the Webb-Hagel Amendment! Votevets.org needs your help in protecting our national security.

Military families at heavily deployed bases like Fort Bragg and Camp Lejeune are communities at war without their country. Never in our history have so few been asked to sacrifice so much while so many are asked to do nothing at all. Too many Americans hear about the war in Iraq on the evening news, switch off their TV's and sleep well at night confident that the yellow ribbon magnet they bought for their car last week is a sufficient sacrifice. My two military children have sacrificed more before age 10 than the grown men in Washington four times their age who beat the loudest drums to send their Daddy off to war...