NewsTrust - U.S. Military - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Independent)

Active-Duty Army Whistleblower Lt. Col. Daniel Davis: U.S. Deceiving Public on Afghan War

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Apr. 11 (Interview) - In an extended interview, we speak with Lt. Col. Danny Davis, the most prominent active duty serviceperson to question the U.S. war in Afghanistan. In his damning report following his return from his second year-long deployment in Afghanistan, Davis draws on about 250 interviews with U.S. soldiers as well as Afghans across the country to conclude: "Senior ranking U.S. military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the U.S. Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable." Davis asks how many more must die in support of a mission that's not succeeding. "When you're given a mission that cannot succeed militarily, then what is the purpose of the mission?" [Transcript to come. Check back soon.]

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"Mind Zone": New Film Tracks Therapists Guiding Soldiers Through Traumas of Afghan War

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Juan Gonzalez - Mar. 16 (Review) - Haaken’s forthcoming documentary, "Mind Zone: Therapists Behind the Front Lines," shows the ethical dilemmas faced by therapists in Afghanistan who guide soldiers through the trauma of war. "The military has relied quite extensively on therapists to kind of help hold people together psychologically in war zones,"

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Jon Stewart Slams Liz Trotta's Views On Sexual Assault On Women In Military (VIDEO)

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Katia McGlynn, Jon Stewart - Feb. 15 (Comedy News) - Fox News contributor Liz Trotta made headlines Sunday when she reacted to a 64% rise in violent sexual assaults in the miltary by saying "What did they expect? These people are in close contact," among other controversial remarks.

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Report: Military Blew $1 Trillion on Weapons Since 9/11

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Adam Weinstein - Nov. 02 (Opinion) - A new study suggests that defense hawks are crying crocodile tears over planned cuts to Pentagon spending. Capitol Hill conservatives and Pentagon brass fighting cuts to defense spending have argued that the military is limping off the battlefield

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Noam Chomsky on the U.S. Economic Crisis: Joblessness, Excessive Military Spending and Healthcare

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Sep. 13 (Interview) - President Obama sent his new jobs proposal to Congress on Monday with a plan to pay for the $447 billion package by raising taxes on the wealthy. Noam Chomsky says, "The healthcare system...the huge military spending, the very low taxes for the rich [and corporations]...those are fundamental problems that have to be dealt with if there's going to be anything like successful economic and social development in the United States." As Republican presidential candidate, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, calls Social Security a "Ponzi scheme," and Democrats buy into the narrative that the program is in crisis, Chomsky notes that "to worry about a possible problem 30 years from now, which can incidentally be fixed with a little bit of tampering here and there, as was done in 1983, to worry about that just makes absolutely no sense, unless you're trying to destroy the program." [includes rush transcript]

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Epidemic: Over 400,000 Traumatic Brain Injuries for Vets Coming from Iraq and Afghanistan

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - Jun. 21 (Opinion) - "We are facing a massive mental health problem as a result of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a country we have not responded adequately to the problem. Unless we act urgently and wisely, we will be dealing with an epidemic of service related psychological wounds for years to come."

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“A Moment in the Sun”: An Extended Interview with Independent Filmmaker, Author John Sayles

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman, John Sayles - Jun. 17 (Interview) - “However small your audiences, however frustrating it is to get where your version of the world or what you want to talk about out there, it is part of the conversation. If you shut up, the conversation is one-sided,” says Sayles.

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Around the Globe, US Military Bases Generate Resentment, Not Security

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Katrina vanden Heuvel - Jun. 14 (Opinion) - “It makes as much sense for the Pentagon to hold onto 227 military bases in Germany as it would for the post office to maintain a fleet of horses and buggies,” writes Gusterson. In a recent Italian documentary Standing Army, the late author and Nation contributor Chalmers Johnson says, “The unit of empire in the classic European empires was the colony. The unit for the American empire is not the colony, it’s the military base.… Things that can’t go on forever, don’t. That’s where we are today.” The bases—isolated from the host communities and, as Gusterson writes, “generating resentment against [their] prostitution, environmental damage, petty crime, and everyday ethnocentrism”—face growing opposition from local citizens.

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Annie Jacobsen on New Book, "Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base"

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Jun. 09 (Review) - Located some 80 miles north of Las Vegas, the secret U.S. military base Area 51 in Nevada was established in the 1950s to build and test hi-tech spy and war planes including the U2, the stealth bomber and surveillance drones. Located inside the Nevada Test and Training Range, Area 51 also played a key role in nuclear weapon tests. For decades, the government denied Area 51 even existed, but in recent years many CIA and military documents have been declassified. We speak with Annie Jacobsen, author of the new book, "Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base."

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Sisterhood and the SEALs

Sat, 28 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

City Journal - By Heather Mac Donald - May. 28 (Opinion) - It was just a matter of time before the successful Navy SEAL operation against Osama bin Laden on May 1 provoked a complaint that SEAL teams are all-male.

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Blackwater Shouldn't Lobby With Our Dime

Sat, 21 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Robert Reich - May. 21 (Opinion) - It's one of the most insidious conflicts of interest in American politics.

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My Reaction to Osama bin Laden's Death

Sat, 07 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Noam Chomsky - May. 07 (Opinion) - 'We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden's, and he is not a 'suspect' but uncontroversially the 'decider' who gave the orders to commit the 'supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole' (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

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The illogic of the torture debate

Wed, 04 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Glenn Greenwald - May. 04 (Opinion) - But even if it were the case that valuable information were obtained during or after the use of torture, what would it prove? Nobody has ever argued that brutality will never produce truthful answers. It is sometimes the case that if you torture someone long and mercilessly enough, they will tell you something you want to know.

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Terrorism Concerns After bin Laden

Mon, 02 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Richard N. Haass - May. 02 (Opinion) - The killing of Osama bin Laden constitutes a significant victory over global terrorism. But it is a milestone, not a turning point, in what remains an ongoing struggle without a foreseeable end.

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Ex-State Department Official Matthew Hoh: With Killing of Bin Laden, Why Are 50,000 U.S. Troops Still in Afghanistan?

Mon, 02 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - May. 02 (Interview) - fter two tours of duty in Iraq and serving in the State Department in Washington, D.C., Matthew Hoh became the United States’ senior civilian representative and political adviser in Afghanistan. He resigned five months into his contract, making him the highest-ranking U.S. government official to publicly quit over the war in Afghanistan. He joins us from Washington, D.C., to discuss whether the death of Osama bin Laden means the end of that war. “Everybody should be asking themselves today in the United States, if Osama Bin Laden was hiding in an upscale villa an hour or two drive north, northeast of Islamabad, then why did we put 50,000 troops in Afghanistan over the last two years?”

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The Abu Ghraib Photos You Haven't Seen

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Nick Turse - Apr. 22 (Review) - Riley Sharbonno didn’t round up people. He didn’t carry out any massacres and didn’t witness any. But Sharbonno did go to war. And he did return with memories that were mixed up, messy or missing. Monica Haller helped him to put them back together in a fascinating photo book—a term she eschews, instead calling the project “an object of deployment.” A thick tome of more than 470 pages, “Riley and his story. Me and my outrage. You and us.” is a piece of art and a historical document. It’s a war story and a meditation on memory as well as a rumination on its absence.

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Why Was PFC Manning Moved to Fort Leavenworth?

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

armycourtmartialdefense.info - By David E. Coombs - Apr. 20 (Opinion) - While the defense hopes that the move to Fort Leavenworth will result in the improvement of PFC Manning’s conditions of confinement, it nonetheless intends to pursue redress at the appropriate time for the flagrant violations of his constitutional rights by the Quantico confinement facility.

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A $2 Trillion Solution

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

FCNL Washington Newsletter - Apr. 15 (Opinion) - The federal budget deficit is center stage in Washington. The administration and most members of Congress agree that the federal debt level cannot be allowed to rise indefinitely. Yet the agreement often ends there. The federal government could save $1 trillion with cuts to the Pentagon budget during the next 10 years, according to a report prepared by a range of groups

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Inside the Intervention

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Steven Metz - Apr. 02 (Opinion) - Put simply, Obama’s Libya strategy is designed to avoid the most undesirable outcomes rather than optimize the chances of a desired outcome, to do something without “owning” the conflict, to maintain maximum flexibility as the situation evolves, and to do all of this in the face of powerful constraints. The question is whether this strategy can actually work.

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Obama’s Missionless War

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

National Review - By Mark Steyn - Apr. 02 (Opinion) - The “Arab Spring” turns out to be a bit more complicated than it looks on CNN, and a CIA that failed to see the bankruptcy of its own pension plan looming is unlikely to be a very useful guide to the various forces in play. For the Western powers to be bogged down in the least consequential Arab dictatorship’s low-grade civil war desultorily providing air support to incompetent al-Qaeda sympathizers may be an artful if expensive piece of misdirection.

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We Spend More Than 1 Trillion on Defense -- It's Time to Take Aim at Our Military Budget

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Robert Dreyfuss - Mar. 31 (Opinion) - For the first time since the end of the cold war, there’s a real possibility that the post-9/11 fever that sent US military spending shooting upward will break and that the Pentagon’s budget will fall sharply. But it won’t be easy.

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Obama Libya Speech Fudges the Details

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Daily Beast - By Howard Kurtz - Mar. 29 (Opinion) - The president’s Libya speech may have been a strong oration, but it fudged a few key elements, from why we responded to Gaddafi to whether we’re at war.

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In Libya, Inaction Was Not an Option

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Real Clear Politics - By Richard Cohen - Mar. 29 (Opinion) - The Libyan intervention established a precedent: There is such a thing as the international community and, as inchoate as it may be, it will insist on certain minimum standards even for dictators: Your people are not yours to kill.

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An Open Letter to the Left on Libya

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Informed Comment - By Juan Cole - Mar. 27 (Opinion) - I would like to urge the Left to learn to chew gum and walk at the same time. It is possible to reason our way through, on a case-by-case basis, to an ethical progressive position that supports the ordinary folk in their travails in places like Libya.

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Obama Gets Pushed Out of His Comfort Zone -- and Pushes Back

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Daphne Eviatar - Mar. 15 (Opinion) - The news on Sunday that State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley was forced to resign for his frank comments about the treatment of Bradley Manning is sparking lots of justifiable criticism. The question is, why would the administration do something so "ridiculous, counterproductive, and stupid"?

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