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nuke_guy
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 Posted: Mon Nov 02, 2009 4:16 pm Post subject: |
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| Truthout? OMG has Dick Cheney been indicted yet? |
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JohnRandolphHardisonCain
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| Posted: Mon Nov 02, 2009 4:27 pm Post subject: Daniel Ellsberg: Obama Fears Military Revolt |
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Ellsberg: Obama Fears Military Revolt | Quote: | Ellsberg: Obama Fears Military Revolt
Monday 02 November 2009
by: Sari Gelzer, t r u t h o u t | Report
Ellsberg: Leaked Pentagon Papers from Vietnam give clues to why Obama will most likely grant military requests to send more troops to Afghanistan.
Paul Jay, senior producer of The Real News Network, interviewed former military analyst and Pentagon whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg about the common thread between the conflict in Afghanistan and the war in Vietnam.
Like Vietnam, Ellsberg said "no victory lies ahead [for the US] in Afghanistan" and President Barack Obama knows it.
Still, Ellsberg believes Obama will "go against his own instincts as to what's best for the country and do what's best for him and his administration and his party in the short run facing elections, which is to avoid a military revolt."
Click on link above for original truthout article which contains a video embedded here.
That means the president will likely authorize a sizable increase of US forces in the region, Ellsberg said, because Obama fears that top US military commanders will stage a revolt if he rejects their requests for additional soldiers.
Ellsberg predicted that Obama will cave in to Gen. Stanley McCrystal's request for as many as 40,000 US troops in order to, "prevent his military from making a political case to his public and to the Congress that he has been weak, unmanly, indecisive, and weak on terrorism, and has endangered American troops."
The Pentagon Papers, which Ellberg leaked to The New York Times in 1971, made public the decision-making details behind the Vietnam War. Ellsberg chose to leak the highly-sensitive papers because they revealed that the government was continuing the Vietnam War despite knowing it would not likely be won.
As revealed in the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg said that President Lyndon B. Johnson chose to go along with increasing US troops in Vietnam: "To keep the military from resigning and going public with complaints that he had abandoned a winnable war."
President Obama's decision to shield himself from a military revolt, as Johnson chose to do in 1965, will take place at the expense of US troops and Afghani civilians, said Ellsberg.
"Many Americans, many Afghans will die in order to protect the president from that kind of blame," Ellsberg said.
Ellsberg, who used to write about what is now known as counterinsurgency theory, critiqued General McChrystal's approach to Afghanistan. Sending more troops to Afghanistan, said Ellsberg, will only increase the Taliban's strength. Ellsberg said:
"The more troops we put in Vietnam, the more Vietcong were recruited. And, the more troops we put in Afghanistan, the curve shows very clearly from 2005 on, the Taliban has come back having been, as you say, despised and reviled by most of the country. How can it be that they get the degree of support that they do now? One reason only: the number of troops, of US troops that they are fighting." |
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Sargbaby
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| Posted: Mon Nov 02, 2009 7:28 pm Post subject: Re: Daniel Ellsberg: Obama Fears Military Revolt |
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| JohnRandolphHardisonCain wrote: | Ellsberg: Obama Fears Military Revolt | Quote: | Ellsberg: Obama Fears Military Revolt
Monday 02 November 2009
by: Sari Gelzer, t r u t h o u t | Report
Ellsberg: Leaked Pentagon Papers from Vietnam give clues to why Obama will most likely grant military requests to send more troops to Afghanistan.
Paul Jay, senior producer of The Real News Network, interviewed former military analyst and Pentagon whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg about the common thread between the conflict in Afghanistan and the war in Vietnam.
Like Vietnam, Ellsberg said "no victory lies ahead [for the US] in Afghanistan" and President Barack Obama knows it.
Still, Ellsberg believes Obama will "go against his own instincts as to what's best for the country and do what's best for him and his administration and his party in the short run facing elections, which is to avoid a military revolt."
Click on link above for original truthout article which contains a video embedded here.
That means the president will likely authorize a sizable increase of US forces in the region, Ellsberg said, because Obama fears that top US military commanders will stage a revolt if he rejects their requests for additional soldiers.
Ellsberg predicted that Obama will cave in to Gen. Stanley McCrystal's request for as many as 40,000 US troops in order to, "prevent his military from making a political case to his public and to the Congress that he has been weak, unmanly, indecisive, and weak on terrorism, and has endangered American troops."
The Pentagon Papers, which Ellberg leaked to The New York Times in 1971, made public the decision-making details behind the Vietnam War. Ellsberg chose to leak the highly-sensitive papers because they revealed that the government was continuing the Vietnam War despite knowing it would not likely be won.
As revealed in the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg said that President Lyndon B. Johnson chose to go along with increasing US troops in Vietnam: "To keep the military from resigning and going public with complaints that he had abandoned a winnable war."
President Obama's decision to shield himself from a military revolt, as Johnson chose to do in 1965, will take place at the expense of US troops and Afghani civilians, said Ellsberg.
"Many Americans, many Afghans will die in order to protect the president from that kind of blame," Ellsberg said.
Ellsberg, who used to write about what is now known as counterinsurgency theory, critiqued General McChrystal's approach to Afghanistan. Sending more troops to Afghanistan, said Ellsberg, will only increase the Taliban's strength. Ellsberg said:
"The more troops we put in Vietnam, the more Vietcong were recruited. And, the more troops we put in Afghanistan, the curve shows very clearly from 2005 on, the Taliban has come back having been, as you say, despised and reviled by most of the country. How can it be that they get the degree of support that they do now? One reason only: the number of troops, of US troops that they are fighting." |
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And your thoughts are?
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Little Lamb
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| Posted: Mon Nov 02, 2009 7:33 pm Post subject: |
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Ellsberg sounds like he's about as senile as McCain.  |
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Sargbaby
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| Posted: Mon Nov 02, 2009 7:37 pm Post subject: |
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| Little Lamb wrote: | | Ellsberg sounds like he's about as senile as McCain. |
McCain is justified!
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Moon Puppy
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| Posted: Mon Nov 02, 2009 8:08 pm Post subject: |
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| nuke_guy wrote: | | Truthout? OMG has Dick Cheney been indicted yet? |
How did you post this before the Rev posted his??
But you're right, Truthout....out the freakin' door.
Indict Dick Cheney!!
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Sargbaby
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| Posted: Mon Nov 02, 2009 9:56 pm Post subject: |
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| Moon Puppy wrote: | | nuke_guy wrote: | | Truthout? OMG has Dick Cheney been indicted yet? |
How did you post this before the Rev posted his??
But you're right, Truthout....out the freakin' door.
Indict Dick Cheney!! |
Didn't you know, MP? He's too rich and powerful!
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nuke_guy
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Location: New Brunswick, Canada
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| Posted: Tue Nov 03, 2009 4:49 am Post subject: |
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| Moon Puppy wrote: | | nuke_guy wrote: | | Truthout? OMG has Dick Cheney been indicted yet? |
How did you post this before the Rev posted his??
But you're right, Truthout....out the freakin' door.
Indict Dick Cheney!! |
LOL! It looks like I posted in syn-syn's thread 11 minutes before he started the post!
Send me your money, send me your money, send me your money.
It's magic! |
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JohnRandolphHardisonCain
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| Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2009 7:17 pm Post subject: |
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Seymour Hersh: Military Is Waging War Against The White House | Quote: | The Huffington Post
First Posted: 10-23-09 03:54 PM | Updated: 10-23-09 05:43 PM
In addition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States military is also fighting a war against the Obama administration at the White House, Seymour Hersh said in a little-noted speech at Duke University on October 13. The military is "in a war against the White House -- and they feel they have Obama boxed in," he said.
Hersh, a Pulitzer-prize winning investigative journalist who exposed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq, sees an undercurrent of racism in the Pentagon's dealings with the White House. "They think he's weak and the wrong color. Yes, there's racism in the Pentagon. We may not like to think that, but it's true and we all know it."
As Neil Offen writes in the Durham Herald Sun:
"A lot of people in the Pentagon would like to see him get into trouble," he said. By leaking information that the commanding officer in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, says the war would be lost without an additional 40,000 American troops, top brass have put Obama in a no-win situation, Hersh contended.
"If he gives them the extra troops they're asking for, he loses politically," Hersh said. "And if he doesn't give them the troops, he also loses politically."
Hersh considers the worsening situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan as the principal test of the Obama presidency, which will require the cooperation of the top military brass. Obama must face up to the military, Hersh said. "He's either going to let the Pentagon run him or he has to run the Pentagon." If he doesn't, according to Hersh, "this stuff is going to be the ruin of his presidency." |
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Moon Puppy
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| Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2009 7:34 pm Post subject: |
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I suppose they need to play the race card to get more attention to their article. I mean if they reported that the Military thinks Obama is weak then it would very well influence the reader to take the military's point of view with some credibility. Throw the racism in there and the military's credibility is shot. Nevermind there's no direct evidence of racism.
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marvincates
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| Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2009 9:38 pm Post subject: |
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I would rest better if Cheney were president. At least you knew where you stood with him. He loves his country.
Why would someone want to indict a man who just wants what's best for our country? Geez, are you people asleep? |
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Sargbaby
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| Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2009 9:44 pm Post subject: |
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| marvincates wrote: | I would rest better if Cheney were president. At least you knew where you stood with him. He loves his country.
Why would someone want to indict a man who just wants what's best for our country? Geez, are you people asleep? |
You've just gotta watch him while he's holding a shotgun! 
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Brad Owens
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Location: Freetown Sierra Leone
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| Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2009 2:15 am Post subject: |
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| Sargbaby wrote: | | marvincates wrote: | I would rest better if Cheney were president. At least you knew where you stood with him. He loves his country.
Why would someone want to indict a man who just wants what's best for our country? Geez, are you people asleep? |
You've just gotta watch him while he's holding a shotgun! |
That made me laugh. The fact is, I bet a lot of his enemies were thinking, 'If THAT is what he does to his freinds, what would he do to us?'
Cheney is a complicated man and very misunderstood I think.
Now on to the military 'revolting'. It will never happen. In all the articles I saw and read (skimmed) it is all about POLITICS not winning the war.
It shows that the Democratic and far leftwingnut supporters of Obama in the 'no war ever for any reason' crowd see the military choices the President must make as political calculation instead of what is a winning strategy for our national defense.
I for one am sick of hearing about what will or will not happen from people who do not see the difference between politics, and the use of troops for electioneering, and the life or death choices that must be made in war concerning our natioanl defense.
To the folks quoted in these articles, Obama is all about 'politics' and not about what is best for our nation. It is only Obama's political clout or survival the way they see it. They even compare him to another Democratic President, LBJ, for shock value without seeing that most people younger than 40 have no idea what it means, nor do they care about these has-been traitors who want to relive the glory days of using our military situation in Vietnam to bring down Nixon and be rellevant.
I have always thought that it was ironic the college students who got out of Vietnam tried to act like they cared about the blue collar guys who were drafted.  I digress.
The Democtaric Party want this to be Vietnam as bad as the GOP wants it to be WWII, and it is neither.
I guess you can't take the politics out of politics but this is a bit much to try to say the Army would revolt. Idiots.
Brad
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Last edited by Brad Owens on Sat Nov 07, 2009 2:26 am; edited 1 time in total |
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marvincates
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| Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2009 2:22 am Post subject: |
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| What would happen if our army tried a coup like happens in other places. Is it even possible? |
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Brad Owens
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| Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2009 3:13 am Post subject: |
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| marvincates wrote: | | What would happen if our army tried a coup like happens in other places. Is it even possible? |
It would not be possible. America is too big and the military has not got the ability to affect a coup in America. We would see a split inside the military and a civil war.
The people of America could only be tricked into allowing one. By that I mean that a majority of Americans would have to think that it was needed to put the military in charge to restore order in say a massive nation emergency.
Imagine a massive outbreak of a deadly virus or flu that spreads quickly and kills several million people in a short period, say like two months. It would cause massive civil unrest and you would see a situation like we had a few days into the Katrina disaster in New Orleans.
The military HAD to be called in to restore order and help people.
I was there and it was like a Mad Max movie for a while. People riding around in trucks armed to the teeth and firefights among gangs and police and then the military. It was only when the 82nd AB Div showed up did order REALLY return to NOLA. It was scary let me tell you.
I saw what would happen in a situation when WalMart was closed, no food, no fuel, no clean water, no power, no law, no order, no government was available in our 'developed' society.
If we were thrown into THAT level of disruption due to some sort of national disaster (the only thing I can see that would do it due to America's size and population would be a virus or flu that was unstoppable and caused massive death and disruption of lives so as to bring a halt to normal life) it would take us into a primal state of survival and hence the only structure trained/equipped to deal with that is the military. The only organization capable of reacting and keeping people safe would be the military coordinating law enforcement and National Guard activities.
Another scenario would be if the civilian leadership were wiped out by a terrorist or military attack. The military would be the only structure in place that could be depended on for communication and protection.
I bet it would be very hard for the military to give up total control of the affairs of our country if they were handed the reins of power. Caesar shows the danger of surrendering your freedom in order to have security but it could happen.
As far as a coup (like I see here all the time in Africa) would never happen in America due to the way we are structured and also because the population would never stand for it. Unless they were tricked like I said.
That is the way I see it,
Brad
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