get the truth out

The Real US National Security Budget:
The Figure No One Wants You to See

Tuesday 01 March 2011 by: Christopher Hellman

What if you went to a restaurant and found it rather pricey? Still, you ordered your meal and, when done, picked up the check only to discover that it was almost twice the menu price.

Welcome to the world of the real U.S. national security budget. Normally, in media accounts, you hear about the Pentagon budget and the war-fighting supplementary funds passed by Congress for our conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. That already gets you into a startling price range -- close to $700 billion for 2012 -- but that’s barely more than half of it. If Americans were ever presented with the real bill for the total U.S. national security budget, it would actually add up to more than $1.2 trillion a year.

Take that in for a moment. It’s true; you won’t find that figure in your daily newspaper or on your nightly newscast, but it’s no misprint. It may even be an underestimate. In any case, it’s the real thing when it comes to your tax dollars. The simplest way to grasp just how Americans could pay such a staggering amount annually for “security” is to go through what we know about the U.S. national security budget, step by step, and add it all up.

So, here we go. Buckle your seat belt: it’s going to be a bumpy ride. (add it all up)

Bradley Manning

Bradley E. Manning (born December 17, 1987) is a United States Army soldier who was charged in July 2010 with the unauthorized disclosure of classified information. He is being held in "maximum custody" at the Marine Corps Brig, Quantico, Virginia, and is expected to face a pre-trial hearing in May 2011 to determine whether he should be court-martialed.

Manning was assigned to a support battalion with the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, based at Contingency Operating Station Hammer, Iraq, which gave him access to SIPRNet—the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network—used by the U.S. Department of Defense and Department of State to transmit classified information. He was arrested in May 2010 after Adrian Lamo, a former computer hacker, reported to authorities that Manning had told him during an online chat that he had downloaded material from SIPRNet and passed it to WikiLeaks. The material included the so-called "Collateral Murder" video—the video of a July 2007 helicopter airstrike in Baghdad—which WikiLeaks published in April 2010; a video of the Granai airstrike in Afghanistan; and a large number of diplomatic cables.

On July 5, 2010 Manning was charged under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for transferring classified data onto his personal computer and communicating national defense information to an unauthorized source between November 19, 2009 and May 27, 2010.

On May 21, 2010, Manning is alleged to have gone online to chat with Adrian Lamo, a former hacker. Lamo had been profiled the day before by Kevin Poulsen in Wired magazine, after being hospitalized and diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. According to The Washington Post, Manning subsequently e-mailed Lamo, introducing himself as "an army intelligence analyst, deployed to eastern baghdad, pending discharge for 'adjustment disorder.'"

In a series of chats over a period of a week, he told Lamo what he had done. He asked Lamo: "If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?" He told Lamo that he felt isolated and ignored at work, and was angered by some of the classified material he had read. He said he was a "wreck": "Ive been isolated so long ... i just wanted to figure out ways to survive ... smart enough to know whats going on, but helpless to do anything ... no-one took any notice of me," he wrote. He said he had been leaking files to a "white haired aussie," Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. He said: "i'm exhausted ... in desperation to get somewhere in life ... i joined the army ... and that's proven to be a disaster now ... and now i'm quite possibly on the verge of being the most notorious 'hacktivist' or whatever you want to call it ... its all a big mess i've created."

On May 25, according to the chat log, he told Lamo he had taken CD-RWs containing music to work, erased them and rewrote them with the downloaded documents. According to Wired, he wrote that he "listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga's 'Telephone' while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history ... pretty simple, and unglamorous ..." Of the security he wrote: "it was vulnerable as fuck ... no-one suspected a thing ... kind of sad ... weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis... a perfect storm ". He asked Lamo "I mean what if I were someone more malicious," writing that he could have sold the material to Russia or China. When asked why he had not done that, he wrote: "it belongs in the public domain ... information should be free."

The chat logs partially released by Lamo said Manning had leaked the Baghdad airstrike video, a video of the Granai airstrike, and 260,000 diplomatic cables, and hoped the release of the material would lead to "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms ... if not ... than [sic] we’re doomed ... as a species ... I will officially give up on the society we have if nothing happens." He told Lamo he felt encouraged by the response to the Baghdad airstrike video: "the reaction to the video gave me immense hope ... CNN’s iReport was overwhelmed ... Twitter exploded ..." He said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and several thousand diplomats were "going to have a heart attack" when they discovered that an "entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format to the public ... everywhere there's a US post ... there's a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed." He wrote: "I want people to see the truth regardless of who they are because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public."
(read more)

tapeworm

Major General Smedley Butler, U.S.M.C.

Smedley Darlington Butler (July 30, 1881 – June 21, 1940), nicknamed "The Fighting Quaker" and "Old Gimlet Eye", was a Major General in the U.S. Marine Corps, and at the time of his death the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. During his 34-year career as a Marine, he participated in military actions in the Philippines, China, in Central America and the Caribbean during the Banana Wars, and France in World War I. By the end of his career he had received 16 medals, five of which were for heroism. He is one of 19 people to twice receive the Medal of Honor, one of three to be awarded both the Marine Corps Brevet Medal and the Medal of Honor, and the only person to be awarded the Brevet Medal and two Medals of Honor, all for separate actions.

In addition to his military achievements, he served as the Director of Public Safety in Philadelphia for two years and was an outspoken critic of U.S. military adventurism. In his 1935 book War is a Racket, he described the workings of the military-industrial complex and, after retiring from service, became a popular speaker at meetings organized by veterans, pacifists and church groups in the 1930s.

In 1934 he was involved in a controversy known as the Business Plot when he told a congressional committee that a group of wealthy industrialists had approached him to lead a military coup to overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt. The individuals that were involved denied the existence of a plot, and the media ridiculed the allegations. The final report of the committee claimed that there was evidence that such a plot existed, but no charges were ever filed. The opinion of most historians is that while planning for a coup was not very advanced, wild schemes were discussed.

Butler continued his speaking engagements in an extended tour but in June 1940 checked himself into a naval hospital, dying a few weeks later from what was believed to be cancer. He was buried at Oaklands Cemetery in West Chester, Pennsylvania; his home has been maintained as a memorial and contains memorabilia collected during his various careers.

In War Is A Racket, Butler points to a variety of examples, mostly from World War I, where industrialists whose operations were subsidised by public funding were able to generate substantial profits essentially from mass human suffering.

The work is divided into five chapters:

War is a racket
Who makes the profits?
Who pays the bills?
How to smash this racket!
To hell with war!

It contains this key summary:

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

In another often cited quote from the book Butler says:

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."...Major General Smedley Butler (read more)

secret astronauts

cash is king

Cost of War

935

Harry Shearer

secrecy is repugnant

The De-Humanization Of Mankind

sexism...the oldest form of de-humanization.

racism...came next adding to de-humanization.

war...made the civilian populations combatants.

i'm a number...not a person, indexed, filed, controlled.

bill moyers.....culture of corruption...follow the money.

economic slavery...people are consumers, commodities.

germ warfare...antithesis of humanity...they will kill us all.

citizens united vs F.E.C....corporations get more influence.

indoctrinated...programmed, surveilled, brainwashed, used.

pharma guinea pigs...they don't need rats...they have us now.

engineered terrorism...culture of fear...they instill fear and hate.

they want to give a zygote...full human rights...a cell is not human.

human testing...Operation Whitecoat...Tuskegee...mental patients.

nwo

No End In Sight

terror - vision

Bill Moyers - The Secret Government

frame 313

(murder solved)

the first man killed on live television

An official investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), conducted from 1976 to 1979, concluded that Oswald shot President Kennedy as a result of a probable conspiracy. This conclusion of a likely conspiracy contrasts with the earlier conclusion by the Warren Commission that the President was assassinated by a lone gunman.

In the ensuing four decades since the assassination, theories have been proposed or published that detail organized conspiracies to kill the President. These theories implicate, among others, Cuban President Fidel Castro, the anti-Castro Cuban community, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Mafia, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), E. Howard Hunt, and the Eastern Bloc – or perhaps some combination of these.

Others claim that Oswald was not involved at all. Shortly after his arrest, Oswald insisted he was a "patsy". Oswald never admitted any participation in the assassination and was murdered two days after being taken into police custody.

Many researchers have found fault with the official Warren Commission version of events, identifying what they say are inconsistencies and errors in the panel's findings. Some of the authors include Mark Lane, Penn Jones, Jr., Jim Garrison, Jim Marrs, David S. Lifton, Gerald McKnight, Henry Hurt, Michael L. Kurtz, and David Kaiser.

Penn Jones, Jim Marrs and Ralph Schuster have suggested that the number of deaths of people connected with the investigation of the assassination is suspiciously large. Polls have indicated that large numbers of Americans believe there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. These same polls also show that there is no agreement on who else may have been involved. A 2003, Gallup poll reported that 75% of Americans do not believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. (read more) (zapruder film) (murder solved)

what is it good for?

"authorized"

The Iran–Contra affair was a political scandal in the United States that came to light in November 1986. During the Reagan administration, President Ronald Reagan and other senior U.S. officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to Iran, the subject of an arms embargo. At least some U.S. officials also hoped that the arms sales would secure the release of hostages and allow U.S. intelligence agencies to fund the Nicaraguan Contras. Under the Boland Amendment, further funding of the Contras by the Reagan administration had been prohibited by Congress (backed by a strong majority opinion of the American public).

It was planned that Israel would ship weapons to a relatively moderate, politically influential group of Iranians, and then the U.S. would resupply Israel and receive the Israeli payment. The Iranian recipients promised to do everything in their power to achieve the release of six U.S. hostages, who were being held by the Lebanese Shia Islamist group Hezbollah, who in turn were connected to the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution. The plan deteriorated into an arms-for-hostages scheme, in which members of the executive branch sold weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of the American hostages. Large modifications to the plan were devised by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council in late 1985, in which a portion of the proceeds from the weapon sales was diverted to fund anti-Sandinista and anti-communist rebels, or Contras, in Nicaragua.

The affair was composed of arms sales to Iran in violation of the official US policy of an arms embargo against Iran, and of using funds thus generated to arm and train the Contra militants based in Honduras as they waged a guerilla war to topple the government of Nicaragua. A Human Rights Watch report found that the Contras were guilty of targeting health care clinics and health care workers for assassination; kidnapping civilians; torturing and executing civilians, including children, who were captured in combat; raping women; indiscriminately attacking civilians and civilian homes; seizing civilian property; and burning civilian houses in captured towns.

Col. North's handwritten notebooks and memoranda sent to North show that North and other U.S. officials were repeatedly informed that Contras ties to trafficking of drugs from Latin America into the United States and that airplanes from the U.S. used to supply arms to the Contras were being flown back with Contras personnel aboard carrying cocaine into the United States. The matter was further examined in the 1997 report of the US Department of Justice Inspector General, where the main question under investigation was whether CIA was instrumental in creating the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles, and where evidence was presented of patronizing by CIA of drug trafficking to Los Angeles, California.

In the end, fourteen administration officials were indicted, including then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Eleven convictions resulted, some of which were vacated on appeal. The rest of those indicted or convicted were all pardoned in the final days of the George H. W. Bush presidency; Bush had been vice-president at the time of the affair. Some of those involved in the Iran-Contra affair who were convicted of felonies and subsequently pardoned, later became members of the administration of George W. Bush.
(read more)

Veterans Day 2010

If you love America,
this is the most important video you will ever watch.

9/11

Never in the history

of steel frame buildings has one ever "collapsed"...

withstanding fires for 24 hours

none has ever "collapsed"...

but on september 11th, 2001

three steel frame buildings "collapsed"...

what are the odds ?...

investigate 9/11

See The Light