Six years, umpteen godzillion dollars and a Patriot Act later and this is all we got?
While the Defense Department conducts exhaustive planning for operations overseas, its planning for possible action inside the United States in response to attacks is inadequate, said the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves.
“We looked at their plans. They’re totally unacceptable,” said commission chairman Arnold Punaro, a retired Marine Corps major general.
“You couldn’t move a Girl Scout unit with the kind of planning they’re doing,” Punaro said
There’s a very good reason for this however: first, we’ve kind of ground the forces we have into tired shell-shocked overdeployed troop nubbins, and second, the brass left prefers petty inter-force fingerpointing and question-dodging to planning for domestic security.
Officials at Northern Command would not discuss the commission’s report, saying the Pentagon would first review the panel’s nearly 100 recommendations…
But the military has not dedicated sufficient time or resources to prepare for such a role, despite the creation of Northern Command after the September 11, 2001, attacks, according to the commission, created by Congress to study the best use of reserve forces.
That is partly because of historical tension between the federal government and states, the commission said. Defense officials also say the military sees its role in domestic emergencies in large part as supporting civilian agencies…
But since the 1990s, the Guard and Reserve have been used more regularly in combat. The availability of those forces, for example, has allowed Washington to conduct the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without a draft, the commission said.
Repeated deployments to those wars strained reserve troops, their equipment and their families
Well, then at least we can assume Iraq & Afghanistan are going swimmingly, right, since the Pentagon is neglecting this hemisphere to work over there, right? Right?
The biggest mistake we Americans made was to take anything the Cheney/Bush administration said literally.
The entire purpose of Cheney/Bush is and has always been to line the pockets of important figures who’ve contributed to the Rethuglican Party.
Terrorism? Al Qaeda? Weapons of Mass Destruction? Allegations of nuclear weapons development? They’re all excuses for doing what had been planned years earlier by people like the “Project for a New American Century”.
I had never really trusted the Bushites – they never seemed genuine about anything. But there’s always been a “benefit of the doubt” factor that prevents (prevented) most of us from assuming the worst, even from people who have never shown good faith on anything.
The tipping point for me, which left me firmly convinced we have been watching only one of the magician’s hands while the other picked our pockets, was finding out they pursued illegal wiretaps immediately after taking office.
Way before “9/11″, way before the storm of bullshit that lead to invading Iraq, way before we were “bringing freedom and democracy” to the Middle East, way before they began to do all of the stupid and evil things they have done “on our behalf”.
It’s all been a sham from the very beginning…