Pentagon Suspends DADT After Court Injunction and Why DOJ Must Appeal

From the Dept. of Defense website:

Pending an appeal, the military services have halted discharges under the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law, DOD officials said today.

Judge Virginia Phillips of the U.S. Central District of California ordered the halt to discharges and investigations. Phillips found the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell statute unconstitutional in a Sept. 9 ruling. On Oct. 12, she issued an injunction ordering the Defense Department worldwide to halt discharges and investigations.

“Earlier today, the staff judge advocate generals from the military services, in consultation with the Office of the Secretary of Defense Office of General Counsel, sent to their service staff judge advocate counterparts in the field an e-mail informing them of the ruling by Judge Virginia Phillips of the Central District of California, issuing an injunction barring the enforcement or application of 10 United States Code 654, commonly known as the ‘Don't Ask, Don't Tell’ statute,” Pentagon spokesman Marine Col. Dave Lapan said in a written statement.

“The e-mail noted that the U.S. government is contemplating whether to appeal and to seek a stay of the injunction,” Lapan said.

“The Department of Defense will of course obey the law, and the e-mail noted that, in the meantime, the department will abide by the terms in the court’s ruling, effective as of the time and date of the ruling,” he said.

It's only a matter of time before Don't Ask, Don't Tell is repealed.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but so far, every headline I read regarding the pending appeal is the contradictory approach the Obama administration has in wanting the law repealed while defending the law.



I love me some Rachel Maddow, but her snark here is a little much. And she does have a dog in this fight. Thankfully, her guest, former Solicitor General Walter Dellinger, makes this convoluted situation very clear.

...the President said that this will end on his watch, and he's actually moved the ball pretty far down -- down the road to making that happen because the President has gotten the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to agree that the policy should end. He, himself, has stated unequivocally that it undermines our national security, and that's going to be a powerful argument in court. I think the government really has no choice but to appeal the case because we don't want a system where a single federal judge can invalidate an act of congress and the president simply say, well, that's it, we're not going to seek to appeal that. 

And here is the crux of the argument.

Imagine, Rachel, three years down the road if someone is challenging the health care, individual mandate or the minimum coverage requirements and there's a Republican president in the White House and they find one federal district judge who holds that it's unconstitutional. I don't think the Supreme Court would agree with that, not close. But suppose one district court held it unconstitutional.

You don't want a situation where they say, we're just not going to appeal... 

 ...But they are going to appeal. And they are going to tell the court that in our view it's unconstitutional because it's harmful to the military.

Watch the whole, enlightening interview here.



Can we now stop all the outrage about the evil Obama administration secretly not wanting DADT to go away? Can we let this play out for the final two or three months? It's been in place for 16 years, and I know it's easy for me to say, "hold your horses and let this play out" because it doesn't affect me, but for god's sake, if this is done correctly, there is no way it's going to come back. And ultimately, isn't that what we want?

Rumsfeld's Bible Thumping

What the fuck?!

Frank Rich: This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld’s corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of “Dead Certain,” the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing (and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists.

Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)

What’s up with that? As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary’s actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world’s apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout “would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”

Read the entire article.

Disillusionment

by Armadillo Joe

Atrios is a master of the infectious catch-phrase which, in just a few choice words, can circumscribe a whole larger issue and create a useful shorthand for people who are tuned-in to the discussion over the long haul, basically an internal slang or jargon. My latest favorite is, as many of you know, SUPERTRAINS!, but he has others that also become more humorous by repetition. "Document the Atrocities" as a heading for his weekly run-down of the lineups of each Sunday morning's bobblehead shoutfests is funny by (slight) overstatement and "Deep Thought" -- while obviously lifted from the old 90's era SNL skit -- is still funny in that what he posts under it is almost never very deep at first glance, but is always revealing of a darker reality in that snarky way that makes one reconsider their own underlying assumptions and also sneer at the foolish who made the mistake of adopting such assumptions in the first place. Which is what good political (and polemical) humor should do.

The most recent phrase of his that is catching on with all the wannabe Kewl Kidz -- or with me, at least, and soon with others I have no doubt -- is "Hopey, Changey", a riff on Colbert's "Truthiness" and a direct attack on the image of Obama that we all voted for versus the grim reality becoming clearer with every centrist, capitulating, accomodationist move he makes. Whether the banks, the Pentagon or the recent Justice Department decision, just to name a few, he has not yet taken any of the really bold steps we progressives hoped he would when we came to support him, but he has certainly made some very clear moves to make us question who's side he's really on. Some of his defenders will chalk up his concessions to The Reich-Wing as yet another stealthy move in an orante clash of political gamesmanship, a chess-match, his Kung-Fu being unorthodox, but effective. They will argue that he is a victim of Bismark's old saw about politics being the art of the possible, and that he is doing the best he can under extremely difficult circumstances with mighty forces of epic greed and entrenched power ranged against him and that at the end of the day he is just one man and one man can only do so much.

I cannot abide such excuses, though. So far, this is not what I voted for.

However, I cannot align myself with the Washington chattering classes who seem so quick to condemn his presidency as already having failed because he hasn't cured cancer, solved the riddle of the sphinx and brought about world peace forever and ever within his first 100 Days, amen. Those clucking tongues on the Sunday morning talk shows are little more than historical blips, mere gossips hardly consequential to present day much less humankind or The Ages, and history will soon forget them as completely as it forgets the poison tongues of the scolds in the king's court at Versailles, who -- when they are remembered at all -- are recalled only as the height of daft frivolity.

No, despite their carping, I think Obama still has promise simply because, well, I have to. The crystal ball is cloudy, though, and I do think Obama guilty of willfully allowing a mis-perception of his commitment to our lefty vision of America to aid his rise to prominence. I have had a gnawing fear from the time he became the anti-war candidate of choice that he was playing us, "us" being the dyed-in-the-wool lefties and assorted DFH's who hated George W. Bush with the searing passion of a thousand suns because Dubya symbolized everything we hated about our country: the gleeful and willful ignorance, the faux-cowboy "common-man" swagger disguising a true East Coast blue-blood's contempt for "The People", the frat-boy bravado marketed as "charm", the mean-spirited jingoistic stupidity passed off as the One True God of Patriotism, the haughty assumption of American exceptionalism used to sell to the rubes the idea of a protected status for a Ruling Class accustomed to inherited wealth and privilege and the abuses of power that flourish in that rancid culture, the inbred and self-absorbed obtuseness of that privileged class, the brittle Christopathic sanctimony parading as moral superiority...

I could go on, but you get the idea.

Barack Hussein Obama was supposed to be the opposite of all that, the antidote to all that ugliness in the American soul, a one-man redemption tale for a vast and powerful nation both sacred and profane from her humble, violent origins to her highest, most sublime ambitions. He was walking, talking proof to the world -- non-white, urbane, educated and eloquent proof -- that we are not all those people (and you know what I mean) that we are not all those gun-toting, Bible-thumping, inbred, hairy-knuckled, toothless, Dixie flag-waving NASCAR goobers stupid enough to vote for an alcoholic chimpanzee who thinks he talks to god and his Evil Uncle Dick(head)...

...on purpose.

TWICE.

...and yet...

...and yet...

And yet, it is hard not to have that gnawing fear bubble up to the surface of having been suckered by a charming chameleon, the sense that all that Hope and Change stuff was really more Hopey and Changey because he looked so different and sounded so different (straight out of Liberal Central Casting), that maybe, just maybe (I can't believe I'm even typing this) over here on the left side of the dial, our popular image of Barack Obama is as much a projection of our own bleeding heart dreams, our own collective moon-bat aspirations for the country we live in, as unrooted in the reality of the man as were the drooling jebus-freaks' collective washing of the sins of George W. Bush.

If Barack Obama were white and named Barney Oswalt from Illinois and running for office twenty years ago, espousing the exact same positions he does now, he would have been a nameless, vaguely right-of-center Republican with a smattering of liberal positions to assuage his urban constituency and otherwise mired in the anonymous middle of the Reagan coalition.

His casting as a Left Wing Matinee Idol reveals both just how far to the right our nation has devolved since the dark days of Saint Ronnie's Reign of Terror and just how obsessed we have been and remain to this very day with pigmentation vis a vis ancestry. He's black with a funny name, therefore -- in our popularly defined bounds of public discourse -- any pronounced position by Mr. Obama to the left of Attila the Hun makes him a DFH, or sympathetic to the DFH's, which is worse because it means he's willing to turn Jesus' America over to the queers and the uppity wimmin-folk and the nigras and the mooz-luhms and all those scary hippies. Which is why anybody in the GOP with skin slightly darker than week-old milk has to take social and political positions that make Marie Antoinette look like a bleeding-heart.

This DFH can't truck with all of that, though. I like Barack Obama, sometimes I truly love him in a teary-eyed, almost worshipful way -- for instance this past week as he and Michelle represented my country, MY country on the global stage -- because he is the image I want to project to the world; he is a living, breathing symbol of that miscengenating, multi-culti, caramel-colored America I believe in, that American ideal I believe we should and could achieve, or I wouldn't be a liberal. Except that I also see that Obama is frail and human and as much as I hope we are witnessing Obama Kung-Fu with his bank bailout end-runs on behalf of the banksters, his expansion of the Pentagon budget (not the reduction that got sold to the press) and -- worst of all -- his reluctance (and, frankly, I predict his eventual failure) to not only not pursue the Bush Administration for its crimes, but his Justice Department's continuation of the crimes themselves makes me realize that we have in him not only an eloquent, handsome and charming symbol of the promise of America, but of her essential corruption, too.

I'll get over it, I'm sure. Today, however, I am sad.

Bush's Legacy - Iraq Reconstruction

This is un. Be. Lieveable. A new 513 page report on the history of the reconstruction of Iraq , or lack of, is about to be released with the New York Times obtaining an advance unpublished copy. The report basically states that the Pentagon's reconstruction efforts have been a complete failure. A complete $100 BILLION failure.

The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.

In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’ ”

[...]

...In an illustration of the hasty and haphazard planning, a civilian official at the United States Agency for International Development was at one point given four hours to determine how many miles of Iraqi roads would need to be reopened and repaired. The official searched through the agency’s reference library, and his estimate went directly into a master plan.

[...]

...The history records how Mr. Garner presented Mr. Rumsfeld with several rebuilding plans, including one that would include projects across Iraq.

“What do you think that’ll cost?” Mr. Rumsfeld asked of the more expansive plan.

“I think it’s going to cost billions of dollars,” Mr. Garner said.

“My friend,” Mr. Rumsfeld replied, “if you think we’re going to spend a billion dollars of our money over there, you are sadly mistaken.”

In a way he never anticipated, Mr. Rumsfeld turned out to be correct: before that year was out, the United States had appropriated more than $20 billion for the reconstruction, which would indeed involve projects across the entire country.

Mr. Rumsfeld declined to comment on the history, but a spokesman, Keith Urbahn, said that quotes attributed to Mr. Rumsfeld in the document “appear to be accurate.” Mr. Powell also declined to comment.

I really, really wish I could say this is a surprise, but when the Bush government loses $8 billion in cash that was flown to Iraq on pallets, nothing is surprising anymore.

Listen to Commanders... Unless They Disagree

The Pentagon on Friday ruled out including Adm. William Fallon as a witness before Congress when the top U.S. military and diplomatic officials in Baghdad testify next month on the way ahead in Iraq.

Adm. Fallon was in vocal opposition regarding any military action in the current run up to attacking Iran. Is it any surprise that a dissenting voice of high ranking stature in the military is being silenced?

In declaring that Fallon would not join Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker as witnesses before Congress next month, Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said the decision had nothing to do with Fallon’s views on Iran or the reasons for his unexpected resignation and retirement.

Sure it doesn't.

“I know there have been requests, in fact, from members of Congress to have Adm. Fallon testify with General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, and I can tell you that Admiral Fallon will not be testifying” with them, Morrell told a Pentagon press conference.

Cheney Links 9/11 to Iraq AGAIN! -Updated

Someone should reprogram Cheney with some updated information. They keep him alive yet fail to upload the Pentagon's own information that a review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents captured during the 2003 US invasion found no evidence that Saddam’s regime had any operational links with the al Qaida terrorist network.

Yet here is what Cheney had to say while making a stealth visit to Iraq:

“This long-term struggle became urgent on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.That day we clearly saw that dangers can gather far from our own shores and find us right there at home...

So the United States made a decision: to hunt down the evil of terrorism and kill it where it grows, to hold the supporters of terror to account and to confront regimes that harbor terrorists and threaten the peace... Understanding all the dangers of this new era, we have no intention of abandoning our friends or allowing this country of 170,000 square miles to become a staging area for further attacks against Americans.”

What a douchebag. I can't wait until he disappears.

(H/T C&L)

UPDATE (3/20/08 10:45am): I can physically feel my blood prssure rise when I see this motherfucker's smirking face. DICK Cheney had this to say while being inteview on Good Morning America:

Raddatz: Two-thirds of Americans say it's not worth fighting, and they’re looking at the value gain versus the cost in American lives, certainly, and Iraqi lives.

Cheney: So? [sinister smirk]

Raddatz: So — you don’t care what the American people think?

Cheney: No, I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls. Think about what would have happened if Abraham Lincoln had paid attention to polls, if they had had polls during the Civil War. He never would have succeeded if he hadn’t had a clear objective, a vision for where he wanted to go, and he was willing to withstand the slings and arrows of the political wars in order to get there. And this President has been very courageous, very consistent, very determined to continue down the course we were on and to achieve our objective.

The comparison to Abraham Lincoln is shockingly laughable. And I love this line in his comparison: "[Lincoln] never would have succeeded if he hadn’t had a clear objective, a vision for where he wanted to go..." while laying it completely on Bush's lap, as if he had nothing to do with it. And "fluctuations in public opinion polls"? Are you fucking kidding?! The only flucuation I see in the Bush approval rating is from 34% to a new low 31%. Wow, that's quite a leap.

Guess what, nitwit? Having a clear objective is exactly what everyone's beeen trying to tell you to have the whole fucking time. You have no clear objective. Of course, if your clear objective was for you to and your cronies to treasonously profit from war, sap the Federal Treasury dry, force bank collapses, cause home forclosures by the millions, quadruple the price of oil, make the U.S. less safe and cause the rest of the world to hate and distrust us, then "Mission Accomplished," asshole.

The smirk bothers me most of all, because it shows that he really doesn't give a shit about what anyone thinks, doesn't care about anything and considers us all gnats that he just flicks away with his speared tail. His smirk gives me the feeling that he knows he's getting away with murder - literally - and knows we're not gonna do a damned thing about it. Besides, he couldn't care less about anything other than lining his pockets. He'd sell his family to the Saudis if he could get a decent profit from it. He is truly an evil, sociopathic bastard. The world will be a much better place once Dick Cheney is not only out of office, but pushing daisies.

You can watch the video on C & L if you can stomach it.

Another Heartwarming "Support The Troops" Story

Jordan Fox received a $10,000 signing bonus when he joined the Army. The Mt. Lebanon man served his country in Iraq, where as a sniper he survived machine gun battles and a roadside bomb that knocked him unconscious and blinded him in his right eye.

The injury forced the military to send him home. A few weeks later, Fox received a bill from the Department of Defense, saying he owes the military nearly $3,000 from his original enlistment bonus because he couldn't fulfill three months of his commitment.

"I tried to do my best and serve my country and unfortunately I was hurt in the process and now they're telling me that they want their money back," Fox told CBS station KDKA-TV.

This is apparently not an isolated bureaucratic foul-up. The military is allegedly demanding that thousands of wounded service personnel give back signing bonuses because they are unable to serve out their commitments.

To get people to sign up, the military gives enlistment bonuses - up to $30,000 in some cases. Now men and women who have lost arms, legs, eyesight, hearing and can no longer serve are being ordered to pay some of that money back.

Brings a tear to your eye, doesn't it?

The real kicker is that Fox helps with a charity founded by his mother, Operation Pittsburgh Pride, sending care packages to troops in Iraq... and was personally thanked by President Bush.

And now they're thanking him by sending him a bill.

Is This How We Support The Troops?

You gotta hand it to the Pentagon and this evil, corrupt administration. They sure do know how to cover their bases.

Over 1,100 members of the Minnesota National Guard who have been deployed to Iraq for 22 months, longer than any other unit currently serving, are being denied education benefits because their orders were written for 729 days - one day short of qualifying for extra tuition to pay for school.

1st Lt. Jon Anderson said he never expected to come home to this... "It's pretty much a slap in the face," Anderson said. "I think it was a scheme to save money, personally. I think it was a leadership failure by the senior Washington leadership... once again failing the soldiers."

And yet another failure chalked up for the "fourth branch of government", who failed to report this news nationally. I bring this up once again: the "General Petraeus or General Betray Us?" ad gets non-stop coverage on major news outlets, but this sickening story of our government screwing yet again the very troops they claim to support is only reported on an NBC affiliate in Portland, Maine.

Read the entire article here.

Holy Home Depot, Batman!

The effects of no financial oversight.

The Guardian:

Plumbing and electrical firm C&D Distributors of South Carolina, took advantage of an automated system the Pentagon uses intended to cut out red tape by making speedy payments. The company repeatedly added hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cost of shipping parts.
The company claimed $998,798 for sending two [19 cent] washers, which could have been put in an envelope and posted through normal mail for a few dollars.

And we wonder why wars costs billions.