The B-21 Long Range Strike Bomber While the federal deficit expands, cities go bankrupt and folks are forced to drink lead ladened water - The Pentagon Parasites get a new ultra-expensive toy.
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Air Force reveals first image of B-21 Long Range Strike Bomber
By Thom Patterson
It's an image that is being picked apart by military aviation experts around the world. The first official drawing of the U.S. Air Force's B-21 bomber.
Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James unveiled the artist rendering Friday based on the initial design concept.
Black, sleek, with swept-back wings and stealthy design make this aircraft look a lot like another famous bomber — the B-2 Spirit.
James seemed to hint at that during her announcement. "The B-21 has been designed from the beginning based on a set of requirements that allows the use of existing and mature technology," she said at the Air Force Association Air Warfare Symposium in Orlando, Florida.
At first glance, the drawing seems basic. But make no mistake, aviation geeks and America's military competitors will be picking it apart for clues to learn more about this very expensive and powerful weapons system. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and just about anyone in the world involved in developing advanced stealth technology will look at this drawing for any indication of where U.S. design is headed.
'His hiring undermines our moral authority on both human rights and in the war on terror,' says former intelligence officer
Julio Jaime Garcia Covarrubias.
By Nadia Prupis
A former member of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's brutal regime taught at the Pentagon's top university for 13 years, despite repeated complaints from his colleagues about his past as a torturer and murderer of political dissidents in the South American nation.
Jaime Garcia Covarrubias is charged in Santiago with leading the executions of seven people in 1973 following a U.S.-backed coup, allegations which the U.S. State and Defense Departments were aware of when they renewed his visa and allowed him to keep teaching at the National Defense University's William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, according to a McClatchy investigation.
"His hiring undermines our moral authority on both human rights and in the war on terror," Chris Simmons, a former Defense Intelligence Agency and Army intelligence officer who specializes in Latin America, told McClatchy. "If he is in fact guilty of what he is accused of, he is a terrorist. Then who are we to tell othe.r countries how they should be fighting terrorism?"
At Firedoglake, investigative journalist Kevin Gosztola writes:
Attention to Covarrubias' employment at the National Defense University (NDU) comes just after State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki maintained during a press briefing the US has a "long-standing policy" to not support coups. She suggested the U.S. "does not support political transitions by nonconstitutional means." They must be "peaceful and legal."
Garcia Covarrubias has been in Chile since January 2014, after an investigative judge ordered him to return to his home country for the duration of the inquiry into his role in the 1973 killings and the extent of his involvement in the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) spy agency.
Chilean 70's torture survivor seeks justice
McClatchy continues:
The center’s officials who hired and renewed Garcia Covarrubias' contracts say he was a highly qualified professor and minimize the allegations against him.
"We made inquiries with people in the region, in Chile and so forth, and were never given anything negative about Jaime," said Margaret Daly Hayes, the center’s first director. "He was vetted by the U.S. government, by the (U.S.) Embassy. They obviously didn't have anything either or he wouldn't have been hired."
One of Garcia Covarrubias's alleged former victims described undergoing gruesome ordeals at his hands, including sexual torture and electric shocks to eyelids and other sensitive parts of the body. He was reportedly known to have a "penchant for horsewhips and perversity."
Garcia Covarrubias downplayed his involvement in the Pinochet regime to international press after the Chilean military disclosed a list of over 1,000 former members of the secret police, which included his name. However, as McClatchy explains:
The DINA link matters.
...The killings and other assassinations outside Chile were attributed to DINA. The Nixon administration’s support of a regime that relied on rampant torture helped galvanize the human rights movement in the United States.
Even as the allegations against Garcia Covarrubias came to light and other professors at the center raised concerns over his hiring, U.S. officials rallied behind him. Martin Edwin Andersen, the school's then-communications director, was reprimanded and eventually pushed out by senior staff after questioning his continued employment there.
"It's shameful that at a time the U.S. prestige as a democracy is under attack, that the National Defense University could be playing footsie with a former state terrorism agent," Andersen said.
America’s $400 billion, top-of-the-line aircraft can’t see the
battlefield all that well. Which means it’s actually worse than its
predecessors at fighting today’s wars.
Newest U.S. Stealth Fighter ‘10 Years Behind’ Older Jets
By Dave Majumdar
When the Pentagon’s nearly $400 billion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter finally enters service next year after nearly two decades in development, it won’t be able to support troops on the ground the way older planes can today. Its sensors won’t be able to see the battlefield as well; and what video the F-35 does capture, it won’t be able to transmit to infantrymen in real time.
Versions of the new single-engine stealth fighter are set to replace almost every type of fighter in the U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps inventory—including aircraft specifically designed to support ground troops like the A-10 Warthog. That will leave troops in a lurch when the F-35 eventually becomes the only game in town.
“The F-35 will, in my opinion, be 10 years behind legacy fighters when it achieves [initial operational capability],” said one Air Force official affiliated with the F-35 program. “When the F-35 achieves [initial operational capability], it will not have the weapons or sensor capability, with respect to the CAS [close air support] mission set, that legacy multi-role fighters had by the mid-2000s.”
The problem stems from the fact that the technology found on one of the stealth fighter’s primary air-to-ground sensors—its nose-mounted Electro-Optical Targeting System (EOTS)—is more than a decade old and hopelessly obsolete. The EOTS, which is similar in concept to a large high-resolution infrared and television camera, is used to visually identify and monitor ground targets. The system can also mark targets for laser-guided bombs.
[...]
Ironically, older jets currently in service with the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps can carry the latest generation of sensor pods, which are far more advanced than the EOTS sensor carried by the F-35.
By Peter Hart
Want to know what corporate media look like when they're reporting for duty?
On the most recent CBS's Face the Nation (9/28/14), host Bob Schieffer previewed the guests who would be appearing on the show:
We will get the latest on the mission and what it entails
from Deputy National Security Adviser Anthony Blinken, retired General
Carter Ham, former Pentagon official Michele Flournoy and former Deputy
Director of the CIA Mike Morell.
So that's a current government official, a retired general, and retired Pentagon and CIA officials. Now that's a diverse line-up.
On ABC's This Week (9/28/14), Martha Raddatz
was reporting from Bahrain to give viewers a close look at a US
aircraft carrier. The segment couldn't have appeared more like an
infomercial for the US Navy:
These sailors understand their jobs are critical. We
watched these men and women assemble bombs, putting together a 500-pound
precision-guided weapon capable of leveling a building, and above them,
the bombs were loaded onto aircraft bound for the war zone.
Raddatz also told viewers that "the deck of an aircraft carrier is an incredibly dynamic place," and that
throughout this deployment there has not been a single
serious mishap, and well over 250 missiles and bombs have been dropped
on Iraq and Syria.
This Week also tapped former military officials for analysis; here's Raddatz introducing her guest:
And now our ABC contributor, former
Marine Corps fighter pilot and State Department official Colonel Steve
Ganyard, is here to help break down these new developments.
And, for the sake of diversity, the former military official was balanced later on by throwing softballs to a current military official:
RADDATZ: And we are now back on land,
and joining us now is Vice Admiral John Miller, who is the commander of
US naval forces for Central Command and the commander of Fifth Fleet
here in Bahrain. Admiral Miller, let's start with what you really have
accomplished with those air strikes.
When government officials launch an ill-defined war based on dubious claims
about a threat to the "homeland," you might hope that would be the time
for reporters to aggressively examine and question government claims.
But corporate media see things differently; war time is when TV screens
are full of former generals and hawkish politicians, and reporters are
busy transmitting official claims. As CBS Evening News reporter Bob Orr (9/24/14) told viewers last week:
Pentagon officials said, in fact, the bombs and missiles hit every intended target.
When have they ever said any different?
Reprinted with permission from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.
A US Department of Defense (DoD) research program is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar program is designed to develop immediate and long-term "warfighter-relevant insights" for senior officials and decision makers in "the defense policy community," and to inform policy implemented by "combatant commands."
Launched in 2008 – the year of the global banking crisis – the DoD 'Minerva Research Initiative' partners with universities "to improve DoD's basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US."
Among the projects awarded for the period 2014-2017 is a Cornell University-led study managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research which aims to develop an empirical model "of the dynamics of social movement mobilization and contagions." The project will determine "the critical mass (tipping point)" of social contagions by studying their "digital traces" in the cases of "the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey."
Notice that the word "contagion" is used in association with democratic movements overseas. The Department of Defense (DOD) is concerned, it appears, that democracy might go viral and contaminate governments in a way that will force military intervention in order to preserve empire.
The foreboding implications of the DOD's Minerva project extends beyond grassroots revolts and into suspicion of nonviolent protest - almost exclusively protest by those on the left, those who challenge the corporate and financial ruling elite - as a potential breeding ground for terrorism, according to The Guardian.
Months after the events took place, Pulitzer prize winning
journalists and others are finally reporting about the lies and
manipulations of the US government regarding the recent chemical weapons
attack in Syria. Far from shining a light on the true situation in the
country, however, these reports continue to avoid the underlying causes
and explanations for what is happening in Syria, and the forces that are
behind it.
Media Disinformation and the Framing of the Syrian War (GRTV Backgrounder on Global Research TV)
