Backbone Blogs for Chuck Spinney
Eisenhower's Nightmare Arrives 03/06/2010
As I indicated in CounterPunch on 3 February 2010, the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) just released by the Obama Pentagon is a bad joke. That bad joke is about to be given the good housekeeping seal of approval by a special panel...

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Hillary Wows the Arabs 02/25/2010
Egged on by a nuclear-armed Israel and its wholly owned subsidiaries throughout the US government, a blizzard of recent news reports make it clear that President Obama's foreign policy team is becoming obsessed with Iran, particularly, but not exclusively, its nascent atomic energy program.

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How Settled is Global Warming Science? 02/14/2010
Answer ... it depends ...

Attached is a very revealing BBC interview with Phil Jones, the head of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. It should be read carefully with an eye to what is said and not said.

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Mark to Market Pentagon Style 02/07/2010
... The latest scam in the Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex (MICC) is the so-called "Buy to Budget" formula for the hugely expensive and deeply troubled F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. This formula was just gleefully endorsed in the attached email recently sent to the F-35's Stakeholders...

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JSF as a Metaphor for Defense Meltdown 02/02/2010
The recent publication of the 2010 QDR reveals once again, in typically leaden and mind-numbing prose, how the Pentagon is incapable of coming to grips with the mismatches among strategy, programs, and resources

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The Eikenberry Cables Turn Sun Tzu on His Head 01/30/2010
In the opening line of Book 1 of Sun Tzu's classic, The Art of War (circa 400 BC), the first treatise ever written on the subject, the Chinese master said,"War is a matter of vital importance to the State; the province of life and death; the road to survival or ruin. ...

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Want to know how the MICC Operates? ... Read This!!!!!! 12/23/2009
The attached article written by my two good friends Winslow Wheeler and Pierre Sprey is one of the very best case studies describing how the incredible corruption of critical thinking that prevails in the day to day life of the Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex (MICC) produces techno trash.

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Why the Time for Afghan Analysis is Over 12/11/2009
Check out this so-called after action report on the situation in Afghanistan. The author is Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general, and he prepared this report, dated 5 December 2009, for Colonel Michael Meese, a professor at West Point. McCaffrey's report contains some useful information, but for the most part, it is merely rhetorical or descriptive of inputs, as opposed to being an analysis linking inputs to real world outputs. Put bluntly, it does not appear to be connected to reality...

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The Folly of the McCrystal-Obama Policy 12/09/2009
Worse than pretending a simplicity of enemies, the hubris of the McCrystal-Obama policy America has now set out to embroil Pakistan and Afghanistan in a deeper conflict

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Bring back the guillotines 04/14/2009
Bill Moyers conducted a fantastic interview with Professor Bill Black, a specialist in securities fraud, on April 3. I found the interview fascinating, because the scam in the banking industry is so similar to the scam in the Pentagon, only the scale of the fraud perpetrated by the bankers made the milcrats in the Pentagon look like pikers. Barron's did their own interview with Black - check it out...

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Geithner Plan: Maybe it is Time for a Second Opinion 04/07/2009
Dean Baker, a respective liberal economist and Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, recently penned the attached critique of the Geithner Plan. His central point is a good one, I think: Namely that before President Obama and Congress take the plunge the cliff bailing out the banks who created the economic mess, perhaps he or the Congress or both ought to get a second diagnostic opinion, or better yet, a number second opinions.

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