Battle of the Bilge

Sorry for the Delay

The East coast blizzards have kept MOAA headquarters closed down for this past week. I apologize for the lack of posts and will get back to email evaluations soon. Here’s yesterday’s view from this blogger’s front porch:

Following Up

On the first of February, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told his cabinet that the upcoming 31st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution would “deliver a harsh blow to the “global arrogance”".

While speculation was that there may be some type of military action, the anniversary was marked by government sponsored demonstrations, a harsh crackdown on protesters, a warning for the West and an announcement of a nuclear breakthrough.

Additionally, the government of Iran continues on its quest to keep its citizens from reaching the outside world with an effort to shut down google and gmail products within the country. As Fox News reports:

A war is brewing between Iran and Google, culminating in the complete shutdown of the Internet behemoth’s Gmail service — and the country’s announcement of plans to create a first-of-its-kind national e-mail service, a local journalist says.

The Gmail shutdown — and a clampdown on Internet access overall — comes amid widespread demonstrations against the Iranian government surrounding Thursday’s 31st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution. Iran blocked access to the Internet in December ahead of protests on National Students Day, as well.

Obviously not a harsh blow, just more empty rhetoric from a repressive regime that can’t make the ongoing protests go away.

Discussion

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“Mad is the man who is forever gritting his teeth against that granite block, complete and changeless, of the past” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Anniversary Boasting

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told his cabinet yesterday that the upcoming 31st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution will “deliver a harsh blow to the “global arrogance”".

The Press TV article, which is a semi-official Iranian news outlet, stated:

“The Islamic Revolution opened a window to liberty for the human race, which was trapped in the dead ends of materialism,” Ahmadinejad said during a cabinet meeting on Sunday.

“If the Islamic Revolution had not occurred, liberalism and Marxism would have crushed all human dignity in their power-seeking and money-grubbing claws. Nothing would have remained of human and spiritual principles,” he added.

Vague Threats, Hatred

While these threats are usually precursors to new missile tests, enrichment milestones or just general rhetoric, the language carries with it a sort of apocalyptic ring to it. As Ahmadinejad is a firm believer of the return of the Muslim savior, the 12th Mahdi, incredibly stupid actions such as striking out at neighboring states or carrying out a nuclear test can not be out of the question.

With the nation in the midst of a popular uprising since last summer’s disputed presidential election, this is in all likelihood just an attempt to divert attention away from the problems at home. Using the veiled references to Israel and the United States in his ‘power-seeking and money-grubbing claws’, the rhetoric could not be more clear to the Iranian people. He is stating that outside forces, not ruinous internal policies, has led to the troubles they are now experiencing. There is nothing new in this claim, and February 11th should pass with heated demonstrations and celebrations in Tehran.

But, vague messages like this should give Israel and the world pause. If he is insane enough to launch a pre-emptive strike against Israel or other neighbors, especially with nuclear weapons that our intelligence says Iran does not have the capability of producing yet, the world will be in for some dark days ahead. What’s worse is the possibility that Israel may take the threat as a justification to launch an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and launch sites, sparking a regional war.

Discussion

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“It’s hard juggling family, work and military. It’s not just one weekend a month” – Eric Nelson

Families Matter

MOAA fights for the well being and benefits of servicemen and women of all ranks, service and status. While we are an association of officers, everything we do to help improve the lives of members of the military is all inclusive.

Although there’s nothing controversial about this picture, it encompasses the heart and soul of the military family. Bless them, and we will, with our members’ support and involvement, continue our vigilance and advocacy on their behalf.

MSNBC’s The Week in Pictures

From MSNBC:

Happy homecoming

Sgt. Andrew Cuce of Gastonia, N.C., embraces his daughter Alyssa, 3, after arriving at the National Guard Armory in Lincolnton, N.C., on Jan. 26. Two busloads of soldiers, made up mostly of members of the N.C. Army National Guard Battery A, 1st Battalion, 113th Field Artillery, returned home to their families after a nine-month deployment to Iraq.

Welcome home Sgt. Cuce, and all of our returning heroes.

Discussion

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“The Vulcan Neck Pinch is not half as powerful as the Vulcan Groin Kick, but it’s more politically correct” – Star Trek

Summary

Following the release of the Department of Defense’s report on the Ft. Hood tragedy, there has been ample criticism in the press regarding how DoD handled the situation and the resulting conclusions of the report. Below you will find an email alert that was sent out by Act! for America, an organization started by a Lebanese immigrant that fled her homeland during that nation’s long civil war and is dedicated to rooting out anti-Israeli and anti-American media bias. Both the introduction and the article that it references are opinion pieces and both make valid points about the report and the colossal disaster of management that led to the rampage.

The Email

Ft. Hood Jihadist Massacre Report – “Gutless and Shameful”
How bad is the cancer of political correctness in the Defense Department?

So bad that the 86 page report on the Ft. Hood jihadist massacre mentions “Islam” or any of its derivatives only once—in a footnote.

So bad that CNN commentator Jack Cafferty called it a “joke.”

Unfortunately, the only ones laughing are the Islamists.

They must be looking at our military and political leadership and thanking Allah for their good fortune. It’s easy to envision discussions among Islamists where they tell each other “surely Allah is with us; the infidel leaders are so blind and stupid they won’t even acknowledge who is fighting them!”

Ralph Peters’ column below is RIGHT ON POINT!

We believe American outrage at this suicidal level of political correctness is only going to grow. Let us resolve together to make 2010 the year that “main street America” shouted back at Washington that we’ve had enough!!

Hood Massacre Report Gutless and Shameful

By RALPH PETERS

January 16, 2010

There are two basic problems with the grotesque non-report on the Islamist- terror massacre at Fort Hood (released by the Defense Department yesterday):

* It’s not about what happened at Fort Hood.

* It avoids entirely the issue of why it happened.

Rarely in the course of human events has a report issued by any government agency been so cowardly and delusional. It’s so inept, it doesn’t even rise to cover-up level.

“Protecting the Force: Lessons From Fort Hood” never mentions Islamist terror. Its 86 mind-numbing pages treat “the alleged perpetrator,” Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, as just another workplace shooter (guess they’re still looking for the pickup truck with the gun rack).

The report is so politically correct that its authors don’t even realize the extent of their political correctness — they’re body-and-soul creatures of the PC culture that murdered 12 soldiers and one Army civilian.

Reading the report, you get the feeling that, jeepers, things actually went pretty darned well down at Fort Hood. Commanders, first responders and everybody but the latest “American Idol” contestants come in for high praise.

The teensy bit of specific criticism is reserved for the “military medical officer supervisors” in Maj. Hasan’s chain of command at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. As if the problem started and ended there.

Unquestionably, the officers who let Hasan slide, despite his well-known wackiness and hatred of America, bear plenty of blame. But this disgraceful pretense of a report never asks why they didn’t stop Hasan’s career in its tracks.

The answer is straightforward: Hasan’s superiors feared — correctly — that any attempt to call attention to his radicalism or to prevent his promotion would backfire on them, destroying their careers, not his.

Hasan was a protected-species minority. Under the PC tyranny of today’s armed services, no non-minority officer was going to take him on.

This is a military that imposes rules of engagement that protect our enemies and kill our own troops and that court-martials heroic SEALs to appease a terrorist. Ain’t many colonels willing to hammer the Army’s sole Palestinian-American psychiatrist.

Of course, there’s no mention of political correctness by the panel. Instead, the report settles for blinding flashes of the obvious, such as “We believe a gap exists in providing information to the right people.” Gee, really? Well, that explains everything. Money well spent!

Or “Department of Defense force protection policies are not optimized for countering internal threats.” Of course not: You can’t stop an internal threat you refuse to recognize.

The panel’s recommendations? Wow. “Develop a risk-assessment tool for commanders.” Now that’s going to stop Islamist terrorists in their tracks.

The Fort Hood massacre didn’t reflect an intelligence failure. The intelligence was there, in gigabytes. This was a leadership failure and an ethical failure, at every level. Nobody wanted to know what Hasan was up to. But you won’t learn that from this play-pretend report.

The sole interesting finding flashes by quickly: Behind some timid wording on pages 13 and 14, a daring soul managed to insert the observation that we aren’t currently able to keep violence-oriented religious extremists from becoming chaplains. (Of course, they’re probably referring to those darned Baptists . . .)

To be fair, there’s a separate, classified report on Maj. Hasan himself. But it’s too sensitive for the American people to see. Does it even hint he was a self-appointed Islamist terrorist committing jihad? I’ll bet it focuses on his “personal problems.”

In the end, the report contents itself with pretending that the accountability problem was isolated within the military medical community at Walter Reed. It wasn’t, and it isn’t. Murderous political correctness is pervasive in our military. The medical staff at Walter Reed is just where the results began to manifest themselves in Hasan’s case.

Once again, the higher-ups blame the worker bees who were victims of the policy the higher-ups inflicted on them. This report’s spinelessness is itself an indictment of our military’s failed moral and ethical leadership.

We agonize over civilian casualties in a war zone but rush to whitewash the slaughter of our own troops on our own soil. Conduct unbecoming.

Origins

The article from Ralph Peters appeared January 16th, 2010 in the New York Post and can be found here. The DoD report on the massacre, entitled ‘Protecting the Force: Lessons from Ft. Hood’, which is a very large .pdf file and will be tough to download unless you use broadband service, is here.

Evaluation

While MOAA as an organization has not taken a stance on the DoD report, Battle of the Bilge found much to agree with in the New York Post article. Although the article under represents the recommendations of the panel, the general theme that political correctness and the failure of so many people that could have stopped this from ever happening is undeniable. The statement that there were gigabytes of intelligence data that were missed or ignored is spot on. Nidal Hasan was a radical Islamic extremist and his actions were motivated by his religious beliefs, but our nation and our military have been ingrained with the concept of tolerance that sometimes makes us blind to obvious warning signs.

It is true that the word Islam is only mentioned once and in a footnote, and it is also true that ‘Muslim’ does not appear anywhere in the report. But then again neither do ‘Christian’, ‘Buddhist’, ‘Hindu’ or ‘Atheist’. It is standard run of the mill PC from DoD reports and in most cases, it is prudent to exclude specific groups. But we are not at war with nations that are composed primarily of those religions. Like it or not, we are at war with Islam, or rather Islam is at war with us. It is not the entire population of Muslims, some are very much on our side in this civilization clash. But the extremists are the ones that cause the damage, and a religion, ethnic group or organization that can not control its extremist elements must be held accountable for their actions. Where is the public outrage on the Muslim street to the actions of Nidal Hasan and the failed perpetrator of the Christmas day airline plot? There is none, and the silence speaks much louder than words.

The US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs had much of the same reaction to the report as Ralph Peters and I do:

“I am encouraged that the Department recognizes the need to update its policies to protect servicemembers and welcome the Department’s intention to hold accountable those who failed to take necessary protective action.

“I am disappointed, however, that the report does not adequately recognize the specific threat posed by violent Islamist extremism to our military, a threat directly addressed by Senator Collins and me in a January 13 letter to Secretary Gates. I believe firmly that if DoD educates its personnel about violent Islamist extremism – and how terrorists distort the Islamic faith to promote violence – we will increase trust between the thousands of Muslim-Americans serving honorably in the military and their colleagues.

“This omission underscores the need for our Committee’s independent investigation. Unfortunately, the Department of Defense has been less than forthcoming in providing us access to the documents and witnesses we require. Now that the DoD review is public, the Department must cooperate fully with our Committee so that we can fulfill our constitutional duty to determine our vulnerabilities and correct them.”

I don’t believe that the report was a ‘whitewash’ but I do believe that it was watered down to the point of being ineffective. The Executive Summary list of recommendations (found on page 7), however, are important going forward:



Yet, at the same time, three findings in the report come close to violating the ‘no religious test for employees of the government’ clause in the Constitution:

Finding 2.3: DoD standards for denying requests for recognition as an ecclesiastical endorser of chaplains may be inadequate…. This limited authority to deny requests for designation as ecclesiastical endorsers could allow undue improper influence by individuals with a propensity toward violence…..

Finding 2.7: DoD policy regarding religious accommodation lacks the clarity necessary to help commanders distinguish appropriate religious practices from those that might indicate a potential for self-radicalization….

Finding 4.9: The lack of published guidance for religious support in mass casualty incidents hampers integration of religious support to installation emergency management plans.

While it seems on the surface perfectly practical given the state of the world and the reality of Islamic terrorism, ignoring our Constitution can’t be the reaction to a tragedy like this. Because the next group they put limitations on may be one more broadly followed by Americans. First they came for…

Additional Sources

New York Post Op-Ed
Act! for America
Religious Clause Blog
Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Reaction

Discussion

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Editor’s Note

Director of Government Relations, Colonel Steve Strobridge, USAF – (Ret.) wrote an article for his As I See It column that was released this Friday. The discussion and comments were going strong but unfortunately ran up against a required database upgrade that stopped the conversation by shutting down our sign in function. Trust me when I say this is a much needed upgrade and despite the week long (expect the site to be back up on Tuesday, January 26th) freeze it is going to be worth the hassle.

Battle of the Bilge does not have the same restrictions so we have reprinted the article here and the discussion can continue. This is based on multiple email requests, thank you for the feedback and for helping us help you speak out about an important issue.

Warmest personal regards,
Matthew LoFiego

As I See It – Scared Straight on Healthcare

January 14, 2009

By Col. Steve Strobridge, USAF-Ret.

As we enter the second decade of the new millennium, most Americans — and most of the military beneficiary population — are scared to death about the future of health care.

And not without reason. There’s certainly no shortage of very real threats. Those fears are heightened further by the Internet and other electronic media that thrive on hype, hyperbole, and our natural tendency to share seemingly outrageous “facts” (which too often actually are outdated “half-facts” taken out of context or even blatant fabrications) with our friends and family.

Throw in a highly partisan political atmosphere in which Republicans and Democrats and liberals and conservatives endlessly trash each other’s ideas and integrity, and everybody’s blood pressure goes up — especially on such a vitally important topic as your family’s health care.

Let’s start with the real threats.

The most imminent one is the crazy formula in current law that requires compounded cuts every year in Medicare and TRICARE payments to doctors. For each of the past several years, Congress has imposed a one-year moratorium on the cuts, because they know allowing the cuts to happen would cause large numbers of doctors to stop seeing Medicare and military patients.

But Congress’ failure to fix the basic statutory formula has meant the size of the annual cut has grown significantly every year.
Now, if Congress doesn’t act before the end of February, current law will require a 21-percent payment cut as of March 1.

Now that’s scary — scary enough that Congress almost certainly will stop it. But they’ll probably just approve a fix for the rest of 2010. Which means they’ll have to act again before the end of the year to stop a 26-percent cut for 2011. Really scary.

As for the next threat, we know it very intimately. Because that threat is us. Or rather me, and people like me. I’ll be 63 years old in April and am among the leading edge of millions of baby boomers who will become eligible for Medicare in this decade.

And Medicare isn’t ready for us. Under current law, Medicare will run out of money in about seven years. The Medicare trust fund actuary says the health care reform bill passed by the Senate would postpone that crisis for another decade — but only if you believe the optimistic assumptions the bill entails, about which the Medicare actuary is dubious.

That means Congress will have no choice but to make further Medicare changes soon — higher Medicare taxes, reduced benefits, or both. Very scary.

Meanwhile, the budget deficit and national debt are rising at unprecedented levels, which means just having the government borrow more money to fund growing health-benefit needs (like fixing Medicare and the doctor payment problem) is a non-starter.

So there will be tremendous pressure in coming years to cut government spending in virtually every area to free up more funds for those critical needs. And that means tremendous pressure on the defense budget, which means a renewal of all the threats we encountered during the tight budget years of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s: force cutbacks, pay-raise caps, COLA delays, higher health care fees, commissary threats, and more.

Unfortunately, those real threats often are obscured by new-age “red herrings” — the electronic equivalent of chain letters circulating on the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, etcetera, that assert some kind of outrageous proposal that we send to all our friends with a note asking, “Can this be true?”

Unfortunately, much of that well-circulated material turns out to be bits of old news that’s no longer relevant, things that were originally written as satirical fiction, or blatantly false assertions that started as a joke or to serve someone’s personal or partisan agenda. Nevertheless, it often acquires a life of its own on the Internet, evolving into ever-more-outrageous forms, as amused or well-intentioned people pass them on for months and years — and as the “Can this be true?” comments change to “This is true!”

Several such electronic chain letters assert there is imminent legislation that would require TRICARE For Life beneficiaries to pay thousands more a year for their coverage.

There actually was such an idea, floated by the CBO back in 2008, but it was never a serious proposal, nor was it supported by anyone in the administration or Congress. Nothing like it is contained in any legislation before the Hill.

Are there legitimate reasons to be scared about our health care future? Yes.

That’s why MOAA has several current legislative alerts asking members to urge their legislators to reverse impending Medicare/TRICARE payment cuts, protect military beneficiaries from adverse effects of health reform, and more.

But let’s stay “scared straight” on our facts, and keep our energy focused on addressing real problems rather than fictional ones.

Another Message from Steve?

Yes. There’s a reason he’s our top mind on legislative issues. He’s extremely smart and sensible. Listen to him, and pass it on to anyone you have in your contact list.

Discussion

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