'Encouraging' returning injured vets to STFU.

This is just too cold for words.

From No Quarter: Army Times: Shut Up and Get in Formation SusanUnPC

Walter Reed patients told to keep quiet

Soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s Medical Hold Unit say they have been told they will wake up at 6 a.m. every morning and have their rooms ready for inspection at 7 a.m., and that they must not speak to the media.

“Some soldiers believe this is a form of punishment for the trouble soldiers caused by talking to the media,” one Medical Hold Unit soldier said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

It is unusual for soldiers to have daily inspections after Basic Training.

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Also read this - Chris Floys at Empire Berlesque: Supporting the Troops: "Shut Up and Suffer"

Because some soldiers were ballsy enough to tell the press about the callous way the Bush gang treats the cannon fodder it sends off to die, kill, maim and be maimed in a useless, pointless, illegal, corrupt, immoral, murderous, mismanaged war, now all the soldiers in Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s Medical Hold Unit are being subjected to a punishment regimen – and banished to an area where they will be inaccessible to the press. So reports that well-known bastion of defeatist pink-lib Islamo-wimpism, the Army Times:

Soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s Medical Hold Unit say they have been told they will wake up at 6 a.m. every morning and have their rooms ready for inspection at 7 a.m., and that they must not speak to the media.

Continue here

And here

And here's your latest heartwarming "Supporting the troops as in Pat Tillman" story

According to the 'authorities' she supposedly either committed suicide, or through her own stupidity, offed herself.
They Say.
Sounds to me like a little Rape - murder. But we wouldn't want that to get around, would we? So, let's blame the victim, like always.

Phillip Barron at AlterNet

The tragedy of her story begins there.

An Army representative initially told LaVena's father, Dr. John Johnson, that his daughter died of "died of self-inflicted, noncombat injuries" and initially added it was not a suicide -- in other words, an accidental death caused by LaVena herself. The subsequent Army investigation reversed this finding and declared LaVena's death a suicide, a finding refuted by the soldier's family. In an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dr. Johnson pointed to indications that his daughter had endured a physical struggle before she died -- two loose front teeth, a "busted lip" that had to be reconstructed by the funeral home -- suggesting that "someone might have punched her in the mouth."

[...]

The mother of Pat Tillman put the matter in stark and honest terms:

"This is how they treat a family of a high-profile individual," she said. "How are they treating others?"

Read it all

Does this make it official that Bush has F**ked up the defense of this country?

I thought that his reason to be allowed continued existence was that he was gonna protect us from the big bad "terrists". Sez here that he has destroyed our military to the point that he might not even be able to throw a war for those nice Iranians. (Don't count on that, though!)
More here - Christy Hardin Smith cross-posted at The News Blog

History has a funny way of looking backward at Presidents and assessing all of those tiny little decisions -- made day in and day out -- from a much wider lens. From the perspective of not just the short-term ramifications of policy decisions, but what their real world, long-term impact has been. It is not often that we get to see both the short-term and the long-term questions intersect in a measureable way. But that is exactly what seems to be shaping up in a number of recent reports regarding US troops, our strategic capability for the short and long term, and the impact that all of this is having -- right now -- on our folks in uniform.

The fact that some of this is coming out of the mouth of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace? That's sure to make a few heads explode inside the Beltway, it?

Strained by the demands of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is a significant risk that the U.S. military won't be able to quickly and fully respond to yet another crisis, according to a new report to Congress.

The assessment, done by the nation's top military officer, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, represents a worsening from a year ago, when that risk was rated as moderate.

[...]So, can we officially say now that the Bush Administration has made us less safe in terms of our strategic readiness capabilities and the eroded level of response capability that we now have under George Bush's watch? The GAO thinks so (H/T Raw Story):

GIs - Just because we volunteered doesn't mean we are suicidal fools.

CBS News 60 Minutes

Americans in the military have been asked to make extraordinary sacrifices in recent years, particularly in Iraq, where the casualties are mounting, the tours are being extended, and some of them have had enough.

Correspondent Lara Logan heard dissension in the ranks from a large group of service members who are fed up and have decided to go public. They’re not going AWOL, they're not disobeying orders or even refusing to fight in Iraq. But they are doing something unthinkable to many in uniform: bypassing the chain of command to denounce a war they’re in the middle of fighting.

---

"As a patriotic citizen who served two combat tours in Iraq, I just feel like this war, it's simply just not working out anymore, and soldiers are dying there everyday," says Specialist Kevin Torres.

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Richard Thompson - Dad's Gonna Kill Me

Go to the site learn the song!

Escalation will be Bush's step into hell

(Do you get the impression that I think this is a lousy idea?)
Chris Floyd at Empire Berlesque

Bush's "Great Leap Forward." The first two prongs of this strategy seem guaranteed: there will be an escalation of the war and an attack on Sadr. The third thrust – expanding the war beyond Iraq – seems increasingly likely, but perhaps, at the moment, more of an option to be held in reserve, to be brought out when the first two elements inevitably begin to fail and there is, finally, nothing left for them to do but shoot the moon and see what happens.

Yes, they are that stupid. Yes, they are that criminally reckless. And no, they don't care how many American soldiers will be slaughtered in the process – not to mention (which they never do) the countless Iraqi and Iranian – and American – civilians who will be killed in direct assaults and the inevitable, generations-long blowback.

Read all of it.

Surging to Disaster (Seems to be a common thought.)

Lawrence J. Korb and Max Bergmann at The American Prospect

Want to break the back of the U.S. military while failing to accomplish anything new in Iraq? Send in more troops.

In 1964, when Lyndon Johnson began escalating America's involvement in Vietnam, Undersecretary of State George Ball warned that "the party which seems to be losing will be tempted to keep raising the ante." In the summer of 1965, when the United States had less than 100,000 troops in Vietnam, Ball concluded that "humiliation would be more likely than the achievement of our objectives -- even after we have paid terrible costs." As Ball predicted, the United States eventually increased its troop levels to nearly 600,000 and suffered almost 60,000 deaths to no avail.

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Dubya, that good ole' boy, has now killed more troops than the 9-11 terrorists killed at the WTC.

So, obviously he has WMDs and deserves pre-emptive attack, doesn't he?

CBS/AP

The U.S. military announced the deaths of seven American soldiers Tuesday, raising the U.S. death toll since the beginning of the Iraq war to at least 2,978 — five more than the number of people killed in the Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S.

At least 54 Iraqis also died in bombings on Tuesday, officials said, including a coordinated strike that killed 25 in western Baghdad.

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This insanity must stop.