Posts Tagged ‘defense’
Pentagon and Obama offer very little reform of military spending
I’m here to sign the checks
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission
The United States should give up the capability to fight two major ground wars simultaneously, according to a Pentagon review that will be presented this week, [said the inevitable unnamed] U.S. official.
Chris Lawrence plays into the Pentagon PR boys just like Wolf always did. The only difference is he won’t receive the Marvin Kalb Award for undercover service to the Mossad.
The review will be publicly outlined by President Barack Obama, the White House announced. The president will join Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Thursday at the Pentagon to discuss the military posture vision.
The official [same guy, I guess], who was not authorized to speak publicly, said the strategic review presents priorities to guide the military into the future, but “they are proposals, not all of them set in stone.”
The review sets forth potentially big changes in U.S. strategy, including, the official said, removing up to 4,000 troops from Europe and downsizing the overall ground forces even further. The 2012 budget request already called for cuts of 27,000 soldiers and 20,000 Marines in the next four years, and those numbers could increase.
The military would not maintain its ability to wage two large conflicts at the same time, such as it did in Iraq and Afghanistan, the official said. But the United States would still be able to deploy troops and equipment to “deter a second adversary” while engaged in a major ground conflict.
Charge! Pic of the Day
The charge by Eric Pierre depicting a herd of muskoxen charging down Arctic wolves has been highly commended in the 2011 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition.
Hit man hire was part of pilot for reality TV show – she says
Dalia Dippolito never planned to have her husband killed, her attorney told a jury on Tuesday. Rather, she thought she was acting in a reality show orchestrated by her husband to achieve fame and publicity.
In his opening statement in her murder-for-hire trial, defense attorney Michael Salnick said Michael Dippolito was a controlling husband who duped his wife into taking part in his hoax.
“Michael Dippolito’s hoax to orchestrate his own murder to achieve fame and fortune was a bad prank,” Salnick said. “It was never anyone’s intention to harm anyone…”
Video from an undercover sting by Boynton Beach police showed Dalia Dippolito in August 2009 trying to hire an undercover officer to kill her husband. Video of her wailing at news of his murder went viral and will be featured on the television show “COPS.”
Salnick told jurors that Dalia Dippolito knew the entire time that she was being recorded, because her husband persuaded her to take part in his reality-show idea. Michael Dippolito won’t admit it, Salnick said…
Dippolito faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted of solicitation to commit first-degree murder. Her alleged plan to have a hit man kill her husband backfired when the man she hired to do the job was the undercover Boynton Beach police officer.
Boynton Beach police were fooled by Michael Dippolito’s staged murder-for-hire scenario, Salnick said, and were more focused on pleasing COPS producers…
On Aug. 5, 2009, police staged the elaborate crime scene, and recorded video of her shrieks and tears when they told her that her husband had been killed.
Later they confronted her, brought her face-to-face with her husband and arrested her. Her reaction and arrest also were caught on video, which will be evidence in the trial.
Michael Dippolito was the victim in the case, Parker said, and was blinded by his love for his wife of six months.
Do you think this is going to work better than the twinkie defense used in San Francisco to justify the murder of Harvey Milk? You have to admit it’s creative and including in a reasonably sleazy reality TV show like COPS is brilliant.
Grow Your Own [Security]
The next hydrangea you grow could literally save your life. With the help of the Department of Defense, a biologist at Colorado State University has taught plant proteins how to detect explosives. Never let it be said that horticulture can’t fight terrorism…
It only took a small engineering nudge to deputize a plant’s natural, evolutionary self-defense mechanisms for threat detection. “Plants can’t run and hide,” says June Medford, the biologist who’s spent the last seven years figuring out how to deputize plants for counterterrorism. “If a bug comes by, it has to respond to it. And it already has the infrastructure to respond.”
That would be the “receptor” proteins in its DNA, which respond naturally to threatening stimuli. If a bug chews on a leaf, for instance, the plant releases a series of chemical signals called terpenoids — “a cavalry call,” Medford says, that thickens the leaf cuticle in defense…
It all started in 2003 with a DARPA program to grow circuitry. Back then, Medford heard about a program from the far-out Pentagon research arm called Biological Input/Output Systems, geared to produce “rational design and engineering of genetic regulatory circuits, signal-transduction pathways and metabolism.”
The program was essentially a call for computer-designed receptors. “I was a plant biologist,” Medford recalls, “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we put it all together, like Reese’s peanut butter and chocolate.’”
That led to a $2 million grant from Darpa, with the Office of Naval Research kicking in another million. But by far the biggest benefactor to Medford’s research is the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which last year gave her a $7.9 million grant to get the bomb-sniffing ferns from the lab to the real world…
Eventually, Medford expects to bring the bomb-detecting plants to market through genetically modified seedlings. Whatever it costs, it’s got to be less than the $100,000 to $200,000 that a backscatter “junk scanner” can run.
Since it appears any green plant can be modified to suit the purpose, eventually – consider the potential for mutual support between anti-terror aspidistra and medical marijuana! The possibilities are endless. If not vegan.
Secretary Gates ratchets up savings drive – Chickenhawks weep!
Soldier who thinks these kids admire something more than his hardware
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission
The Pentagon announced $178 billion in cost savings over five years but softened the blow by recycling much of the money into other programs and helping pay down the budget deficit by trimming its bureaucracy.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the Pentagon would achieve the savings partially by taking the extraordinary step of reducing U.S. troop levels. He also announced cuts or cancellations of poorly performing weapons programs, including a $13-billion Marine Corps landing craft, designed by General Dynamics Corp.
The budget proposal is already raising hackles in some quarters of Congress, which ultimately controls the Defense Department’s budget…
Hackles belonging to members of Congress beholden to the military-industrial complex. Fools whose understanding of economics are grounded in [1] 19th Century imperial economics and politics – and [2] personal gain.
Gates said the military services had come up with $100 billion in savings over five years that would be redirected within other military programs. He said an additional $78 billion would go toward deficit reduction, made up primarily of $54 billion in Pentagon-wide savings, changes to economic assumptions, and cutting troop strength beginning in 2015.
The plan calls for cancellation of a ground-launched missile built by Raytheon Co, and the second overhaul in a year of the Pentagon’s largest weapons program: Lockheed Martin Corp’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
Under the proposal, the Pentagon would trim its force levels by up to 47,000 U.S. troops starting in 2015. That is long after U.S. troops are due to leave Iraq at the end of this year. It is also the year when U.S. war planners hope to hand over responsibility for Afghan security to local forces.
Someday – just maybe, someday – we may elect a Congress which will turn the dollars dedicated to death and destruction, imperial power and greed, to ends productive for our whole nation.
Rules to fast-track executions withdrawn by Feds
With prodding from a Bay Area judge, the Obama administration has quietly withdrawn regulations by President George W. Bush’s Justice Department that would have helped California and other states put their death penalty cases on a fast track in federal courts.
The change, authorized by Congress in 1996 but never implemented, was intended to compress a federal review process that can last anywhere from two years to a decade or more.
Death penalty appeals in California now typically take 20 to 25 years to resolve. Most of that time is spent in state court waiting for trial court records to be prepared, appeals lawyers to be appointed, and a badly backlogged California Supreme Court to rule.
But proceedings can also be lengthy in federal courts. The last inmate executed in California, Clarence Ray Allen, was put to death in January 2006 after more than 23 years of appeals – 17 of which were in federal court…
But Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., and an opponent of capital punishment, said revelations about wrongfully convicted prisoners on death row show that this is no time for a speedup…
The fast-track system was authorized by Congress and President Bill Clinton in 1996 as part of a law designed to limit federal court review of state criminal cases, especially capital cases.
It would allow states to speed up federal review of death sentences if they have adequate procedures for appointing and paying lawyers to represent condemned prisoners…
The 1996 law let federal judges decide whether states qualified for fast-track, and the answer was uniformly no…
In 2005, a Republican-controlled Congress voted to bypass the judges and authorize the U.S. attorney general to review the state’s procedures, subject to final approval by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., which has a conservative majority. But the change has never taken effect.
After 14 years, no doubt Republicans and those who see no requirement to balance adequate defense and timely resolution will try, again.
RTFA for the details. As much as most, I think little of our criminal justice practices – whether failing to keep hardened criminals on the inside or railroading the poor and non-white.
Then there are the judges and lawyers, too often working at their political careers more than anything else.
Caffeine made me kill my wife! Uh-huh.
A Kentucky man accused of strangling his wife is poised to claim excessive caffeine from sodas, energy drinks and diet pills left him so mentally unstable he couldn’t have knowingly killed her…
Woody Will Smith, 33, is scheduled for trial starting today on a murder charge in the May 2009 death of Amanda Hornsby-Smith, 28.
Defense attorney Shannon Sexton filed notice with the Newport court of plans to argue his client ingested so much caffeine in the days leading up to the killing that it rendered him temporarily insane — unable even to form the intent of committing a crime…
A legal strategy invoking caffeine intoxication is unusual but has succeeded at least once before, in a case involving a man cleared in 2009 of charges of running down and injuring two people with a car in Washington state…
I am never surprised over silly-ass defenses accepted as legit by a court. Responsibility for your own acts, decisions, means nothing.
Prosecutors, meanwhile, said their own expert may testify there was no evidence Smith had consumed diet pills or energy drinks as he claimed before his wife died.
Prosecutor Michelle Snodgrass said Smith tested negative for amphetamine-type substances shortly after the killing…
Reports and case records say during that time, he was drinking five or six soft drinks and energy drinks a day, along with taking diet pills; it all added up to more than 400 milligrams of caffeine a day.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — published by the American Psychiatric Association showing standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders — defines overdose as more than 300 mg. That’s about three cups of coffee.
More than three cups of coffee classifies you as loony, overdosed on coffee?
Har! That explains the behavior of half the geeks in the world.
Judge disallows “birther” defense for nutball Army doc
Obama at Bagram AFB, Afghanistan
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission
A judge has denied a request for President Barack Obama to testify at a court martial for a U.S. Army flight surgeon who refused to deploy to Afghanistan until he saw proof that Obama was born in the United States.
The judge, Army Col. Denise Lind, said any evidence or witnesses related to Obama’s citizenship is irrelevant to the charges against Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin, who has 17 years of service in the U.S. military.
After failing to deploy with his unit in April, Lakin was charged with missing a movement, disobeying a lawful order and dereliction of duty.
The Uniform Code of Military Justice says the maximum punishment for both offenses — missing his plane and disobeying lawful orders — is a dishonorable discharge and up to two years in confinement. A guilty verdict could also result in forfeiture of Lakin’s pay, which totals $7,959 a month, according to a charge sheet provided by a group sponsoring his defense.
In addition to putting Obama on their witness list, Lakin’s lawyers had asked Lind to order Obama’s official birth records from Hawaii be brought to court for trial.
The prosecutors in the case argued that Obama’s eligibility is not relevant because the officers who ordered Lakin to go to Fort Campbell and then ordered him to answer questions about why he didn’t go were his proper superiors in the military chain of command, and they gave him legal orders. Jensen later conceded that point.
Of course, Doctor Dipshit knew all this. He’s just another fool whose ideology overwhelms reality before his very eyes.
Spanish coppers bust Mariposa botnet ring
Spanish police have arrested three men accused of masterminding one of the biggest computer crimes to date — infecting more than 13 million PCs with a virus that stole credit card numbers and other data.
The men were suspected of running the Mariposa botnet, named after the Spanish word for butterfly, said Spain’s Civil Guard.
Mariposa had infected machines in 190 countries in homes, government agencies, schools, more than half of the world’s 1,000 largest companies and at least 40 big financial institutions, according to two Internet security firms that helped Spanish officials crack the ring…
Mariposa initially spread by exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft Corp’s Internet Explorer Web browser. It also contaminated machines by infecting USB memory sticks and by sending out tainted links using Microsoft’s MSN instant messaging software, he said.
A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company did not immediately have any comment…
Panda Security Senior Research Advisor Pedro Bustamante said that one of the three was caught with 800,000 personal credentials when Spanish police arrested him.
“Mariposa’s the biggest ever to be shut down, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. These things come up constantly,” said Mark Rasch, former head of the U.S. Department of Justice computer crimes unit.
Maybe just the tip of the iceberg; but, it feels like there has been a measurable increase in arrests, lately.
Overdue. Welcome.
Gates praises restraint after Mumbai attacks
State meeting last November
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, flying to New Delhi, praised India’s restraint and statesmanship following the 2008 Mumbai attacks and remarked at how both India and Pakistan have kept tensions at a “manageable level.”
Relations between the South Asian neighbors have been strained since India suspended a peace process with Pakistan after the assault on Mumbai by Pakistan-based militants…
“The bombing in Mumbai was a really terrible event and frankly I believe that the Indians responded subsequently with a great deal of restraint and have conducted themselves in a very statesmen-like manner since that attack,” Gates told reporters on his flight to India…
Last month, Gates told the U.S. Senate he believed al Qaeda wanted to provoke a conflict between India and Pakistan in order to destabilize Pakistan. He said it was providing Lashkar-e-Taiba militants — the group blamed for the Mumbai killings — with targeting information to help the group plot attacks in India.
Gates said the United States would be happy to work to help improve India-Pakistan relations, if asked, but added: “I think it’s clear that both sides prefer to deal with this bilaterally and that others not be involved…”
Of course, military-industrial commerce is an important part of Gates’ visit. India is preparing to open the purse-strings for $50 billion worth of death toys. Uncle Sugar wants the biggest chunk. If not all of it.
