Gates

I was listening to the Gates-Senate hearings today. If you ever listen to this type of affair, it was familiar and maintained the standard of previous hearings.

If you think about it though, its quite an odd spectacle. Here we have this civil formality of asking the candidate questions and he politely and respectfully answers. But what's going on here, this is the guy who is going to be the head of the Pentagon. This is about war, the military, and all that it entails meaning, a lot of killing, that's a lot of dead people, billions upon billions of dollars in weapons, training, spying, surveillance, missiles, atomic weapons, and much that is secret and hidden from virtually all Americans.

They can talk about the occupation of Iraq with incredible objectivity, civil and polite exchanges, but its crazy in Iraq right now, crazy, bizarre, bloody, chaotic, violent as hell. It is hell. The tone of this exercise is a gross hypocrisy. Somebody should have been playing the fiddle.

A tiny number of things about the Pentagon:

1. 19 percent of the Pentagon's acquisition budget is devoted to "black" ie classified stuff. The things you willl never even hear about until years from now. That alone accounts for approximately $28 billion. The "black" budget is roughly 4 times larger than the entire population's GNP of Ethiopia.

2. The President's 2007 base budget for the Pentagon is $439.3 billion. Using our Ethiopia model, that is 64 times larger than the entire population's GNP of Ethiopia. One year of the Pentagons budget spread over Ethiopia would change the income of 70 million people from $110 per year to $7,000 per year.

3. "...the military and the Department of Defense (DoD) have an entire system of education and training institutions and organizations of their own, including the many schools of the National Defense University system (NDU): the National War College, the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, the School for National Security Executive Education, the Joint Forces Staff College, and the Information Resources Management College as well as the Defense Acquisition University, the Joint Military Intelligence College – open only to "U.S. citizens in the armed forces and in federal civilian service who hold top secret/SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information) clearances" – the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, the Naval Postgraduate School, the Naval War College, Air University, the Air Force Institute of Technology, the Marine Corps University and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, among others. ...Chalmers Johnson has noted in his book on American militarism, 'The Sorrows of Empire', that there are approximately 150 military-educational institutions in the U.S." source