The Missing Trillions

It was a casually-delivered announcement on a typical September 10 when the Pentagon revealed it had lost 2.3 trillion dollars. It was a staggering sum and the public outrage promised to be high. However, 9/11 happened the next day and the missing trillions were forgotten. 

No one has ever been held accountable or made to withstand scrutiny when it comes to the lost of those 2.3 trillion dollars. Evidence, unfortunately for the American public, was destroyed when that massive 767 was crashed into the Pentagon by Islamic maniacs. 

One would consider that the start of the two decade war against Al-Qaeda and associated forces would force the government to tighten its financial belt; but that is very far from the case, however. The Pentagon delivered plane-fulls of money to Afghan officials. Over 60 billion dollars cannot be accounted for in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

The story is very disturbing in Iraq, where the government cannot account for over 12 billion dollars. In what represented the biggest cash airlift in history, Iraq's money was stolen from its people. It seems that the Pentagon has a problem with keeping track of cash, and also black money. 

The Pentagon's black budget of 51 billion dollars -- combined with the Military Intelligence Program of 19 billion, and the National Intelligence Program of around 50 billion -- means that the government will dish out more than 120 billion dollars in black money. The US government black budget is 50 billion dollars higher than Russia's military budget and just lower than the Chinese. That 120 billion dollar figure, I should add, is only an estimation since the Pentagon has another classified program where the budgets don't add up with the programs. 

It was Eisenhower who warned about the military-industrial complex in his farewell address. The very last thing he did as president was to warn the nation of what was to come. And indeed, if the government can mismanage so much money and receive almost no public scrutiny, one can only wonder how much little we know about other classified projects. 

From One Nightmare to Another

I woke up at 5am this morning. I'm not sure how long I was tossing around in bed before that. My sleeping schedule is erratic to say the least. So, I rolled out of bed at 5am and decided to finish watching Zero Dark Thirty, or the Glorification of America's Brave Men and Women Fighting Terror. The snuff scenes had put me to sleep during my first viewing attempt, so I was hoping that the second viewing attempt would also put me to sleep.

 

Instead, I sat through the whole thing. To be honest, I had already read many reviews about the film -- something I almost never do -- most of them casting the film as an attempt to glorify the War on Terror and justify America's human rights abuses. As I watched the movie, I found myself disagreeing with most of the reviews.

 

Without going into detail about the fact that the only man who has been prosecuted and gone to prison is the guy who's spoken about torture, I simply could not believe that most reviewers consider Zero Dark Thirty to be torture-apologist, American propaganda. Quite the contrary, I found that the lead male character resembled a typical psychopath: worried about the fate of little animals just minutes before starting a torture session.

 

The lead female character struck me as a brainwashed career opportunist who only seemed happy and content after boarding a cargo plane all by herself and being told by the pilot that she must be important to have such a privilege. Further, the character is shown coldly pressing for violations of international law and pre-meditated murder based simply on the probability that someone could be an Al-Qaeda operative. The powers that the movie depicts the lead female character as possessing are reminiscent of the KGB's extrajudicial imperatives: no one citizen should have as much covert power.

 

Indeed, I asked some of my Dutch friends how they felt after watching the movie: "I now have a worse opinion of the US," was the general type of answer I got. The movie only serves to reinforce and defend something that to the average person in a civilized democracy seems appalling. Zero Dark Thirty might be a movie that influences the opinions of someone incapable of sympathizing with "the enemy," but the average Dutch person I speak to is shocked that the US tortured as it did and that such barbaric acts are celebrated and justified in a movie drafted with assistance from Pentagon associated-forces.

 

Just days ago, an Italian court convicted in absentia 3 CIA agents of kidnapping a man in Milan who was later renditioned to Egypt and tortured. This makes the second European court in under two months that found the CIA guilty of violating international law. After watching the movie, did I feel better at the fact that governments around me are slowly convicting my homeland of crimes usually reserved for third world dictatorships?

 

There are too many threads in Zero Dark Thirty and many years are haphazardly compressed for chronology's sake to truly convince the viewer that torture was necessary because of urgent national security needs. Though the charming lead female character remains ageless throughout her travails and certainly will appeal to many, the movie is likely to be more useful as anti-American Jihadist propaganda. In one dry scene, two female characters discuss their sex lives, almost as if to convince us that they are loving, liberated women. Kathryn Bigelow should be prosecuted for aiding America's enemies and portraying feminist progress as succeeding in the same capacity for brutality that has traditionally been attributed to males.

 

I believe that if an American citizen were waterboarded by an unpopular government simply based on suspicion of wrong-doing by a "high-level administration official," there would be no one to defend him or her. We are all more at risk now; If a foreign government decides to use enhanced interrogation methods on one of us for a possibly indefinite period of time, which moral American voice will come out and unhypocritically demand that those foreign officials be held accountable?

 

Obama will not even entertain the idea of following international law, and a result American citizens are more likely to be targeted for mistreatment. Brazil, for example, is a country that enjoys laws of reciprocity. American citizens are required to pay $100 dollars for a visa and must be fingerprinted upon entry to the South American nation, simply because the US requires the same of Brazilian nationals.

 

Perhaps not a Brazilian official, but a Russian, will introduce a law called: "The Enhanced Interrogation Reciprocity Act." I certainly would want to spend many cold months in a Brazilian or Russian prison suffering sleep deprivation and enduring stress positions simply for suspicion of connection to an international crime cartel: it's necessary to preserve everyone else's freedoms.

We've Crossed the Cyberarms Rubicon

No one knows exactly where the Rubicon was flowing through when Julius Ceasar commanded his troops to cross its waters, thereby passing the point of no return. The flow of the river has changed in the many centuries since: many things have. War in Ancient Roman times was a much more technologically simpler affair, but now war is a technologically easier affair to wage.

 

And with that ease, the Pentagon has declared that a cyberattack is tantamount to an act of war. If Iran were to, for example, design a computer virus that disrupts US air traffic or the electrical grid, the US would be justified in launching missiles and sending in the boots. If we operate along the same lines of Pentagon thought as to what constitutes a declaration of war, hasn't the United States by its own definition already declared war on Iran?

 

The New York Times reported that the Pentagon developed a virus that caused Iranian nuclear centrifuges to spin out of control and self-destruct. The virus, Stuxnet, was developed jointly by the NSA and Israel's Unit 8200. However, the Israelis inserted extra code that resulted in the virus escaping its original parameters and attacking computers around the world. Vice-president Joe Biden angrily quipped: "It's got to be the Israelis. They went too far!"

 

And, yes, I agree that the Israelis went too far, but they are a small state working with the superpower's National Security Agency. Before Obama took office, he met with then president Bush who asked him to continue two classified programs: the drone program and the cyberweapons program. Obama not only complied, he expanded exponentially. Obama has gone too far; he has forced other states to launch their own cyberweapons programs.

 

The recent attacks against the New York Times are just the beginning. The next American war could very well come because Iran or China feel justified in developing a computer virus that disrupts America's air traffic or brings down its power grid. President Ahmajinehad himself stated on Iranian television that "the enemy" had already declared economic war. What Ahmajinehad failed to mention, however, was that "the enemy" has already declared a cyberwar, and that Iran has started its own cyberweapons unit in retaliation. There is no shortage of computer talent in Iran, I can guarantee you that.

France's "Mission Accomplished"

Saddam Hussein's forces fell like a house of cards when American forces invaded in 2003. Saddam's Soviet-era equipment was no match for the world's most powerful military force and its 21st century technological ruthlessness. However, it was the great military strategist Dick Cheney who so wisely observed in 1994 that (transcript):

The man was a military prophet, it's like he could see 20 years into the future. Cheney knew that a conventional military attack would  be quickly successful, but the ensuing guerrilla war would embroil the US in the same way that Vietnam did. And, let's not forget that Vietnam was French Indochina, a post-colonial problem that the US military-industrial complex was more than willing to get embroiled in due to the potential for mass profit and untold weapons test on the field.

 

The US has already set into motion the construction of a drone base in Niger, to make operations in North Africa more tenable. The Pentagon strategists can see what is obvious: the Islamist forces withdrew strategically to the more inhospitable north of Mali, where they are well-entrenched and have more base of support. The French know that too, and that is why they are reluctant to proceed. What Hollande has done is: provide training to the rebels, and give them time to analyze and prepare for the second wave of attack.

 

Nonetheless, president Hollande has taken one of the most expensive photo-ops for a European head of state in recent memory. He has traveled to a warzone, at grave taxpayer expense, to be photographed as the victorious savior of a jubilant people.

 

Some years down the line, we will look back at president Hollande smiling as he walked amidst the crowds in Mali, and remember Bush's arrival on the USS Lincoln by jet, and cheering to a jubilant crowd as the words "Mission Accomplished" were splashed behind him. Don't expect that French forces will actually be able to withdraw soon; the quagmire has just begun.

How Malcolm X Helped Me Go Vegan

I was a lean, fit child in the Dominican. It could be fair to say that I was addicted to my bicycle, often riding around town for up to twelve hours a day. When I got to NY, I was 60 pounds, and pretty much on the bone. Things, however, changed pretty quickly.

 

CES 64 in the Bronx was not the most well-equipped elementary school. We barely even had something that resembled a science class, much less a gym. There was a massive space in the lobby, where we would sometimes play kickball all the while trying to avoid the cement columns and marble floor. So, no gym in school, no capacity to do much outside because of the crime rate, no more traditional Latin cuisine, and you end up with a fat Jose. By age 15, my weight had already ballooned to 240 pounds. I went from 60 to 240 pounds in just a few years of misery in the Bronx.

 

I guess I was a typical male in many ways. I never really questioned what was on the plate; I simply ate it. I never thought about where the ice cream came from, or what was in it; I simply liked the look and taste, and for me that was enough. It was not until age 15 that tragedy and destiny would force me to start asking questions.

 

It was September 15th, 2002 and my father and I were watching the Vargas Vs. De la Hoya fight. I wasn't paying much attention to the fight, in reality I was on the phone with my buddy Jan. After babbling for about 10 minutes on the phone, my father turned to me and said in a tired, calm voice: "don't talk on the phone so much." He said it in Spanish and instead of saying, "no hables mucho por el telefono," he said, "no me hables mucho por el telefono." The use of the pronoun me before a verb is used in Spanish to indicate something that affects the speaker negatively or is a disadvantage to him. In essence, his last words on this earth were, "don't talk on the phone, I can't afford it."

 

Before I even finished talking with Jan, my father fell off his chair and started convulsing on the floor. We rushed him to the hospital; he'd suffered a debilitating stroke. On October 6, after almost three weeks in the hospital, I got a phone call informing me that he was never going to wake up. He was 46, like his father who was also 46 when a stroke took him from this earth.

 

Soon after, I started wearing black and my mind was filled with obsessive thoughts of my own mortality. I wasn't sure whether I'd make it past 46, and thought it best to embrace a culture of death, so that I could be more prepared for it. I would have gone down a very, very dark path had it not been from Ms. Gross' Malcolm X class that same semester.

 

Had I simply watched the movie or swallowed the book in a single week, my life probably wouldn't have been impacted the way it was. Though The Autobiography of Malcolm X has a largely conciliatory tone near the end, it was the black, militant philosophy throughout the book that helped me cope. For most of October, November, and December, we read Malcolm X at a very slow pace, and the anger that he felt before his trip to Mecca, I also felt. I channeled the pain from my loss and my fear of death into intellectual anger at America's history of racial injustice. You don't have to be a psychologist to recognize that intellectual anger is much more useful than despair.

 

But I also picked up some things from my surrogate father for those three very difficult months: dietary considerations. Malcolm X described pork in a way that simply convinced me it was too dirty and risky to eat. For the first time in my life, I began to wonder what exactly was on my plate and where it came from. I started asking myself: "What's in this meat?"

 

The recent horse meat scandal by no means shocks me. The fact that I was 15 and the adults who were giving me food couldn't tell me precisely what it was, taught me that most people simply consumed blindly. I decided to open my eyes; I went to the small local library behind Bronx Lebanon and withdrew all of its 12 books on nutrition. I became familiar with everything about nutrition, and after reading Diet for a New America and The Food Revolution, I understood that the American diet I'd adopted was not only destructive to me, but also to the environment -- not to even mention the animals themselves.

 

By January 2003, I was already solidly vegan, and had new determination in life: I was ready to join the track team. I had never before in my life eaten green, so it took two solid months of forcing myself to eat broccoli, tomatoes, lettuce, carrots, cauliflower, and tofu. I threw up on a near daily basis. Something similar happened each time I went out running, but by the fall of 2003, I had already lost 80 pounds. In less than a year, I had gone from 240 pound couch potato to commanding the wrestling team in the 160-170 pound weight class. Malcolm X didn't direct me towards veganism, but he helped me open my eyes.