Binders Full of Generals

[unhappycamper]

http://truth-out.org/news/item/12312-binders-of-generals-how-the-romney-campaign-advances-the-corruption-of-our-military-brass




Binders Full of Generals
Thursday, 25 October 2012 10:51
By Dina Rasor, Truthout




~snip~


Retired General James Conway: Conway is a retired four-star general. Last year, he was named to the Board of Directors of Textron, which manufactures helicopters and other aircraft and products for the military.

Retired Navy Admiral James B. Busey: Busey served in the Navy until 1989. After leaving the federal government in 1992, he joined the board of directors of defense contractor Curtiss-Wright and left in 2008.

Retired former commander of United States Strategic Command James O. Ellis: After serving his country, Ellis decided to make a fortune by working for the defense industry. He serves in the leadership of the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations and also has a board position at Lockheed Martin.

~snip~

Retired Air Force Commander William R. Looney III: Looney actually campaigns on behalf of for-profit colleges that are under fire for abusing military veterans. Those colleges actually are a huge beneficiary of dollars from the Veterans Administration, and thus represent an often under-looked form of defense contractor welfare.

[Kolesar]

1. Active duty Generals used "leaks" to leverage keeping the troops in Iraq past 2011

Hastings describes in his book the contempt that the top generals had when Obama said that he was going to honor the troop withdrawal agreement with Iraq and have troops leave at the end of 2011. (There is plenty of controversy surrounding the State Department's 5,000-person army of hired mercenaries, but they are small compared to the troops that Obama pulled out.) The generals and some hawks in the administration leaked like crazy to the press that this was a "soft" date and insisted on the caveat that it depended on the old phrase of "the situation on the ground," as the date neared.

But Obama prevailed despite the leaks, most likely helped by his firing of McChrystal and overruling his generals on the Bin Laden raid by insisting that there were backup helicopters.

This article describes a huge problem in our democracy.