Soldiers headed for Iraq are still buying their own body armor — and in many cases, their families are buying it for them — despite assurances from the military that the gear will be in hand before they're in harm's way.
To their credit though, those troop lovin' Republicans who were in charge of everything at the time really got off their asses and made things happen. Here's a story from over a year later:
Nearly a year after Congress demanded action, the Pentagon has still failed to figure out a way to reimburse soldiers for body armor and equipment they purchased to better protect themselves while serving in Iraq.
Soldiers and their parents are still spending hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for armor they say the military won’t provide. One U.S. senator said Wednesday he will try again to force the Pentagon to obey the reimbursement law it opposed from the outset and has so far not implemented.
Did you see the part where the Pentagon opposed the reimbursement law from the start? Nice. The Senator who was trying to get the military to spend some chump change out of the Defense budget to protect their own people was Christopher Dodd. He's running for president this year. As a Democrat. He won't win.
You know who doesn't have trouble getting body armor from the United States though? Iraqi insurgents. The American corpo-media doesn't seem to want to to tell you this, but across the pond in the UK it's front-page-above-the-fold news. To the Guardian of London:
The US has lost track of about 190,000 weapons issued to Iraqi security forces since the 2003 invasion, some of which will have ended up in the hands of insurgents, according to an official report published in Washington. Among the missing items are AK-47 rifles, pistols, body armour and helmets.
The 20-page report - Stabilising Iraq: Department of Defence cannot ensure that US-funded equipment has reached Iraqi security forces - says the Pentagon and the multinational force in Iraq responsible for training "cannot fully account for about 110,000 AK-47 rifles, 80,000 pistols, 135,000 items of body armour and 115,000 helmets reported as issued to Iraqi forces as of September 22 2005". (emphasis mine)
While I freely admit I do not support the troops, I also am not standing in the way of them buying their own equipment nor am I openly arming the people who are killing them. That actually makes me more of a troop supporter than the Defense Department. I also just broke this news to you, while those troop supporting journalists at Fox News spend 24 hour news cycles talking non stop about a bridge that fell down or coal miners that are stuck under the ground. I'll even give you this link, in case you think that $500,000,000,000 a year for the military isn't quite enough.
I really suck at not supporting the troops. I think it should be my New Years resolution in 2008 to do a better job.
5 comments:
My lifetime resolution is to NEVER make a new year's resolution. ReVolution comes when inspiration and effort colide. That doesnt have to be in January.
wait a sec... you freely admit you do NOT support the troops?
supporting the soldiers does not necessarily mean supporting the war. it could mean supporting an withdrawal of our soldiers from Iraq and bringing them home safely.
NOT supporting the troops is apathetic and means you could not care if they lived or died and could stay in Iraq forever.
The troops don't even support the troops. Suicides have sky rocketed this year because even THEY know they're out there for nothing, figthing for a ghost of a cause and the fact that they can't do anything about it backs them into a mental corner. Sadness.
P.S. I, too, cringe everytime a Medicaid Baby Momma hands us a script for an OTC product that costs about $2-4 cash. But then again, that's $2-4 knocked right off the crack rock, also.
Eh...Iraq and "stabilizing" the rest of the Mid East was necessary for strengthening the dollar by proxy. Of course we could just do something to bolster production stateside to decrease trading defects....but...darn it, forcing most of America to truly sacrifice..well...that's just not American. Let's send a bunch of 20 year old to do it instead. They don't vote, anyway...
I hate politics. Everyone is too biased to give me anything resembling an objective answer to anything.
What's really needed is to invest money into the modernization of Iraq. The country will only be changed with enlightenment. Give them good paying manufacturing jobs and you'll see how fast they become complacent in the whole "blow up the US" thing. Either solution we are presented with right now by the Republicans or Democrats will just fuck us over in the end.
I need to be the damn president.
Hate to tell you this, but it was originally the Manchester Guardian. Although it is now based in London, it still has a northern bias. No one in the UK calls it the Guardian of London, it is just the Guardian (or the Granuaid on account of a reputation for typographical errors).
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