March 6, 2010, By Joan Brunwasser

For a long time, I've been fascinated by the MRFF, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, especially after I read founder Mikey Weinstein's book. I recently learned that best-selling author and former evangelical Frank Schaeffer is on their advisory board. I interviewed him several months ago, so I invited him back today. Welcome to OpEdNews, Frank. Let's start at the very beginning. Can you tell our readers what MRFF is?

MRFF's role is to ensure that our government does indeed adhere to the spirit as well as the letter of the Constitution; that it leads by example when it comes to not allowing the military to become a place where religion takes residence as if in a church! Mikey Weinstein, who founded it, has a passion to protect us from the pitfall of allowing fundamentalists to hijack our military in order to 1) convert soldiers and 2) use our military as a platform for missionary work world-wide.

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Original Interview

The Road To 'Global Zero': An Interview With Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan

by Plutonium Page

Sun Feb 07, 2010 at 10:00:39 AM PST

Last week, a rather extraordinary summit took place in Paris. Over 200 leaders and experts in the field of nuclear arms control and national security gathered to discuss the threat of nuclear proliferation and terrorism, and a plan to:

...end the nuclear threat once and for all by setting the world on the course to the elimination of all nuclear weapons.

Presidents Obama and Medvedev sent statements to the summit; Ellen Tauscher, the US Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security, even spoke at the conference, as did UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon.

SOURCE: OpEdNews

January 10, 2010

Part Two: Veteran Journalists Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould Give OpEdNews the Lowdown on Afghanistan

By Joan Brunwasser

Welcome back for the conclusion of my interview with Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould. In the first half, you dissected how we got to this point. The next question for you two is, can we break out of this military mindset?

The U.S. is currently in a tenuous financial arrangement with the rest of the world and especially Russia and China. How long the United States can continue to act as a hegemonic power in Central Asia with the intention of controlling pipeline routes against Chinese and Russian interests is a delicate and growing issue. Without careful and ingenious diplomacy, the United States could soon find itself as the odd man out. No amount of military thinking or spending will resolve the problem the United States faces. If the United States can't adjust to this new post cold war reality, then the U.S. will go the way of the Soviet Union.

SOURCE: OpEdNews

January 9, 2010

Veteran Journalists Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould Give OpEdNews the Lowdown on Afghanistan

By Joan Brunwasser

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are a husband and wife team of journalists who have spent the last thirty years keeping a close eye on Afghanistan. They are the go-to folks if you want to really understand this hot spot and its history. Welcome to OpEdNews, Paul and Liz. Your book, Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story, came out last year. Please tell our readers a bit about your background and what made you the right ones for the job.

Paul and Liz

Big things were happening in 1978, with new approaches to old problems as the Carter administration vowed to eliminate the threat of nuclear war and reevaluated detente with the Soviet Union. The Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, SALT was a major vehicle for these changes and by 1979 we had focused on its impact by interviewing the central figures. By the end of 1979, we had finished a documentary called the Arms Race and the Economy, A Delicate Balance, analyzing the effects of defense spending on the US economy. Having experienced a decade of improving relations with the Soviet Union our documentary was received with great interest.

I think it's because there's an inability to anticipate what is going to happen next. And that's probably a consequence of an inability to track the sequence of events with any accuracy. It's as if information is randomized, like shuffling a deck of cards, BEFORE being stored in memory. Knowing what comes next is never identified. So, remembering the past is no help, if one wants to prevent making the same mistakes again.

C.I.A. Said to End Blackwater Contract
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: December 11, 2009

WASHINGTON (AP) -- CIA Director Leon Panetta has canceled a contract with the former Blackwater security firm that allowed the company's operatives to load missiles on Predator drones in Pakistan.

Panetta canceled the contract earlier this year and the work is being shifted to government personnel, a person familiar with the contract said Friday. The person spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the classified program.

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December 2, 2009, Ann Jones, Author of "Kabul in Winter," Talks with OpEdNews

By Joan Brunwasser

Ann Jones is a writer, photographer and social activist. Over the years, she has been particularly vocal about the rights of women. Kabul in Winter was published in 2006. Welcome to OpEdNews, Ann. When you first headed to Afghanistan, did you imagine that you would be there for so long?

Kabul in Winter

When I first went to Kabul, I hoped to stay just a few months. That seems to be the plan of every invader. The Soviet army planned on a few weeks and stayed a decade, and the US seems well on the way to outstripping that terrible record. In my case, I saw that there was a pressing need for a little help, and I was drawn to Afghan women who were thrilled to have been released from Taliban captivity and eager to take up their public lives again. So I kept going back, year after year, doing my small part--only to witness the sad dashing of Afghan hopes and the rising disappointment, and anger, at all things American.

I first went to Afghanistan in 2002, planning to spend a few months helping Afghans pick up the pieces after the American bombardment, of which I deeply disapproved. (That bombing, by the way, killed more innocent civilians than were lost in the attack on the World Trade Center, while leaving Osama bin Laden untouched.) I found work as a volunteer with a couple of small NGOs non-governmental organizations that worked with women; one that helped widows earn some money by sewing and gardening, and another that worked with women survivors of personal violence in the midst of war.

SOURCE: Truthout.org

Monday 30 November 2009

by: Dina Rasor, t r u t h o u t | Special Investigative Report

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: LizaP)

Recently, the Congressional Research Service released an amazing statistic – it will cost one million dollars a year to support one soldier for one year in Afghanistan.

This mind-blowing number partly includes the cost of private contractors who have moved into areas of support that have been strictly military in the past. Estimates for the numbers of contractors have been as high as one contractor for every soldier. As President Obama prepares to announce his decision on Afghanistan, the price of this war is also on his mind since he included Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, in his last war council.

One of the reasons for the high costs of maintaining each soldier is the lack of oversight of private contractor billings over the course of these two wars. The Department of Defense (DOD), and especially the Army, has fought the auditors and the investigators in the military who have attempted to expose fraud, waste, overbillings and other abuses of costs in contractor contracts. The contractors, using contingency contracting, which is similar to the old cost plus contracts, knew that their profits and, more important, their future task orders and contracts would be priced based on what they spend in the beginning of the wars. So the contractor billing meter, especially in labor costs, spun vigorously in the first years of the war with little oversight. When the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) tried to withhold a small percentage of payment from KBR, the largest contractor, because it believed that the billings were excessive and they wanted to scrub the numbers, the Army pushed past the DCAA and paid KBR the excessive costs. This set the tone to let the contractor billings run wild.

Click here to see Truthout's Matt Renner interview Dina Rasor.