Spooky Dealings at the Pentagon
The Defense Department and a private contractor have been building an extensive database of 30 million 16-to-25-year-olds, combining names with Social Security numbers, grade-point averages, e-mail addresses and phone numbers.
- New York Times, 6/24/2005
They have been doing this since 2002, about the time that the Downing Street Memo was written, i.e., about the time it was very clear to everyone but the Congress and the Media that we were on a path to war. Certainly the Pentagon was preparing for the situation they are in now, which is that they don't want to do a draft, but they need to do something dramatic to try and get young people in to the military.
Major General Don Edwards (Ret.) has pointed out just how desperate the situation is and everyone should read his article in the Washington Post.
So now they are doing what big banks, political campaigns and corporate marketers do. They are building a data profile on all young people so that they can crunch all the data and target the specific young people they want to recruit without the young people knowing at all that they have just been profiled.
According to the articles it was an innocent mistake that they failed to report this publicly for three years. That’s what I call a black ops ooops.
posted by Anonymous at 4:06 PM
15 Comments:
Spooky Dealings at the "Insert name of any company in America"
The Pentagon is doing what every company in America already does. The Pentagon needs to find its ideal market and market to those people. This is how companies efficiently use their resources to market their products. The fact that its the Pentagon doing this should not surprise or alarm one person.
What is alarming is how the non-partisan rockthevote.org continually tries to slander anything dealing with the US military or the current US administration.
And the problem with this is what, exactly?
I personally don't care if the Pentagon wants to pull up my GPA/contact information. If they think there's some position that would be good for me, and they want to ask if I'd be interested, they can by all means go right ahead.
The funny thing is, you lefties at Rock the Vote would be pissed if the Pentagon DIDN'T recruit, and instead just took whoever signed up- you'd be saying it was part of a "poverty draft" because only the poor would sign up.
Let them recruit. They want to pull up schooling information? Even better. I'd rather have them recruit me for positions that are relevant to my field, instead of calling me up asking me to go do things I have no skill in.
Now stop whining and trying to scare people.
If you think the Pentagon's database is bad then you should see the one the IRS has on you.
Personally I'd rather no database be kept and the Selective Service be abolished.
Chickenhawks in action
Young Republicans support Iraq war, but not all are willing to join the fight
By Adam Smeltz
Knight Ridder Newspapers
NEW YORK - Young Republicans gathered here for their party's national convention are united in applauding the war in Iraq, supporting the U.S. troops there and calling the U.S. mission a noble cause.
But there's no such unanimity when they're asked a more personal question: Would you be willing to put on the uniform and go to fight in Iraq?
In more than a dozen interviews, Republicans in their teens and 20s offered a range of answers. Some have friends in the military in Iraq and are considering enlisting; others said they can better support the war by working politically in the United States; and still others said they think the military doesn't need them because the U.S. presence in Iraq is sufficient.
"Frankly, I want to be a politician. I'd like to survive to see that," said Vivian Lee, 17, a war supporter visiting the convention from Los Angeles,
Lee said she supports the war but would volunteer only if the United States faced a dire troop shortage or "if there's another Sept. 11."
"As long as there's a steady stream of volunteers, I don't see why I necessarily should volunteer," said Lee, who has a cousin deployed in the Middle East.
In an election season overwhelmed by memories of the Vietnam War, the U.S. military's newest war ranks supreme among the worries confronting much of Generation Y'ers. Iraq is their war.
"If there was a need presented, I would go," said Chris Cusmano, a 21-year-old member of the College Republicans organization from Rocky Point, N.Y. But he said he hasn't really considered volunteering.
At age 16, Chase Carpenter has.
"It's always in the back of my mind - to enlist," Carpenter, a self-described moderate Republican visiting Manhattan this week from Santa Monica, Calif., said Wednesday on the convention floor. He said he's torn over whether he'd join the military if he were 18.
Others said they could contribute on the home front.
"I physically probably couldn't do a whole lot" in Iraq, said Tiffanee Hokel, 18, of Webster City, Iowa, who called the war a moral imperative. She knows people posted in Iraq, but she didn't flinch when asked why she wouldn't go.
"I think I could do more here," Hokel said, adding that she's focusing on political action that supports the war and the troops.
"We don't have to be there physically to fight it," she said.
Similarly, 20-year-old Jeff Shafer, a University of Pennsylvania student, said vital work needs to be done in the United States. There are Republican policies to maintain and protect and an economy to sustain, Shafer said.
Then there's Paula Villescaz, a 15-year-old from Carmichael, Calif. who supports Bush and was all ears Wednesday afternoon at the GOP's Youth Convention in Madison Square Garden. She doesn't support the war, but she supports the troops and thinks the United States "needs to stay the course" now that it's immersed.
If Iraq is still a U.S. issue when she's 18, Villescaz added, she'll give serious thought to volunteering.
"I'm in college right now, but who knows?" said Matthew Vail, a 25-year-old from Huntsville, Ala., who works with Students for Bush. He said he might consider enlisting after he finishes his degree at the University of North Carolina, but not until then.
"The bug may get me after college," he said.
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/9556221.htm
To all those that made Durbin/Dean remarks what say you about Karl Rove:
Steve Gilliard absolutely plasters the Rove apologists:
As a New Yorker, I find this the equivalent of blood libel. (You know, the lie that the Jews used Christian babies blood for matzoh). No one asked what party 343 firemen belonged to when they died, or the 34 policemen. No one asked what party nine members of the 69th Regiment, New York City's own infantry regiment with a lineage going back to WW I, were when they were killed in Iraq, two of whom were immigrants, one a Pakistani muslim. No one asked and no one cared.
To say that New Yorkers, who are 5-1 Democrats, are shirking from the service of their country is an insult to them and their service. No one asked for party enrollment when they took their oath and it is wrong to suggest that it matters now. Many New Yorkers, and Californians as well, have died in the service of their country in Iraq and Afghanistan. [...]
Let me explain something birdman: I smelled the dead in my windows for a week after 9/11. While you sat back and worried about some Sikh blowing up your mall, every time I took a breath, burning flesh and paper filled my nose. Every day, for a year, I opened the paper to read about yet another funeral. On nice, sunny days, I get reminded of 9/11. [...]
So don't fucking lecture me about defending the people who protect my city. You don't drive by the firehouse memorials on every goddamn firehouse in the city. You don't see the stories about fucked up families left behind. You live in a fantasy world where big strong men kill the brown people and make you feel like a man. We know what they did for us far better than you ever will, no matter how much you pretend to understand. You don't. And you never will and you never want to. [...]
Not that you care. You sit in your home and cheer the confused teenagers in Irqq dying for your ideas and you don't lift a finger to help them. You don't volunteer, do you? Not at the local VA, or military hospital. Nope. You just sit there, a big old coward, cheering on children as they get crippled in the quest to make the Islamic Republic of Iraq. A fight you will not join, either.
To begin to understand the New York Democrats' reaction to all of this, read the whole thing.
And you should be aware that Mayor Bloomberg still won't condemn Rove's statements. Republican governor Pataki stands solidly behind Rove too. And NJ GOP candidate Doug Forrester, on whose behalf Rove was fundraising during this trip, doesn't have a problem with it either. Steve has phone numbers and email addresses, for those of you that want to take it up with them...
The White House Attack on Dissent
by Hunter
Fri Jun 24th, 2005 at 12:23:23 PDT
Mahablog:
I'd like to ask Karl and his puppies to stand anywhere in the vincinity of Ground Zero and repeat Karl's fatuous, lying remarks to a crowd of New Yorkers.
Whole lotta liberals in New York. Whole lotta those liberal New Yorkers lost someone in the towers. Whole lotta liberal New Yorkers who lost someone in the towers might want to break Karl's jaw today. Karl would be well advised to keep his sorry ass out of New York from now on.
Junior got less than a quarter of the New York City vote last November, as I recall. Yeah, the people most closely affected by 9/11, who are most intimate with it, are less than impressed with Junior and his war on terra. [...]
That karma wheel keeps turnin' children. Take care.
Some people are misunderstanding the nature of the backlash against Karl Rove and his latest attack against fellow Americans. There's nothing planned about it. It is real, and it is huge. Karl Rove, widely described as the most corrupting, immoral, "pathological" political hack in a nation awash in immoral political hacks, has taken it upon himself to attack a broad and deeply patriotic swath of Americans, including troops in the field, New Yorkers who lost loved ones in the towers, and anyone else who might actually have issues with the incompetent manner in which George W. Bush has cowboyed around the world roundly making a mess of the war on terror.
This is because Karl Rove is, at heart, less a genius than simply someone who finds America's legal and ethical rules below him. He's a political Ted Bundy, and the Republicans treat him like their patron saint.
So please, don't tell the citizens of New York, don't tell liberals, and don't tell fellow Democrats that it's OK to be called traitors. It's not going to work. It's not bloggers or talk shows feuling this, it is a deep-seated rage at the audacity not of Karl Rove, but of the amoral and thuggish White House itself. New Yorkers, in particular, have just had some Beltway hack call their mothers, their fathers, their sons and their daughters traitors. You really think New Yorkers are going to put up with that crap? I'm surprised Karl Rove got out of the building with all his limbs.
Bush Administration :: ::
Karl Rove's comments aren't a distraction from the Downing Street Memos, from Bolton, from Plame, and from the latest failures in Iraq. Rove's comments are the counterattack against anyone who dares bring those things up. They're part and parcel of an Administration that, only six months into this term, is in deep trouble, on all these fronts and others, and is attempting to stifle dissent. Well, we're not going to put up with that crap. We're not.
The most serious crisis facing the administration is this: as the Downing Street "memos" continue to surface, as the Bolton nomination continues to be dragged down as Senate Democrats discover more and more questionable activites undertaken by Bolton on behalf of the White House, and as news reports on other fronts are finally being pieced together into a larger narrative, it is becoming more and more clear that not only was there an effort to "fix" intelligence in the runup to the Iraq War, but that the effort was far larger, more organized, and more vicious against dissenters than administration critics had even suspected. That is the driving force behind many of these new media stories. Rove and the White House need to crush these investigative efforts, and that's what these latest carefully organized attacks against Democrats, liberals, reporters, etc., have been geared towards doing.
It's not going to work. And it's time to get outraged.
I am proud to represented by people like Durbin and Dean. Are you proud to be repreesetned by Karl Rove?
An Honest Conservative Takes Rove To Task
by Armando
Fri Jun 24th, 2005 at 10:11:43 PDT
Trevino of Red State has this to say about Republican defenses of Rove:
Making excuses.
By: trevino · Section: Other Politics
The remarkable thing about the excuse-making for Karl Rove is how intellectually dishonest so much of it is.
Yep, you read that right. Read on.
Jun 24th, 2005: 09:11:08, Not Rated
The excuses fall into two camps: first, that Rove mentioned liberals, not Democrats; second, that Rove is adeptly highlighting a key Republican (though, notably, not conservative!) strength in the public mind. To find the first excuse credible, you must adhere to the following premises:
A critique of an ideology does not constitute a critique of the single principle vehicle of that ideology in American public life.
A critique of an organization's leader does not constitute a critique of that organization.
A critique of a prominent member of an organization does not constitute a critique of that organization.
Karl Rove(!) is suddenly not operating in the political sphere, for the first time ever restricting himself to purely ideological concerns.
To find the second excuse credible, you must adhere to the following premises:
That the Republicans do have a natural advantage in issues of war and defense.
That this purported advantage is a lasting one.
Suffice it to say that the premises attendant to excuse no.2 are the more credible; suffice it to say that neither set of premises are convincingly credible. Let's dismiss excuse no.1 altogether, as it's nothing that a reasonable, fair-minded person would buy -- certainly Republicans would be up in arms over a similar attack on conservatives. As for excuse no.2, while it may contain some dwindling truth, the sad fact is that the two traditional pillars of GOP superiority -- fiscal rectitude and defense -- are pretty much gone under the twin blunders of Administration deficits and the incompetent prosecution of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Rove's ham-handed disingenuousness wasn't merely inept: it's not even particularly true.
On a broader point, rhetoric such as this is simply unbecoming to a White House that purportedly seeks to lead the whole of America. While it's true that pacifist, defeatist leftists such as those at Moveon.org do exist, it's also true that most self-identified liberals heartily supported the invasion of Afghanistan and the goal -- pathetically still unmet after forty-five months -- of capturing or killing Osama bin Laden. It is further true that most liberals gave the President the benefit of the doubt in the invasion of Iraq. In this group, I count my wife, a liberal and a Democrat both, and a 9/11 refugee from downtown Manhattan to boot; along with many friends.
It's also true that pacifist, defeatist conservatives exist. No prize for figuring out who they are.
So what was the purpose behind Rove's remark? The hypothesis is that it was calculated, canny, and well-thought-out, with consequences foreseen and prepared-for. But this is to give too much credit to a man whose effect on the party, in unmooring it from conservative principle in so many ways, has been a long-term negative. If we accept the President's public actions as indicative of Karl Rove's own convictions, then the latter has tenuous, at best situational claim to the conservative mantle; certainly not where wartime is concerned. He is a smart man, and even a political genius. But this does not impart those qualities to all he does. In this case, we can call his action what it was: the demagoguery of mediocrity.
Re the chickenhawk accustion against young republicans, that is exactly right. They would rather have the military figure out some fancy way to find someone else who wants to go fight Bush's war.
C'mon. They covered up the data base until after the election. They misled the nation and the world about weapons of mass destruction. And now there are all these stories about coersive and dishonest recruiting tactics that are used by recruiters. (they had so suspend operations for a day to retrain everyone it got so bad).
It is not the fault of the military. It is Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and the rest of the jerks at the top who just got it wrong.
erik, Rove was right, but I find it interesting on how he parsed his statement, he didn't say Democrats, but rather liberals. Funny how the media and Democrats got upset by those words... I thought if you called a democrat a liberal it was name-calling? Didn't John Kerry take offense to being called a liberal? So I guess in the end we learned that democrats are really liberals, and that Rove really pisses them off.
Until Liberals/Democrats stop calling for enemy combatants to be tried in US courts I'll stand behind Rove's assertion.
BTW Rove has nothing to do with this topic.
As for what does deal with this topic, I find it interesting that half of the young republicans interviewed in that article aren't old enough to enlist. And why is it when the Democrats roll out an honest Draft Dodger for Prez its ok to not serve and have an opinion, but in the time of war unless you are in the military Democrats believe you have no right to support the action.
Interesting.
Rove has nothing to do with this, but Erik is obsessed with throwing around smear at any and all possible chances he gets.
I'd just ignore his drivel if I were you.
You don't like being associated with Rove. I am proud to be associated with dean/durbin. I am proud to call myself a democrat. Most here claim to be anything but a republican while following everything that the right wing echo chamber says and everything the bush and repubs do. Are you not proud of your republican party? Most aren't!
Guest Viewpoint: The party's over for betrayed Republican
By James Chaney
As of today, after 25 years, I am no longer a Republican.
I take this step with deep regret, and with a deep sense of betrayal.
I still believe in the vast power of markets to inspire ideas, motivate solutions and eliminate waste. I still believe in international vigilance and a strong defense, because this world will always be home to people who will avidly seek to take or destroy what we have built as a nation. I still believe in the protection of individuals and businesses from the influence and expense of an over-involved government. I still believe in the hand-in-hand concepts of separation of church and state and absolute freedom to worship, in the rights of the states to govern themselves without undo federal interference, and in the host of other things that defined me as a Republican.
My problem is this: I believe in principles and ideals which my party has systematically discarded in the last 10 years.
My Republican Party was the party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Barry Goldwater, and George H.W. Bush. It was a party of honesty and accountability. It was a party of tolerance, and practicality and honor. It was a party that faced facts and dealt with reality, and that crafted common-sense solutions to problems based on the facts as they were, not as we wished them to be, or even worse, as we made them up. It was a party that told the truth, even when the truth came hard. And now, it is none of those things.
Fifty years from now, the Republican Party of this era will be judged by how we provided for the nation's future on three core issues: how we led the world on the environment, how we minded the business of running our country in such a way that we didn't go bankrupt, and whether we gracefully accepted our place on the world's stage as its only superpower. Sadly, we have built the foundation for dismal failure on all three counts. And we've done it in such a way that we shouldn't be surprised if neither the American people nor the world ever trusts us again.
My party has repeatedly ignored, discarded and even invented science to suit its needs, most spectacularly as to global warming. We have an opportunity and the responsibility to lead the world on this issue, but instead we've chosen greed, shortsightedness and deliberate ignorance.
We have mortgaged the country's fiscal future in a way that no Democratic Congress or administration ever did, and to justify the tax cuts that brought us here, we've simply changed the rules. I matured as a Republican believing that uncontrolled deficit spending is harmful and irresponsible; I still do. But the party has yet to explain to me why it's a good thing now, other than to say "... because we say so."
Our greatest failure, though, has been in our role as superpower. This world needs justice, democracy and compassion, and as the keystone of those things, it needs one thing above all else: truth.
Republican decisions made in 2002 and 2003 have killed almost 2,000 of the most capable patriots our country has to offer - volunteers, every one. Support for those decisions was gathered through what appeared at the time to be spin and marketing, but which now turns out to have been deliberate planning and falsehood. The Blair government's internal documentation only confirms what has been suspected for years: Americans are dying every day for Republican lies first crafted in 2002, expanded and embellished upon in 2003, and which continue to this day. This calculated deception is now burned into the legacy of the party, every bit as much as Reagan's triumph in the Cold War, or Nixon's disgrace over Watergate.
I could go on and on - about how we have compromised our international integrity by sanctioning torture, about how we are systematically dismantling the civil liberties that it took us two centuries to define and preserve, and about how we have substituted bullying, brinksmanship and "staying on message" for real political discourse - but those three issues are enough.
We're poisoning our planet through gluttony and ignorance.
We're teetering on the brink of self-inflicted insolvency.
We're selfishly and needlessly sacrificing the best of a generation.
And we're lying about it.
While it has compiled this record of failure and deception, the party which I'm leaving today has spent its time, energy and political capital trying to save Terri Schiavo, battling the threat of single-sex unions, fighting medical marijuana and physician-assisted suicide, manufacturing political crises over presidential nominees, and selling privatized Social Security to an America that isn't buying. We fiddle while Rome burns.
Enough is enough. I quit.
James Chaney is a Eugene attorney who has been in private practice for more than 20 years, and who has been a registered Republican since 1980.
http://www.registerguard.com/news/2005/06/26/ed.col.chaney.0626.html
QUOTE:
And the problem with this is what, exactly?
I personally don't care if the Pentagon wants to pull up my GPA/contact information. If they think there's some position that would be good for me, and they want to ask if I'd be interested, they can by all means go right ahead.
/QUOTE:
WHAT!?! Are you kidding me? If someone wants my personal information, they damn well better get my permission first. The point is that the pentagon didn't let anyone know they were doing this.
Groups: DOD Should Scrap Massive Database
In comments to the Department of Defense, EPIC and 8 privacy and consumer groups objected to the creation of a massive database for military recruitment purposes. The database would contain the Social Security Numbers, race, and educational information on up to 25 million people as young as 16 years old. The database would be operated by a commercial data marketing company, and individuals would not be able to opt-out. The groups called upon the Department of Defense to terminate the database program, as the database is
fundamentally incompatible with the government's responsibilities under the Privacy Act. (Jun. 21)
http://www.epic.org/privacy/profiling/dodrecruiting.html
WHAT!?! Are you kidding me? If someone wants my personal information, they damn well better get my permission first. The point is that the pentagon didn't let anyone know they were doing this.
Credit bureaus do this all the time. Marketers do this all the time. Face it, your personal information has been impersonal for a very long time.
The Pentagon pulling up harmless information on a typical person makes no difference. In fact, like I said, it's better that they recruit you for things you are actually good at than things you are not. The worst that can happen is that you don't want to be recruited, and you tell them to go to hell.
Is that really so difficult?
QUOTE:
Credit bureaus do this all the time. Marketers do this all the time. Face it, your personal information has been impersonal for a very long time.
The Pentagon pulling up harmless information on a typical person makes no difference. In fact, like I said, it's better that they recruit you for things you are actually good at than things you are not. The worst that can happen is that you don't want to be recruited, and you tell them to go to hell.
Is that really so difficult?
/QUOTE:
First of all, who said it's okay when credit bureaus pull my info without my consent? (There's a way of opting out it to some extent, FYI) Second, many people like every member of EPIC for starters and myself included have a big problem with random people we don't know looking through our personal info in the same way that many women don't like random people looking at them naked. There's no physical harm done in either case, but both are dehumanizing and there's absolutely no good reason why we should be forced to let random people do so without our consent.
That said, the best way to really avoid this pentagon fascism is to homeschool. You get a better education and don't have pentagon fascists calling you either.
www.bureaucrash.com
My name is Leah Silvieus, and I am working on a story for CNN about the U.S. Department of Defense gathering information regarding the student database, and we want to talk with young people who would be impacted. If you are interested, please e-mail me at leah.silvieus@turner.com.
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