The U.S. Navy SEAL who shot and killed Osama bin Laden is speaking out for the first time since the May 1, 2011, raid on the al-Qaida leader’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
In an interview with Esquire, the former SEAL—identified as “The Shooter” due to what the magazine described as “safety” reasons—said he’s been largely abandoned by the U.S. government since leaving the military last fall.
He told Esquire he decided to speak out to both correct the record of the bin Laden mission and to put a spotlight on how some of the U.S. military’s highly trained and accomplished soldiers are treated by the government once they return to civilian life.
Despite killing the world’s most-wanted terrorist, he said, he was not given a pension, health care or protection for himself or his family.
“[SEAL command] told me they could get me a job driving a beer truck in Milwaukee,” he told Esquire.
Plus, he said, “my health care for me and my family stopped. I asked if there was some transition from my Tricare to Blue Cross Blue Shield. They said no. You’re out of the service, your coverage is over. Thanks for your 16 years. Go f— yourself.”
Not even good for driving a beer truck, which would seem recession proof.
Unfortunately, there are millions more already in line.
The good news: The Esquire notice will get him a book deal and some offers. If he can’t write, a ghost will be furnished. Hardly anyone else gets that opportunity.
Funny how the Ted Nugents of the country never want for work.
Readers will have noticed much of national security has taken an extended holiday. Cyberwar took off for a long time because the people who love to talk about it and make all the claims planted in the news, the upper tier, were enjoying Xmas and a few extra weeks sipping champagne in their chalets.
Al Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction have taken a permanent holiday. It is difficult to take seriously discussions on the ease of making biological weapons, or the Internet ricin recipe being dangerous when American white gun crazies have shot up more people in the last 12 months than jihadis in the US post-p/11.
All this is because much of the old national security threat matrix is shoeshine — talk to guarantee full employment in that jobs sector.
The real problems of the US are a political party that has turned neo-fascist, predatory American multi-national big business, inequality, an economy that doesn’t work for way too many citizens, and the continual real threat posed by a runaway gun lobby that exists only to stimulate the business of small arms manufacturing.
Talks of cyberwar and a cyber Pearl Harbor seem to be a regular fixture of news reports in the last few months, with prominent U.S. administration officials like Janet Napolitano or Leon Panetta regularly touting the threat of a cyber attack on the United States. But not everybody is buying it. For one, Howard Schmidt, the former chief cybersecurity advisor to President Barack Obama, is skeptical.
“I don’t share the viewpoint that we’re on the brink of disaster every time a new worm comes out or a new DDoS (distributed denial of service) comes out,” he told Mashable. In fact, he even disagrees with the terminology that’s being used. “I don’t like using the word cyberwar, and I don’t like using the word cyber 9/11, cyber Pearl Harbor and all these other things,” he said …
Schmidt said he’s not discounting the threat, in fact, he is well aware of the potential disruption that cyber attacks could cause. For him, the worst case scenario is an attack that takes out power, something that could have cascading and potentially very damaging effects. It’s exactly for this reason that he also warns that using cyberweapons or malware against another nations should be a measure of last resort.
“You can use fire in a conflict if you’re not going to burn. If you’re going to burn, you better not care about what’s going to burn,” he said. “And in cyberspace you think about how vulnerable we are in the United States and generally in the developed countries, that could have a worse effect than what we’re trying to solve to begin with.”
Of course, Mashable itself is shoeshine. It exists only because of the need for grease — and a class of publicity workers for the upper tier in US tech society, providing comment and news on material always implied to be revolutionary but of virtually zero value when thinking about the problems that have blighted the economic prospects and health of hundreds of millions in the United States.
Electronic Pearl Harbor talk is now almost twenty years old. Over fifteen years ago I flatly stated that “electronic Pearl Harbor — not likely.” The people who are writing about it now were in rubber pants when the foundations of the meme were put in place.
Howard Schmidt is an old-timer. He’s been around long enough to see that cyberwar has never made the United States skip a beat while plenty of other things from the real world have.
“[Operation] Red October is rumored to be either a Russian or a Chinese operation,” reads Mashable.
Six months from now it will be something else. Just as it’s been for the past fifteen years.
A secret legal review on the use of America’s growing arsenal of cyberweapons has concluded that President Obama has the broad power to order a pre-emptive strike if the United States detects credible evidence of a major digital attack looming from abroad, according to officials involved in the review.
That decision is among several reached in recent months as the administration moves, in the next few weeks, to approve the nation’s first rules for how the military can defend, or retaliate, against a major cyberattack. New policies will also govern how the intelligence agencies can carry out searches of faraway computer networks for signs of potential attacks on the United States and, if the president approves, attack adversaries by injecting them with destructive code — even if there is no declared war.
“While many potential targets are military, a country’s power grids, financial systems and communications networks can also be crippled,” reads the Times.
The financial system was crippled, by its own corrupt work and bad faith financial speculation in 2007.
What happened? The economy tottered, the world was thrown into a depression and the US government stepped in to keep the banks from failing.
Cyberwar could do that? That’s shoeshine hard at work.
“Meet the Data Brains Behind the Rise of Facebook” reads the title and you get a picture of said brains arrayed, all guys, all smiles, trying to look as hip as can be, like a new rat pack or a famous all boy pop group.
Wired and the Facebook programmers want you to believe the worldwide data handling that goes into coordinating the nuisance ads inserted into your news feed along with all the likes and posts, is something remarkable.
Nope fellows, they’re not the new Manhattan Project in 1,000 words. They’re not even the global effort that makes the new flu vaccine every year, just guys who communicate the jargon of software platforms, big data and server clusters.
“[Someone] even graced the Facebook data team with its own theme song,” reads Wired.
Everywhere, it’s part of what WhiteManistan has to say. They all talk like this and say it so often it would sound better if they sang it. Some do, using an assortment of similar refrains.
Which is what this is about. From the comments for Gun Nut Folk Tune. When you sing it for them, the truth apparently is of a lower moral standard. Should leave the country, too.
Yesterday I was reading Howard K. Smith’s “Last Train from Berlin,” published in 1941 before this country entered the war. It’s an exceptional piece of reporting on the Nazi capitol just as it was beginning to sink in to the people of Germany that Hitler was not going to win the war and the day of reckoning, when it arrived, would be terrible. It eloquently captures the bleakness of Nazi Germany and a growing fear among its citizens.
Entertainment died in Nazi Germany because the best of it involves telling the truth. But truth was forbidden. And most of the country’s artistic talent had either been driven out, imprisoned or killed.
This caused a crash in movie attendance. Smith writes about German movies made to glorify the war effort. And one he picks to describe has some resonance when compared with the US taste for war movies during the last decade — which is nonexistent. The recent thing involving the good guys (or woman) torturing a bad guy and the hunt for bin Laden.
Wrote Smith:
The [German propaganda films] can be exhaustively described by a five-letter word. Lousy. Take the one called “Stukas.” It was a monotonous film about a bunch of obstreperous adolescents who dive-bombed things and people. They bombed everything and everybody. That was all the whole film was — just one bombing after another. Finally the hero gets bored with bombing and lost interest in life. So they took him off to the Bayreuth music festival, where he listened to a few lines of Wagnerian music, his soul began to breathe again, he got visions of the Fuhrer and guns blazing away, so he impolitely left right in the middle of the first act and dashed back and started bombing things again, with the old gusto.
That’s wonderful writing. And the entire piece is like that.
Americans no more want to see movies from Iraq, Afghanistan, wherever, than the people of Berlin wanted to see “Stukas” in the autumn of 1941. What, a real movie called “Day of the Drones,” showing the remote pilots between flying missions in a windowless building and returning to their tract homes in the suburbs, would have an audience?
And it made me think about why I also detest the journalism that has evolved to cover the war on terror and the technology of America’s national security industry. Because it’s all like “Stukas” must have been. Deadening and stupid.
Even when its young reporters work in some pallid snark, between the lot they never come up with anything even remotely as supercilious or appropriate as what’s in Last Train from Berlin.
The reasons for that have always been fairly obvious. They can’t have the natsec biz and the Pentagon thinking they’re combative.
“The only things that are not trash are their guns, which are handsome and terrifying,” writes Smith of the arms in Berlin. “The biggest and handsomest [are] anti-aircraft cannon mounted on a tower which, itself looks like a fantastic monstrosity from a lost world, or another planet. It is huge and positively frightening just to look at (Nazis like to hear it described this way; they are specialists in fright propaganda. But the world has now advanced beyond the stage of being frightened in any decisive way by anything the Nazis do or create.)”
Proven by science, or at least by the Congressional Research Office, the legislative analytical arm looks into ‘profit shifting’ by American multi-national corporations. Profit-shifting is the practice of using global tricks to declare the majority of profits in tax haven countries while investing virtually zero in hiring and infrastructure in the same places.
This is the utilization of small nothing-nations like Bermuda, Luxembourg and Switzerland, to launder profit so that tax payment to Uncle Sam are avoided. In such a way one has read news of US oil giants with central shell offices in Zug, Switzerland, or Apple routing its iTunes and iJunk store purchases through Luxembourg.
This is not new and the Congressional Research Service does not phrase it so indelicately. But it is good that the agency has analyzed the trend — which is upward — and reported the truth in “An Analysis of Where American Companies Report Profits: Indications of Profit-Shifting,” ably distributed by Steven Aftergood and his Secrecy blog here.
“The analysis appears to show that American companies report earning profits in tax haven or tax-preferred countries that, when compared to more traditional economies, appear to be disproportionate to hiring and capital investment in those countries,” reads the CRS report summary. “Profits reported by American companies also appear to be disproportionate to national output in the tax haven countries, and in some countries, these reported profits actually exceed total economic output.”
In other words, the financial structures of Bermuda, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Ireland, Switzerland and others appear to have been modified and used exactly because they enable tax avoidance as international parasite nations.
Again, “An Analysis of Where American Companies Report Profits: Indications of Profit-Shifting,” at Secrecy blog here.
Not much of a surprise from the New York Times, a quick piece on corporate hiring in the economy that produces little. Corporate America is now hiring primarily through connections, which leaves anyone out of work for a long time discarded. America has always hated the unemployed.
It also points out that resumes sites like Monster and Careerbuilder are largely a waste of time.
One of the questions, or rather assertions from the crowd:
Online job search is a waste of time. Once you have given up as I have, how is one expected to go out and try to put on a positive face when all one faces is no positive direction? Everything in the United States is a scam.
For many, it’s a very accurate observation. Much of daily life is filled with scams from corporate America and to survive everyone must go about the task of trying to always avoid the tricks and traps. And the past four years have made it abundantly clear that no will exists anywhere in the country — except maybe in the writings of Paul Krugman — to lessen unemployment, decrease inequality, and raise the pay and declining living standards of average Americans. In fact, these are things that are vigorously opposed in the current system.
Of course, the headhunter couldn’t admit this was so. But he couldn’t actually lie in front of everyone, either, so he had to talk in a circle:
No, everything is not a scam. There are a lot of companies that are hiring, but there are more that are nervous about investing in more personnel in a volatile economy. It’s understandable: So much is in flux today that companies hesitate to spend money, and they over-compensate by insisting on “perfect hires??? …
First, we already know that applying for jobs online is largely a waste of time …
The “hiring expert” who insisted not everything was a scam emphasized the importance of knowing someone on the inside, of having a network. Then he conceded most people didn’t have the luck or resources to cultivate such relationships. And not tackled was the hard fact that once you’ve been unemployed nobody wants to know you — which is the same as having no “network.”
Economists and other experts say the recession has severed networks for many workers, especially the long-term unemployed, whose ranks have remained high even as the economy recovers.
“You’re submitting your résumé to a black hole,??? it reads at one point.
Although the phenomenon has intensified it’s not unique. When I was being trained in chemistry, none of the undergraduates (the bachelors and masters candidates) I worked with got first positions by sending out resumes in response to ads in the trade journals like Science and C&E News. It just didn’t happen. They could all use their rejection notices as wallpaper.
When they got hired it was always through leveraging someone they already knew at a company, or pleading with a relative who worked at a firm to get them an in.
Human resource departments were simply barriers.
The New York Times piece spends a lot of time discussing hiring at Deloitte & Touche, one of the big parasite consulting and accounting firms of the country, a business that encompasses everything but which contributes very little observable to the social good.
Another firm mentioned hiring more and more by acquaintance is a national rent-a-car company.
If a rent-a-car company is run by people so venal and stupid that it thinks that the only good employees for standing behind a counter and working a scheduling and tracking program on a computer network, moving cars around a parking lot and handing out keys can be obtained only by digging through the friends of current workers, it speaks volumes about their regard for people, including their own.
