They'll fix you. They fix everything.

Europeans Seek to Revive Nuclear Weapons Ban

The European Union is trying to revive a movement to reduce the number of nuclear weapons, proposing a global ban on nuclear testing and a moratorium on the production of all fissile material, according to a letter from the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, made public on Monday.

Rice: U.S. is still ‘very well-regarded’ in terms of ‘popularity.’

In an interview with CBS today, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was asked how the U.S. image has fared under President Bush. Rice acknowledged that there were “some negative perceptions” but added that the U.S. is still quite popular.

DELUSIONAL...



Role of Alleged CIA Asset in Mumbai Attacks Being Downplayed
Recent press reports on developments with regard to last month’s attacks in Mumbai, India indicate the role of Dawood Ibrahim, a wanted crime boss, terrorist, and drug trafficker, is being downplayed, possibly the result of a deal taking place behind the scenes between the governments of the US, Pakistan, and India, to have others involved in the Mumbai attacks turned over while quietly diverting attention from a man who some say could reveal embarrassing secrets about the CIA’s involvement in criminal enterprises.

Mumbai Terror Group Trained American Jihadists
A growing chorus of intelligence officials in the U.S. and in south Asia have pinned the Mumbai attacks on the Kashmir-based militants Lashkar-e-Taiba. But there's been hardly any mention of the extremist group's deep ties to American-based jihadists.

India demands Pakistan hand over 40 wanted 'terrorists'

India has demanded that Pakistan hand over 40 people it believes were involved in attacks on Indian soil and other serious crimes, the Indian Foreign Minister announced today.
Pranab Mukherjee also called on Pakistan to follow up on its recent arrest of several militants by completely dismantling the facilities of terrorist groups operating on its territory.
However, Pakistan says it wants proof of their role in Mumbai and has categorically ruled out handing them to India, pledging to try them on its own territory if there is evidence against them.

Bush's flock expected to go out to pasture quietly
But for Mr. Bush and his colleagues, the post-executive period is unlikely to mimic the elder statesman efforts of Jimmy Carter or the globe-trotting celebrity of Bill Clinton. After presiding over two unpopular wars, a tanking economy and the lowest approval ratings in recent U.S. political history, most agree that Mr. Bush will eagerly leave behind both Washington and the public spotlight.

Injured Veterans Denied Promised Reviews
There was nothing dramatic about how Spc. Cristapher Zuetlau's career in the Army came to an end: he stepped in a hole. But the damage to the tank crewman's wrenched back was so brutal he can barely walk.
The Army agreed he was no longer fit to serve, but in doing so determined his disability was not severe enough to warrant long-term care by the military. That turned his health care over to the Department of Veterans Affairs, which left him with no retirement benefits and cut off his family from government health care.
Thousands of similar stories caused veterans advocates to protest that the military was manipulating disability ratings to save money, and Congress last year ordered the Pentagon to accept appeals from wounded and injured troops.
So far, officials have yet to examine a single case.

Prosecutor removed from Cheney case
A judge removed a South Texas prosecutor from cases related to Vice President Dick Cheney, a state senator and a private prison group Wednesday, calling the district attorney biased and ordering Texas Rangers to escort him to his office so he could hand over case files.

Musicians don't want tunes used for torture
The tactic has been common in the U.S. war on terror, with forces systematically using loud music on hundreds of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then the U.S. military commander in Iraq, authorized it on Sept. 14, 2003, "to create fear, disorient ... and prolong capture shock."
Now the detainees aren't the only ones complaining. Musicians are banding together to demand the U.S. military stop using their songs as weapons.

UK runs 'Guantanamo camps', say detainees

Asylum-seekers who claim to have been abused by British security guards accused the Government yesterday of running Guantanamo Bay-style detention camps.
Mafungasei Maikokera, a Zimbabwean asylum-seeker attending a meeting at the House of Commons, said guards had beaten her when she resisted attempts to deport her, and had discussed "bonuses" they were paid for removing asylum-seekers.

Ohio sheriff orders deputies not to evict

A sheriff in southwest Ohio has ordered deputies to ignore eviction orders when people have nowhere else to live.
Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones says evictions in winter weather and during an economic recession are heartless and those cases should be sent back to the courts and resolved some other way.

The Next Shoe to Drop: Pension Payments

Dozens of millions of newly retired “baby-boomers” are beginning to call upon payback from these [pension] funds. According to our team, it is likely that, by the end of 2008, this crisis will be the dominant aspect of the current global financial crisis. It will also provoke a social crisis affecting pensioners, in particular in the US (45 percent of pension funds’ total assets in the world), in Japan (18 percent) and in various European countries depending heavily on capital-based pension systems.

Time to redefine the Economic Paradigm
Lack of regulation and the quest for short term profit at the expense of long term sustainability has brought the World to it's knees. A new paradigm is desperately needed to restore sanity to a world gone mad. As we travel the downside we cannot expect the same failed mechanisms to save us.

Does this look like a vehicle regular Americans want or need?

Big 3 Auto Rescue Bill Bails Out Transit SILO Tax Shelters
Grassley said the tax shelter bailout within the auto bailout is related to abusive leasing transactions called SILOs, where transit agencies have sold public transportation assets like rail lines, only to lease them back from purchasers, with the result of providing tax depreciation deductions to the purchasers. Such transactions were motivated solely by collection of fees on one side and tax benefits on the other, rather than any change to the services provided by transit agencies.

Revoking Israel's UN Membership
The Gaza Strip is now the largest concentration camp in the world. The situation grows steadily more insufferable for the 1.5 million Palestinians who live there. Deliveries of food, medicine and fuel are made difficult or stopped altogether. Child malnutrition is increasing. Water supplies and drainage have ceased to function. Children die for lack of healthcare. Tunnels to Egypt, dug by hand, are the only breathing space. Journalists and diplomats are denied entry. Israel is planning more military efforts.

Livni calls of a large-scaled military offensive in Gaza
Israeli Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, stated on Wednesday that the Israeli army should carry a large-scaled military offensive in the Gaza Strip in retaliation for what she described as "the violation of the truce".
On the ground, Israel already violated the truce, carried offensives, killed, wounded and kidnapped Palestinians, and kept the border crossings sealed in spite that the truce states that Israel should open the border terminals.
Yet, Livni said that Israel must make it clear to Hamas that it is responsible for the deterioration of the situation.

Israeli army awaiting order for ground offensive in Gaza
As the fragile Egyptian-brokered ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, is ending in eight days, Israeli military leaders stated on Wednesday that the Army is ready to carry out any military offensive the political leaders order, Israeli Ynet News reported.
Military sources said that the army already submitted to the political leadership in Israel several scenarios of action that were in turn handed to the cabinet.

Iran to send relief ship to Gaza
Iran's Red Crescent announced on Wednesday that it is sending a relief ship to the Gaza Strip, in the face of an Israeli blockade of the Hamas-ruled territory.
The official did not disclose the nationality of the ship, but said the cargo will include 500 tonnes of wheat, 200 tonnes of sugar, 200 tonnes of rice, 50 tonnes of cooking oil and 50 tonnes of medical supplies.

Settler who shot a Palestinian in al-Khalil released

Israeli radio reported on Wednesday that an Israeli settler who shot a Palestinian in al-Khalil was set free by a magistrate who rebuked the IOF for not arresting the Palestinians who were throwing stones. Malka Aviv, a judge at the magistrates court in Jerusalem, ordered the release of Ze'ev Brauda from "house arrest" after his lawyer claimed that Brauda acted in self defence and even claimed that the Palestinian who was shot got up again and started throwing stones.

When FBI Called, Governor Asked: 'Is This A Joke?'
Robert Grant, the FBI special agent in charge, called the house on the phone.
"I advised him that we had a warrant for his arrest, that there were two FBI agents outside his door. I woke him up. So the first thing was, he asked if this was a joke. He tried to make sure that was an honest call."
Once convinced, Blagojevich gave himself up to the agents on his front porch and was taken away in handcuffs to FBI headquarters where he sat for four hours before he was moved to court.

A Whitewash for Blackwater?
The federal manslaughter indictment of five Blackwater Worldwide security guards in the horrific massacre of more than a dozen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad may look like an exercise in accountability, but it's probably the exact opposite -- a whitewash that absolves the government and corporate officials who should bear ultimate responsibility.

A tattered safety net for US unemployed
As a rising number of Americans sign up for unemployment benefits, many of the state-funded trusts that pay them are on the decline. At least 12 of them are on the brink of insolvency. In 20 other states, the funds have lost value, even before the big job losses of the past two months.

9/11 families condemn tribunals

Thirty-three relatives of people killed in the 9/11 attacks on the US have denounced the Guantanamo war crimes trials as illegitimate and unfair.

Rep. Reyes: Since Torture Might Be Necessary, Obama Should Keep Torture Apologists Hayden, McConnell

Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told Congress Daily that President-elect Obama should keep Mike McConnell on as Director of National Intelligence and Michael Hayden as head of the CIA. He said Obama should keep “continuity” in the intelligence sector because we live in “a world that is very dangerous.”
Reyes dismissed concerns over Hayden and McConnell’s records as apologists for torture. He insisted that that “there are some options that need to be available” to interrogators — presumably beyond the Army Field Manuel — to get the best information.

WRONG!

Gen. Hayden and the claimed irrelevance of presidential appointments

If, less than 3 years later, Obama chooses as his CIA Director the very same Michael Hayden -- who, during his confirmation hearing, justified Bush's illegal NSA spying and said how proud he was to help implement it [to say nothing of his (at best) equivocations on torture] -- then it should be quite . . . let us, for the moment, say "interesting" . . . to watch him and his most loyal supporters explain and justify that.

CIA Drug Trafficking and remembering Gary Webb

Check out this new story by Robert Parry reflecting on journalist Garry Webb's suicide, after being totally blacklisted by the mainstream media because he had the guts to speak the truth about the CIA and other parts of the US government that helped the Contras and their allies import cocaine into the US, during the period that President Reagan was talking about "fighting drugs" and locking up all those drug users in a cage, beefing up the police state and the prison industrial complex.

The CIA and Drugs
Just say "Why not?"
by William Blum
"In my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA."
Dennis Dayle, former chief of an elite DEA enforcement unit.
On August 18, 1996, the San Jose Mercury initiated an extended series of articles about the CIA connection to the crack epidemic in Los Angeles. Though the CIA and influential media like The Washington Post , The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times went out of their way to belittle the significance of the articles, the basic ingredients of the story were not really new -- the CIA's Contra army, fighting the leftist government of Nicaragua, turning to smuggling cocaine into the U.S., under CIA protection, to raise money for their military and personal use.

Babylon's history swept away in US army sandbags
Fragments of bricks, engraved with cuneiform characters thousands of years old, lie mixed with the rubble and sandbags left by the US military on the ancient site of Babylon in Iraq.
In this place, one of the cradles of civilisation, US troops in 2003-2004 built embankments, dug ditches and spread gravel to hold the fuel reservoirs needed to supply the heliport of Camp Alpha.




Police taser man in diabetic shock
Luckily for a driver who went into severe diabetic shock last month in Oklahoma, police arrived on the scene and called in an ambulance.
But not before they tasered and handcuffed him.

Torture and murder at a Florida reform school
He was beaten so badly that his underwear was buried into his skin. The nurse on campus had to surgically remove it. He says his face was unrecognizable after multiple lashes with a whip.



'White House Boys' win inquiry of reform school graves

Roger Kiser, Michael McCarthy, Bryant Middleton and Dick Colon talked about whippings and beatings and other boys who disappeared.
They discussed the 32 crosses marking the graves of persons unknown on the grounds of the former Florida Industrial School for Boys.
They called their group the White House Boys, taking the name from the single story concrete building where, they say, boys were beaten and tortured decades ago.
The White House Boys believe that delinquents and orphans sent to the concrete White House were killed and their remains buried to cover up the brutality.

Larry Summers’ Hedge Fund Freezes Redemptions
Larry Summers’ company, D.E. Shaw, announced this week that it has frozen client withdrawals. Summers, who was tapped to lead President Obama’s White House National Economic Council, served as a managing director to the hedge fund up until the announcement of his cabinet appointment.
D.E. Shaw Co, is a New York based hedge fund with a reputation surrounded in secrecy.

On Global Warming

Is it possible (just possible) that our "dear leaders" have once again diverted our energy and good intentions away from REAL threats (like genetically modified food, neurotoxins in our vaccines, carcinogenic pesticides all over our food, etc) into something that serves them (expands their power and their profits) while doing NOTHING to "make us safe?"

EU carbon trading system brings windfalls for some, with little benefit to climate
The European Union started with the most high-minded of ecological goals: to create a market that would encourage companies to reduce greenhouse gases by making them pay for each ton emitted into the atmosphere.
Four years later, the carbon trading system has created a multibillion-euro windfall for some of the continent's biggest polluters, with little or no noticeable benefit to the environment so far.

Carbon Trading is a Scam

Obama must ensure that the banks use the trillions of dollars in federal bailout assistance to renegotiate mortgages and make new loans to worthy homebuyers and businesses. Obama must make certain that banks do not continue to squander federal largess by padding executive bonuses, acquiring other banks and pursuing new high-return, high-risk lines of businesses in merger activity, carbon trading and complex derivatives.

Nick Turse: It's Time for a Trillion-Dollar Tag Sale at the Pentagon

It's Time for a Trillion-Dollar Tag Sale at the Pentagon

By Nick Turse, Tomdispatch.com

Wars, bases, and money. The three are inextricably tied together.

In the 1980s, for example, American support for jihadis like Osama bin Laden waging war on (Soviet) infidels who invaded and constructed bases in Afghanistan, a Muslim land, led to rage by many of the same jihadis at the bases (U.S.) infidels built in the Muslim holy land of Saudi Arabia in the 1990s. That, in turn, led to jihadis like bin Laden declaring war on those infidels, which, after September 11, 2001, led the Bush administration to launch, and then prosecute, a Global War on Terror, often from newly built bases in Muslim lands. Over the last seven years, the results of that war have been particularly disastrous for Iraqis and Afghans. Sizable numbers of Americans, however, are now beginning to suffer as well. After all, their hard-earned taxpayer dollars have been poured into wars without end, leaving the country deeply in debt and in a state of economic turmoil.

In his 1988 State of the Union message, President Ronald Reagan called the jihadis in Afghanistan "freedom fighters." They were, of course, fighting the Soviet Union then. He, too, pledged eternal enmity against the Soviet Union, which he termed an "evil empire." For years, conservatives have claimed that Reagan not only won his Afghan War, but by launching an all-out arms race, which the economically weaker Soviet Union couldn't match, bankrupted the Soviets and so brought their empire down.

While that version of history may be disputed, today, it is entirely possible that one of Reagan's freedom fighters, Osama bin Laden, actually returned the favor by perfecting the art of financially felling a superpower. While Reagan ran up a superpower-sized tab to outspend the Soviets, bin Laden has done it on the cheap. Essentially for the cost of box cutters and flight training, he got the Bush administration to spend itself into penury, without a superpower in sight.

Since bin Laden's supreme act of economic judo in 2001, the U.S. military has spent multi-billions of tax dollars on a string of bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, failed wars in both countries, and a failed effort to make good on George W. Bush's promise to bring in bin Laden "dead or alive." Despite this record, the Pentagon still has a success option in its back pocket that might help bail out the American people in this perilous economic moment. It could immediately begin to auction off its overseas empire posthaste. To head down this road, however, U.S. military leaders would first have to take a brutally honest look at the real costs, and the real utility, of their massively expensive weapons systems and, above all, those bases.

Today, the Pentagon acknowledges 761 active military "sites" in foreign countries -- and that's without bases in Iraq, Afghanistan, and certain other countries even being counted. This "empire of bases," as Chalmers Johnson has noted, "began as the leftover residue of World War II," later evolving into a Cold War and post-Cold War garrisoning of the planet.

With those bases came a series of costly wars in Korea in the 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Persian Gulf in the early 1990s. An extremely conservative estimate of their cost by the Congressional Research Service -- $1 trillion (in 2008 dollars) -- tops the present economic bailout. Add in brief cut-and-run flops like Lebanon in 1983 and Somalia, from 1992-1995, as well as now-forgotten hollow victories in places like the island of Grenada and Panama, and you tack on billions more with little to show for it.

Since 2001, the Bush administration's Global War on Terror (including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) has cost taxpayers more than the recent bailout -- more than $800 billion and still climbing by at least $3.5 billion each week. And the full bill has yet to come due. According to Noble Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University professor Linda Bilmes, the total costs of those two wars could top out between $3 trillion and $7 trillion.

While squandering money, the Global War on Terror has also acted as a production line for the creation of yet more military bases in the oil heartlands of the planet. Just how many is unknown -- the Pentagon keeps exact figures under wraps -- but, in 2005, according to the Washington Post, there were 106 American bases, from macro to micro, in Iraq alone.

If you were to begin the process of disentangling Americans from this world of war and the war economy that goes with it, those bases would be a good place to start. There is no way to estimate the true costs of our empire of bases, but it's worth considering what an imperial tag sale could mean for America's financial well-being. One thing is clear: in getting rid of those bases, the United States would be able to recoup, or save, hundreds of billions of dollars, despite the costs associated with shutting them down.

Tag Sales and Savings

If the Pentagon sold off just the buildings and structures on its officially acknowledged overseas bases at their current estimated replacement value, the country would stand to gain more than $119 billion. Think of this as but a down payment on a full-scale Pentagon bailout package.

In addition, while it leases the property on which most of its bases abroad are built, the Pentagon does own some lucrative lands that could be sold off. For instance, it is the proud owner of more than 11,000 acres in Abu Dhabi, "the richest and most powerful of the seven kingdoms of the United Arab Emirates." With land values there averaging $1,100 per square meter last year, this property alone is worth an estimated $48.9 billion. The Pentagon also owns several thousand acres spread across Oman, Japan, South Korea, Germany, and Belgium. Selling off these lands as well would net a sizeable sum.

Without those bases, billions of dollars in other Pentagon expenses would immediately disappear. For instance, during the years of the Global War on Terror, the Overseas Cost of Living Allowance, which equalizes the "purchasing power between members [of the military] overseas and their U.S.-based counterparts," has reached about $12 billion. Over the same period, the price tag for educating the children of U.S. military personnel abroad has clocked in at around $3.5 billion. By shutting down the 127 Department of Defense schools in Europe and the Pacific (as well as the 65 scattered across the U.S. mainland, Puerto Rico, and Cuba) and sending the children to public schools, the U.S. would realize modest long-term savings. Once no longer garrisoning the globe, the Pentagon would also be able to cease paying out the $1 billion or so that goes into the routine construction of housing and other base facilities each year, not to mention the multi-billions that have gone into the construction, and continual upgrading, of bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And that's not the end of it either. Back in the 1990s, the Pentagon estimated that it was spending $30 billion each year on "base support activities" -- though the exact meaning of this phrase remains vague. Just take, for example, five bases being handed back to Germany: Buedingen, Gelnhausen, Darmstadt, Hanau and Turley Barracks in Mannheim. The annual cost of "operating" them is approximately $176 million. Imagine, then, what it has cost to run those 750+ bases during the Global War on Terror years.

Some recent Pentagon contracts for general operations and support functions overseas are instructive. In March, for instance, Bahrain Maritime and Mercantile International was awarded a one-year contract worth $2.8 billion to supply and distribute "food and non-food products" to "Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and other approved customers located in the Middle East countries of Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia."

In July, the French foodservices giant Sodexo received a one-year contract worth $180 million for "maintenance, repair and operations for the Korea Zone of the Pacific Region." These and other pricey support contracts for food, fuel, maintenance, transport, and other non-military expenses, paid to foreign firms, would disappear along with those U.S. garrisons, as would enormous sums spent on all sorts of military projects overseas. In 2007, for instance, the Army, Navy, and Air Force spent $2.5 billion in Germany, $1 billion in Japan, and $164 million in Qatar. And this year, the Pentagon paid a jaw-dropping $1 billion-plus for contracts carried out in South Korea alone.

Men and Materiel

With most or all of those 761 foreign bases off the books, and a much reduced global military "footprint," the U.S. could downsize its armed forces. As Andrew Bacevich notes in his book The Limits of Power, it already costs the Pentagon a bailout-sized $700 billion a year to "train, equip, and sustain the current active-duty force and to defray the costs of on-going operations." Even if current U.S. forces were simply brought home, there would still be significant savings (including, of course, the $10 billion a month going into the Iraq and Afghan wars).

The very opposite, however, is happening. Facing manpower demands on an overstretched military, the Pentagon is planning to ramp up the size of the armed forces by 92,000 over the next several years. That expansion comes with a sure-to-rise price tag of $108 billion. This step has the support of large majorities in Congress and both presidential candidates. John McCain has denounced the notion of "roll[ing] back our overseas commitments" and instead proposes "to increase the size of the Army and Marine Corps." Barack Obama agrees, but has been more specific. He has long touted plans, echoing the Pentagon's desires, to "increase the size of the Army by 65,000 troops and the Marines by 27,000 troops."

Just attracting this many recruits would cost a small fortune. This year, the Army had to spend $240 million on advertising alone to help meet its recruiting goals. On top of that, it paid out $547 million in bonuses to recruits -- a 164% increase since 2005. And this is to say nothing of how much it costs to train, equip, feed, and pay these future troops.

Capping, if not decreasing, the size of the military and bringing troops home would be the foundation for a new foreign policy based on non-aggression and fiscal responsibility. This would, of course, be a major departure for the military. In the 120 years between 1888 and 2008, according to a study by the Congressional Research Service, only seven -- using generous criteria -- were without "notable deployments of U.S. military forces overseas." Beginning in 2009, U.S. forces could aim for a complete reversal of this trend for the next 120 years, enabling the slashing of budgets for force-projection weapons systems.

Take the F-22A Raptor, a fighter plane designed to counter advanced Soviet aircraft that were never built. Pentagon budget documents released earlier this year put the estimated cost of the program, 2007 to 2013, at almost $3.7 billion. With no advanced Soviet fighters around to dogfight -- Russian aircraft had trouble enough in their recent Georgian encounters -- and no need for its "global strike" capabilities, the program could be scrapped. Such a step is not without precedent. As Wired magazine's Danger Room blog reported last month, Congress "all-but-eliminated funding for the so-called ‘Blackswift' program," a prototype hypersonic aircraft for which the Pentagon had requested almost $800 million in 2009 start-up funding. If the project remains stillborn, that alone will mean billions in future savings.

This year, for example, the Air Force is spending nearly $65 billion on new weapons systems. By shutting current and future weapons programs not meant for actual defense of the United States, Americans would be looking at hundreds of billions of dollars in savings in the near term. If the Pentagon demilitarized and sold off existing equipment as well, including, for instance, some of its 120,000 Humvees, at least 280 ships, and 14,000 aircraft, you're talking about another significant infusion of cash.

Bases Gone Bust

If history suggests anything, it's that one way or another, on a long enough timeline, all imperial garrisons fall. Some, of course, go bust sooner than others. As one Army publication noted in the 1970s, "[t]he ravages of rot, jungle, and weather have left only memories of the once-mighty World War II bases of the South Pacific." The fate of many bases built since has been no less inglorious.

While it would be difficult to total up just how many firebases, camps, airbases, port facilities, and base camps the U.S. had in Indochina during the Vietnam War, or what it cost to build and upgrade them, the numbers would surely be staggering. What we do know is instructive. For instance, the U.S. Army-Vietnam headquarters complex at Long Binh, about 16 miles from Saigon, had a value of more than $100 million in 1972 -- the year the U.S. gave it away to its South Vietnamese allies. They, in turn, lost it when the Saigon regime collapsed in 1975. Today, it's an industrial park. Similarly, the U.S. poured huge sums into its naval base at Cam Ranh Bay. By 1979, the Soviet Navy was using it and, after abandoning it earlier this decade, may do so again.

Similarly, in the 1990s, the U.S. got kicked out of its massive bases in the Philippines. A volcano laid waste to Clark Air Base and the Philippine Senate rejected U.S. efforts to extend the lease on its massive installation at Subic Bay. Just moving out personnel and equipment afterwards cost billions. More recently, the same process played out on fast forward in Central Asia. As adjunct professor at the Air Force's Air Command and Staff College Stephen Schwalbe pointed out in an article in Air & Space Power Journal, after the U.S. negotiated the right to use Uzbekistan's Karshi-Khanabad Air Base in 2001, as part of its Afghan War plans, it pumped millions of dollars into the base to improve infrastructure and facilities -- from increased aircraft parking space to a movie theater. It also ponied up a $15 million fee for its use.

In 2005, however, Uzbek security forces perpetrated a massacre of domestic protesters, leading to a Bush administration demand for an investigation. In the end, all the money spent on the base was wasted. Not long after the American request, Uzbekistan gave the U.S. military 180 days to leave the base and the country -- and promptly signed friendship pacts with Russia and China.

The buildings and structures at the U.S. base at Ecuador's Manta Air Field are valued at over $176 million and are also soon to move into the Pentagon's loss column. Last year, Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa offered the following terms for continued use of Manta after 2009: "We'll renew the base on one condition: that they let us put a base in Miami -- an Ecuadorian base." The U.S. did not take him up on the proposal. Correa has since offered to lease the base to China for commercial use.

The Pentagon stands to lose billions more when it finally withdraws from Iraq and Afghanistan. The cost of manning, maintaining, and regularly upgrading the mega-bases in Iraq, in particular, is already a significant financial burden on American taxpayers, but it would be dwarfed by the losses incurred if they had to be abandoned. As such, getting out, even in today's depressed real-estate market, would be the financially prudent thing to do.

Similarly, closing down the Bush administration's notorious torture bases might yield significant financial savings (while enhancing global opinion of the U.S.). Selling off the Pentagon's facilities on the British-owned island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, for instance, where Global War on Terror "ghost prisoners" have been held (and U.S. air raids on Iraq and Afghanistan have been regularly launched), could yield $2.6 billion. Saying goodbye to the facilities at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba could net another $2.2 billion -- and some global cheers.

The Pentagon Comes Home

While we may never know if it was bin Laden's knowledge of America's "expeditionary" history that drove him to plan out the 9/11 attacks, he certainly goaded the Bush administration into a Soviet-style military spending spree, complete with a Soviet-style ruinous war in Afghanistan. With some caves for bases, he managed to sink Americans into a multi-trillion dollar financial quagmire.

If the United States had never wasted the better part of a trillion dollars fighting a war in Vietnam and, following defeat there, embarked on a scheme to saddle the Soviets with a similarly ignominious loss -- which has now led to wars with a multi-trillion dollar price tag -- the United States might not be in such dire financial straits today. And yet, despite the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the U.S. continues to sink money into costly wars fought from expensive bases overseas with no end in sight. The result is sheer waste in every sense of the word.

When Americans want to get serious about a long-term bailout strategy that brings genuine financial and national security, they'll look to real cost-cutting options like stopping America's string of costly wars and getting rid of the Pentagon's vast network of overseas bases. Until then, they are simply helping Ronald Reagan's freedom fighter, Osama bin Laden, be a better Reagan than Reagan ever was.

Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. His first book, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, an exploration of the new military-corporate complex in America, was recently published by Metropolitan Books. His website is Nick Turse.com.