Bazookaman Doesn't Live There AnymorePosted Tuesday, November 18, 2008, at 10:17 AM
While at Camp Pendleton this past Friday, I drove up to 33 Area, better known as Camp Margarita. It was where I spent my last eight months in the Marine Corps, before getting out in July of 1969. I just wanted to see the old place before I headed back here.
At first, I thought it was a ghost town, most of the buildings were very dated, and it looked like little had changed over these past 40 years. I parked the truck in front of my old barracks (#33326), and was STUNNED at what I saw! Not only was the entire ROW of barracks time-weathered and run down, but there are Marines STILL living in them! Now.........when I returned from Vietnam in the winter of 68, these barracks were old THEN. Last Friday, it almost looked like a ghetto!.........oh, there wasn't any trash or garbage laying around, or anything like that. The Marine Corps has always been fanatical and "neat, clean and squared-away." Everything WAS clean, swept, swabbed, bunks & footlockers in perfect rows............guys out on the road running in formation.........but the barracks buildings themselves, which should have been condemned back in 1969, are amazingly still in use. A young Captain (who turned out to be the Camp Chaplain at Margarita) walked up while i was taking a few pictures, and I explained to him that I had once lived in 33326 exactly 40 years ago, and couldn't believe our guys today, were still living in these "dog kennels." As our Chaplains are all NAVY, I had to get my "digs" in a little bit..............."You know sir," I said, "I know the Navy has always been tight with the Marine budget, but wouldn't you think they could afford some paint and stucco occasionally? This is worse than when I lived here back in 69!" "Well, it's not as bad as you think" he replied........"all these barracks were re-wired a few years ago, and a couple of them have new plumbing. We even have washers and dryers now! No more hand-scrubbing on the washracks and no more clotheslines!" "Really sir???? Where ARE they? "Down at the end of the street. It's marked." And it was.........inside a leaning singlewide trailer, there were about 4 of each. For 6 barracks. If Airmen at the base out here had to live like that, you'd hear it from one Senate chamber to the next. None of the Marines I talked to seemed to mind though. "Better than living in tents." I guess, looking back, that was OUR outlook too. The Corps is a rough life, but you get so used to it, you think EVERYONE else lives the same way. When I joined the Air Force in 1971, to learn a "useable trade", I quickly found out there was a HUGE difference in living conditions. The first time I walked into an Air Force "Dining Facility" (as opposed to a "mess hall"}, I thought I'd mistakenly walked into the Officer's Club or something!......Tablecloths, napkin holders, piped-in MUSIC, actual dinnerware (instead of tin trays)...........man, I didn't know WHAT to think! Took quite awhile to get used to it. 2-man rooms WITH REFRIGERATORS.........and I understand that today, they have individual rooms, with cable tv if they want to have it put in. Well...this is 2008, and "even the MARINES must live better than they used to"................not from what I saw Friday! I have to think it all has to do with keeping them from getting soft. Keeping life hardcore basic. I didn't drive all the way out to San Onofre, but I was told they are STILL using the old quanset huts in some places. I saw them for myself 5 years ago, and I guess everything's still the same. It's still sad in a way though.....when I think of the money our government hands out to the rest of the world, the luxuries and perks of our politicians............yet, the guys who they send whenever they have some dirty job to be done...................yeah............. And Obama's comin'............if he and his cronies are anything similar to past Democratic administrations, the first of whatever CUTS they might make, will be the military. They have traditionally cut into defense to help fund their social programs for the lazy. One good thing I noticed though..........if they DO start cutting defense funds, it shouldn't impact the Marines a whole lot.............leastwise not up at Camp margarita, or anywhere ELSE in at Pendleton. It's the same today as it was with US.........."First to go, last to know." Semper Fi, Brothers Comments Showing most recent comments first [Show in chronological order instead] |
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Ex-Intern....you are right on the money. You just said what a lot of us have felt for years, and I couldn't agree more with you.
Over the years though, the blame still falls to us....and on BOTH sides of the coin. We're the ones who keep returning most of these idiots to office.
Every 2....or 4.......or 6 years, WE "the Boss" get to fire the deadweight and hire fresh blood.
When we don't, this is what happens.
I say "nuke 'em til' they glow and use their butts for runway lights.
Al Qaeda -- the Database
by Pierre-Henri Bunel
Global Research, November 20, 2005
Wayne Madsen Report and World Affairs, Delhi
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Shortly before his untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that "Al Qaeda" is not really a terrorist group but a database of international mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Courtesy of World Affairs, a journal based in New Delhi, WMR can bring you an important excerpt from an Apr.-Jun. 2004 article by Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence.
Wayne Madsen Report
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"I first heard about Al-Qaida while I was attending the Command and Staff course in Jordan. I was a French officer at that time and the French Armed Forces had close contacts and cooperation with Jordan . . .
"Two of my Jordanian colleagues were experts in computers. They were air defense officers. Using computer science slang, they introduced a series of jokes about students' punishment.
"For example, when one of us was late at the bus stop to leave the Staff College, the two officers used to tell us: 'You'll be noted in 'Q eidat il-Maaloomaat' which meant 'You'll be logged in the information database.' Meaning 'You will receive a warning . . .' If the case was more severe, they would used to talk about 'Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.' Meaning 'the decision database.' It meant 'you will be punished.' For the worst cases they used to speak of logging in 'Al Qaida.'
"In the early 1980s the Islamic Bank for Development, which is located in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, like the Permanent Secretariat of the Islamic Conference Organization, bought a new computerized system to cope with its accounting and communication requirements. At the time the system was more sophisticated than necessary for their actual needs.
"It was decided to use a part of the system's memory to host the Islamic Conference's database. It was possible for the countries attending to access the database by telephone: an Intranet, in modern language. The governments of the member-countries as well as some of their embassies in the world were connected to that network.
"[According to a Pakistani major] the database was divided into two parts, the information file where the participants in the meetings could pick up and send information they needed, and the decision file where the decisions made during the previous sessions were recorded and stored. In Arabic, the files were called, 'Q eidat il-Maaloomaat' and 'Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.' Those two files were kept in one file called in Arabic 'Q eidat ilmu'ti'aat' which is the exact translation of the English word database. But the Arabs commonly used the short word Al Qaida which is the Arabic word for "base." The military air base of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia is called 'q eidat 'riyadh al 'askariya.' Q eida means "a base" and "Al Qaida" means "the base."
"In the mid-1980s, Al Qaida was a database located in computer and dedicated to the communications of the Islamic Conference's secretariat.
"In the early 1990s, I was a military intelligence officer in the Headquarters of the French Rapid Action Force. Because of my skills in Arabic my job was also to translate a lot of faxes and letters seized or intercepted by our intelligence services . . . We often got intercepted material sent by Islamic networks operating from the UK or from Belgium.
"These documents contained directions sent to Islamic armed groups in Algeria or in France. The messages quoted the sources of statements to be exploited in the redaction of the tracts or leaflets, or to be introduced in video or tapes to be sent to the media. The most commonly quoted sources were the United Nations, the non-aligned countries, the UNHCR and . . . Al Qaida.
"Al Qaida remained the data base of the Islamic Conference. Not all member countries of the Islamic Conference are 'rogue states' and many Islamic groups could pick up information from the databases. It was but natural for Osama Bin Laden to be connected to this network. He is a member of an important family in the banking and business world.
"Because of the presence of 'rogue states,' it became easy for terrorist groups to use the email of the database. Hence, the email of Al Qaida was used, with some interface system, providing secrecy, for the families of the mujaheddin to keep links with their children undergoing training in Afghanistan, or in Libya or in the Beqaa valley, Lebanon. Or in action anywhere in the battlefields where the extremists sponsored by all the 'rogue states' used to fight. And the 'rogue states' included Saudi Arabia. When Osama bin Laden was an American agent in Afghanistan, the Al Qaida Intranet was a good communication system through coded or covert messages.
Meet "Al Qaeda"
"Al Qaida was neither a terrorist group nor Osama bin Laden's personal property . . . The terrorist actions in Turkey in 2003 were carried out by Turks and the motives were local and not international, unified, or joint. These crimes put the Turkish government in a difficult position vis-a-vis the British and the Israelis. But the attacks certainly intended to 'punish' Prime Minister Erdogan for being a 'toot tepid' Islamic politician.
" . . . In the Third World the general opinion is that the countries using weapons of mass destruction for economic purposes in the service of imperialism are in fact 'rogue states," specially the US and other NATO countries.
" Some Islamic economic lobbies are conducting a war against the 'liberal" economic lobbies. They use local terrorist groups claiming to act on behalf of Al Qaida. On the other hand, national armies invade independent countries under the aegis of the UN Security Council and carry out pre-emptive wars. And the real sponsors of these wars are not governments but the lobbies concealed behind them.
"The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the 'devil' only in order to drive the 'TV watcher' to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only interested in making money."
In yet another example of what happens to those who challenge the system, in December 2001, Maj. Pierre-Henri Bunel was convicted by a secret French military court of passing classified documents that identified potential NATO bombing targets in Serbia to a Serbian agent during the Kosovo war in 1998. Bunel's case was transferred from a civilian court to keep the details of the case classified. Bunel's character witnesses and psychologists notwithstanding, the system "got him" for telling the truth about Al Qaeda and who has actually been behind the terrorist attacks commonly blamed on that group. It is noteworthy that that Yugoslav government, the government with whom Bunel was asserted by the French government to have shared information, claimed that Albanian and Bosnian guerrillas in the Balkans were being backed by elements of "Al Qaeda." We now know that these guerrillas were being backed by money provided by the Bosnian Defense Fund, an entity established as a special fund at Bush-influenced Riggs Bank and directed by Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.
French officer Maj. Pierre-Henri Bunel, who knew the truth about "Al Qaeda" -- Another target of the neo-cons
Global Research Articles by Pierre-Henri Bunel
DON'T DISMISS IT JUST BECAUSE A FRENCH-MAN WROTE THE ARTICAL. It's a fact and you can find more info on it just by typing the title of this piece into your browser.
Unfortunately, we have a long history now of sticking our noses into things that don't concern us. To this day, I'm still trying to figure out what we're doing in Iraq at all......when it was Bin Laden of Afghanistan who enginerred 9/11.
Is he no longer important to our government? Bush should have done what Reagan would have done..........slammed Afghanistan until we either GOT Bin Laden, or until the people over there coughed him up.
This combination of mishandling, targeting the wrong country, and procrastination was a key factor in what happened at the polls two weeks ago.
No, we created our own enemy by getting involved at all. It wasn't our military's job to defend Afghanistan from the Soviets, and it's not our military's job to subsidize Iraq's national security.
Self-determination, HA!! You know what will give the Iraqis a sense of self-determination? LETTING THEM DETERMINE THEIR NATION'S FATE THEMSELVES. And if we leave and it falls apart, it won't be our fault, it will be THEIR OWN INCOMPETENCE - Did the U.S. ever need foreign troops to keep our peace? Then why does the rest of the world "need" us? THEY DON'T. They're exploiting our generosity.
Don't forget to pray for those that are already deployed. So much has good has been done over there, yet you'll never see it on the 6 o'clock news, yet I've seen photos of service men happily greeted by Iraqi citizens in rebuilt un-wartorn streets and these same citizens now have a self determination and sense of empowerment they never had under the Hussein regime. The thanks should go to those that serve. If Hussein-Obama pulls them all home, we'll have a half finished job and the Iraqi's may feel the same abandonment that the Afghanis felt in the eighties. Lets not forget that WE trained the Muhajadeen, and when we abandoned them they evolved into AlQaida. We created our own enemy by only doing half the job! Our sevicemen's lives should be too important to make that mistake again. God Bless those who serve!