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Hagel to Take Pay Cut in Solidarity with DoD Furloughed Workers

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Photo Credit: Secretary of Defense

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel will take the same pay cut as the 750,000 civilian Pentagon employees slated for furloughs in the coming months.

Hagel and Deputy Defense Secretary Ash Carter plan to voluntarily hand over 14 days of pay back to the Treasury Department, as a sign of solidarity with the Pentagon employees who are being forced to take the same cut via furloughs.

Both Hagel and Carter are exempt from the furlough plan, since both officials are Senate-confirmed White House appointees, Defense Department (DOD) press secretary George Little told reporters on Tuesday.

“My understanding is … that there is a legal way to actually write a check, if you will, back to the U.S. Treasury,” Little said, regarding how both senior DOD officials would be able to adapt their pay scales to furlough levels.

Carter informed Congress he would be willing to take a pay cut, commiserate with proposed furloughs, during testimony on the department’s fiscal situation under sequestration earlier this year.

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Feds Allowed Known Terrorist – Linked To 9/11 – to Dine at Pentagon as Part of Muslim Outreach

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Photo Credit: WND

New documents obtained through the federal Freedom of Information Act about Anwar al-Awlaki reveal that his banking activity and other links to several 9/11 hijackers were known to the FBI weeks before he was invited to lunch at the Pentagon during an “outreach” to Muslims.

The documentation was obtained by Judicial Watch, the government watchdog agency that investigates and reports on government corruption.

“The more we learn about Anwar al-Awlaki, the more questions arise not only about his activities before and after 9/11, but also about the al-Qaida operational and support network still active in the United States,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

“It is now even more concerning that al-Awlaki was invited to the Pentagon after 9/11 and then let go by the FBI despite warrants for his arrest.” It was reported in 2010 that Al-Awlaki was a lunch guest of military brass at the Pentagon months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

At that time, it was revealed that documents, including an FBI interview conducted after Nidal Hasan’s terror attack on members of the military at Fort Hood in 2009, show that al-Awlaki was taken to the Pentagon as part of the military’s outreach to the Muslim community after 9/11.

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Venezuela’s Maduro Calls on Obama to Halt US Plan to Assassinate Rival

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Venezuela’s acting president urged U.S. leader Barack Obama to stop what he called a plot by the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency to kill his opposition rival and trigger a coup before an April 14 election.

Nicolas Maduro said the plan was to blame his opponent’s murder on the OPEC nation’s government and to “fill Venezuelans with hate” as they prepare to go to vote following the death of socialist leader Hugo Chavez.

Maduro first mentioned a plot against his rival, Henrique Capriles, last week, blaming it on former Bush administration officials Roger Noriega and Otto Reich. Both rejected the allegations as untrue, outrageous and defamatory.

“I call on President Obama – Roger Noriega, Otto Reich, officials at the Pentagon and at the CIA are behind a plan to assassinate the right-wing presidential candidate to create chaos,” Maduro said in a TV interview broadcast on Sunday.

Maduro, who is Chavez’s preferred successor, said the purpose of the plot was to set off a coup and that his information came from “a very good source.”

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Napolitano: Sequester Cuts Will Make US More Vulnerable To Terrorist Attack

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Photo Credit: U.S. Embassy New DelhiAllowing the $85 billion sequester to go forward will make the United States more vulnerable to a terrorist attack, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano warned Monday.

Napolitano added that the blunt nature of the $85 billion in automatic spending cuts set for March 1 “makes it awfully, awfully tough” to mitigate threats faced by the nation.

“I don’t think we can maintain the same level of security at all places around the country with sequester compared to without sequester,” said Napolitano, whose agency includes the Transportation Security Administration.

The cuts will also hit the Pentagon, the Department of Justice and other national security spending, and the administration has warned the spending reductions will hurt the military’s readiness.

“I think if you look at the combination of the effect on [the Department of Homeland Security], the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense, we are having real impacts on the robustness of our defensive posture,” Napolitano told reporters at the White House on Monday.

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Cut Commitments, Not Muscle

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Photo Credit: Senior Airman Julianne In that year of happy memory, 1972, George McGovern, the Democratic nominee, declared he would chop defense by fully one-third. A friendly congressman was persuaded to ask Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to expatiate on what this might mean.

The Pentagon replied the Sixth Fleet might have to be pulled out of the Med, leaving Israel without U.S. protection against the fleet of Adm. Sergei Gorshkov, and provided the congressman a list of U.S. bases that would have to be shut down.

Radio ads were run in the towns closest to the bases on the Pentagon list, declaring they would be closed and all jobs terminated, should McGovern win.

Something akin to this is going on with the impending sequester. A cut of 7 percent, $46 billion, in Pentagon spending, says Army chief Ray Odierno, will mean a “hollowing” out of his force.

The Navy? The carrier Harry Truman will not be sailing to the Persian Gulf. The Abraham Lincoln will not be overhauled in Newport News. Thousands of jobs will be lost. Reporter Rowan Scarborough writes that the Air Force has produced “a map of the U.S. that shows state-by-state the millions of dollars lost to local economies,” should the guillotine fall.

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Pentagon Conducting Urgent Assessment Of North Korean Mobile ICBM Threat

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Photo Credit: APThe Pentagon’s Joint Staff is conducting an urgent threat assessment of North Korea’s new road-mobile missile and the danger it poses to the United States.

The classified assessment is being done for Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on an expedited basis, said defense officials familiar with the effort.

“This is an expedited examination of the North Korean ICBM threat specifically for the chairman,” one official said. A Joint Staff spokesman declined to comment on the North Korean ICBM assessment.

Disclosure of the urgent threat assessment from nuclear-armed North Korea comes as President Barack Obama is expected to announce Tuesday night that he plans to cut an additional one-third of the warheads from the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

The Pentagon plans to cut its nuclear warheads to 1,550 warheads under the 2010 New START arms treaty with Russia. An additional cut of a third of those warheads would bring the U.S. warhead arsenal to around 1,000.

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More Holes in White House Denial Of Arms To Jihadists

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Photo Credit: WNDThe White House denial of supplying arms to the al-Qaida-saturated Syrian rebels may be somewhat more difficult for some to swallow now that it has been revealed the arms-to-rebels plan had been endorsed by the leaders of the CIA, Pentagon and State Department.

If, indeed, President Obama rejected the arms plan, as reported earlier by the New York Times, it would mean the White House went against the recommendations of outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then-CIA Director David Petraeus.

The plan was said to have been generated by Petraeus and Clinton.

During Senate hearings on Benghazi yesterday, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., asked Panetta and Dempsey whether they had supported a plan “that we provide weapons to the resistance in Syria.”

“We do,” Panetta replied.

“You did support that?” McCain asked again.

“We did,” added Dempsey, who was sitting next to Panetta.

Neither Dempsey nor Panetta elaborated on their positions.

This past weekend, the New York Times reported the White House rebuffed the Clinton-Petraeus plan developed last summer to arm and train Syrian rebels.

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Report: White House Set To Cut Nuclear Arsenal By One-Third

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Photo Credit: Glyn Lowe PhotoworksPresident Obama is poised to sign off on a new internal review of U.S. nuclear weapons strategy that would reduce the arsenal by one-third, resulting in billions in savings to the Pentagon and Energy Department.

The recommended reductions were included in a draft version of a classified decision directive compiled by top defense and national security officials inside the White House, according to a report by the Center for Public Integrity issued Friday.

While the president has yet to officially approve the directive, including the recommended one-third cut to the nuclear arsenal, sources tell CPI Obama has voiced no objection to the directive’s findings.

Representatives from State Department, Strategic Command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the office of Vice President Biden also played a part in drafting the directive.

White House officials had pushed to get the new directive finalized late last year, according to the CPI report. However, the administration pushed back against that plan.

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Pentagon To Extend Certain Benefits To Same-Sex Spouses

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Photo Credit: Jeff Sheng/APThe Pentagon has decided to extend certain benefits to the spouses of gay and lesbian personnel, according to officials and people notified about the decision, responding to the increasingly vocal appeals of same-sex couples in the military.

The military expects to announce the decision this week.

Officials at the Pentagon would not say which new benefits the department has determined it can extend to same-sex couples without violating the Defense of Marriage Act, a 1996 law that bars the federal government from legally recognizing same-sex unions. Gay rights advocates have called for benefits including housing privileges, access to base recreational facilities and joint duty assignments for couples in the military.

Legal experts say, however, that the Pentagon will be unable to extend more than 100 benefits while the Defense of Marriage Act remains in place.

The new guidelines will be departing Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta’s final imprint on the armed forces. They will also come on the heels of two landmark changes undertaken under his relatively short tenure: the rescinding of the ban on openly gay service members and the decision to allow women to serve in combat units.

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US Military Ends Four Army Officers’ Careers for Accidentally Sending Korans to Burn Pits

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Photo credit: Roel Wijnants

Army officials said that four Army officers and two enlisted soldiers received letters of reprimand for sending boxes of Korans from a prison library to a burn pit at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Although an Army investigation that was made public on Monday found that the soldiers did not act out of “malicious intent” to disrespect the Koran or defame Islam, investigators concluded that they did not follow proper procedures, were ignorant of the importance of the Koran to Afghans and got no clear guidance from their leaders in a chain of mistakes.

The Marine Corps said three non-commissioned officers involved in a video that shows four Marines urinating on the body of a dead Taliban fighter received “nonjudicial punishments,” which could include letters of reprimand, a reduction in rank, forfeit of some pay, physical restriction to a military base, extra duties or some combination of those measures.

The Marine Corps did not release the results of its investigation into the episode because, officials said, there were continuing inquiries about higher-ranking officers in the unit involved, which was part of the Third Battalion, Second Marine Regiment, based in Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Military officials said the punishments were not as light as they might seem to the public — letters of reprimand effectively end most military careers — but it was unclear how they would be viewed in Afghanistan, where the Koran burning touched off days of riots across the country and compelled Mr. Karzai to call for a public trial.

American military officials said they were hopeful that Afghans would take the news calmly. “We have conveyed our condolences to the government and the Afghan people,” said Col. Thomas W. Collins, a spokesman for the international military coalition in Afghanistan. “These were both terrible mistakes.”

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