You can argue that GITMO should not exist as a base, but since it does those serving there should not be slighted because it was picked to be a prison for unlawful combatants.

I spent time there and as well as in Keflavik. Both are in strategic locations for shipping lane protection and sub hunting.

efense Secretary Leon Panetta has been predicting doom should his department be forced to make considerable budget cuts, but a GAO report released Friday points out that the Pentagon can't say for certain where all the money it's getting now is really going.

The Government Accountability Office has been trying to call attention for nearly two decades to the fact that the Department of Defense has been unable to produce auditable financial statements -- in other words, is so big, so complex and so lacking in financial controls that it cannot account for how it spends its funds.

In testimony submitted to the House Armed Services Committee on Friday, senior GAO official Asif A. Khan pulled no punches, concluding that: "Pervasive deficiencies in financial management processes, systems and controls, and the resulting lack of data reliability continue to impair management's ability to assess the resources needed for DOD operations; track and control costs; ensure basic accountability; anticipate future costs; measure performance; maintain funds control; and reduce the risk of loss from fraud, waste and abuse." link

Having personally shaken my head at the paperwork, laziness and outright waste required to build a government building nothing surprises me anymore.

Remember Homers dream car?

Promising to return America to the "moral high ground" in the war on terrorism, President Obama issued three executive orders Thursday to demonstrate a clean break from the Bush administration, including one requiring that the Guantanamo Bay detention facility be closed within a year.

During a signing ceremony at the White House, Obama reaffirmed his inauguration pledge that the United States does not have "to continue with a false choice between our safety and our ideals."

The president said he was issuing the order to close the facility in order to "restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great even in the midst of war, even in dealing with terrorism."

January 22, 2009