CAN YOU AFFORD TO TRUST BUSH AND THE REPUBLICANS ON THE DRAFT?
The most important thing to keep in mind is that the Bush Administration could add several billion dollars to the Defense budget and add two active-duty divisions to the military to save the Volunteer Army. John Kerry is actually proposing just that in his $7 billion plan to add the 2 divisions, and strengthen the military with increased benefits, a doubling of Special Ops and several other programs like his volunteer Civilian Stability Corps (kind of a Peace Corps on steroids).
Yet instead Bush is stretching the Army so thin, they are now calling up the retired Individual Ready Reserve—and they have even sent Company B of the Arlington Color Guard to the Mideast, giving them real bullets instead of the blanks they were firing at military funerals. If they want to preserve the Volunteer Army, as Bush said in the first debate, and not have to reinstate the combat draft, why has the Bush Administration not added the several billion needed to avoid having to call a draft? Out of the $200 billion allocated for Iraq, not one penny was ever allocated to do this.Timeline of activity on Skills and Medical DraftsFeb. 11 2003—Top-level meeting between the head of the SSS and Deputy Undersecretary Abell in charge of Personnel and Readiness of the DoD on a new type of draft, the Skills Draft. This is the meeting recorded in the unpublicized Agenda Document, revealed by a Freedom of Information Act request in May 2004, which recommends a Skills Draft and an upgrading of the Medical Draft. The memo proposes the SSS be able to call up any number of several hundred skills the Pentagon and even the Dept. of Homeland Security might be short of. Option 3 of the agenda’s “Next Steps” outlined moving “promptly” to change the mission of the SSS, to actively plan and prepare for the massive datbase needed to track men and women, “virtually every young American” under 35 and their skills (more details below). The SSS goes back to the drawing board after this meeting, encouraged enough to do some more planning.
http://www.blatanttruth.org/selective_service091304.pdfSummer 2003—A drive begins to start filling Draft Board vacancies by asking current board members to find new ones. (Salon, "Oiling Up the Draft Machine")
July 25, 2003 – World Net Daily article on plans for the medical draft (HCPDS). System could draft up to 80,000 doctors, nurses and specialists, men and women.
http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=33754Fall 2003 - In its July 13th , 2004 article, “Could Your Child Be Drafted?”, Family Circle reported that in the Fall of 2003, “Karl Rove polled Republican members of Congress on how they felt about the draft. They said they'd support the President.” Despite Family Circle’s circulation of 23 million, this charge was never refuted by the White House.
http://www.oregonparentsunited.org/articles_could_your_child_be_drafted.htmFall 2003—DoD announces critical skills shortages in linguists, computer experts and engineers. SSS Director Brodsky orders the designing of the SKILLS DRAFT procedures, the registration card, and the massive database needed to track every young American under the age of 35 AND their skills (the first step in creating a database is to decide what data fields are needed). The two-year process to gear up SKILLS DRAFT starts a year ago, in Fall 2003, meaning a skills draft could be ready in late 2005 (a new law would have to be passed by the Congress and signed by the President along the lines suggested in “Next Steps” at the end of the Skills Draft Agenda document).
September, 2003 – Acting SSS Director Brodsky, misleads J. E. McNeil, the head of Center on Conscience & War, a Conscientious Objector support and information group, telling her that in February of 2003 the SSS had to “justify their existence” before a hostile committee and that the Skills Draft “planning” was just a way to keep the Selective Service funded for another year. In reality, the SSS and DoD were having the Skills Draft meeting in that same month of February and he himself had just started designing the new draft registration cards and procedures, making it his top priority when the Pentagon announced the critical skills shortages.
http://www.nisbco.org/UAA/03152004.htmlSeptember 23, 2003 – Draft Board Recruitment ad appears on Defense.Link site. First public ad for Draft Boards in decades. Page scrubbed within a few days of being noticed by some media in early November. Spokesman says there is “no plan” to reinstate draft, that it must be authorized by Congress. Public concern over new draft begins. “If a military draft becomes necessary," the notice explained, "approximately 2,000 Local and Appeal Boards throughout America would decide which young men, who submit a claim, receive deferments, postponements or exemptions from military service, based on Federal guidelines."
http://www.thememoryhole.org/mil/draft-boards.htmNovember 2003—Draft board ad scrubbed.
Nov. 12, 2003 – “If President Bush is re-elected, it is likely that he will reinstate the draft. The war on terrorism will not end in Iraq, but instead will proceed into countries like Syria and Iran," said Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame.
Dec. 2003—
Acting SSS Director Brodsky announces the Skills Draft to be the “top priority” of the SSS in the Winter 2003 newsletter The Register, talking of rapid progress to come on the Skills Draft. As with the health care draftees, no medical deferments are allowed in the Skills Draft except for total disability. Startling inside information is revealed: “SSS officials consulted with DoD planners to learn that medical personnel, computer specialists and linguists are difficult to recruit and hard to retain. There are also fears that lengthy and repetitive activations of Guard and Reserve members will boost Reserve Component attrition rates. So a principal objective of PIP-2003 is to shift the Agency’s focus away from maintaining a high state of readiness to execute a large draft of untrained manpower and toward preparing for a much smaller draft of trained personnel possessing critical skills needed for military service in a national crisis.” This is a direct statement the Selective Service is focused on “preparing” a Skills Draft, that it is not just a planning paper or “food for thought”. In addition, there is the internal Pentagon fear that the Guard and Reserves will not meet re-enlistment rates, despite public statements by DoD spokesmen and Rumsfeld himself that a draft is not needed.http://www.sss.gov/PDFs/NovDec2003-Register.pdf (go to P. 6)
March 13, 2004—Word of Skills Draft leaks out in a SF Chronicle story—the SSS admits it but tells reporters it’s just a “planning contingency.” In a misleading statement to allay fears, the SSS also says it would take 2 years to gear up and work the kinks out of a Skills Draft and that there is no funding for it. In fact, the SSS admits 6 weeks later that it has been actively designing the procedures and the data fields to be used on the Skills and Medical Registration cards since Fall of 2003 when the Pentagon announced shortages in liguists, computer experts and engineers. And SSS Spokesman Richard Flavahan contradicts spokesman Amon saying:
"We want to gear up and make sure we are capable of providing (those types of draftees) since that's the more likely need," Eric Rosenberg, the reporter on the story, finds out about the Feb. 11 meeting agenda document and files a Freedom of Information Act request to get a copy.
May 1, 2004—Eric Rosenberg’s writes an article on the Skills Draft Agenda memo with the memo in hand—but fails to mention several key points: skills conscription would be expanded to fill labor shortages throughout the Dept of Homeland Security, which is 1/3 of the whole government, the Skills Draft can be called without a combat draft, Skills induction will take a mere 90 days of reauthorization, the SSS wanted to “promptly” change the very MISSION of the SSS, and so on. The article does, however, reveal many major points of the sweeping plan.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/171522_draft01.htmlMay 2, 2004 – Second Rosenberg article with memo in hand. “"These ideas were only being floated for Department of Defense consideration," Amon said. He described the proposal as "food for thought" for contingency planning.” “Nonetheless,
Flahavan said, “the agency has begun designing procedures to conduct a targeted registration and draft of people with computer and language skills, in case military officials and Congress authorize it.” In actuality, however, the SSS was right then designing the cards and data fields needed for the entire Skills Draft and upgrading the Medical Draft based on that design work, they were not just working on a draft for computer and language skills. http://www.dailystar.com/dailystar/dailystar/20404.php
Summer, Fall, 2004—Mock Combat Draft Lottery held, and sample medical exam report orders issued to sample addresses with mailing list software. Alternative Service is geared up for first time in 31 years. Papers to place Conscientious Objectors with employers as Alternative Service Workers are actually drawn up. With the Alternative Service for the first time geared up in the culmination of a 5-year readiness plan, the SSS is brought up to 95% operational capability. Full Medical Draft capability is set for 2005, and all DRAFT BOARD vacancies are to be filled by Spring 2005, according to column by Ted Rall. The SSS must report to the Director on March 31, 2005, that the entire system could be operational within 75 days. This means that all 1,980 local draft board offices would be open by June 15, 2005. Theoretically, the first draft lottery for Combat for 20 year-olds and older Skills and Medical registrants could then take place. httP://www.sss.gov/perfplan_fy2004.HTML
Sept 13, 2004—Agenda memo of key Feb 2003 meeting posted on the Web. The .PDF file reveals the full scope of the Feb.11 agenda and, in the context of the statements by Flavahan and Brodsky, makes clear the SSS was told by the Pentagon a year ago to go ahead with the Skills Draft. What Option 3a and 3b at the end of the memo indicates for the future of “virtually every young American” can now be read by everyone, so each person can decide for themselves what it may mean to them.
Sept 20, 2004 – Howard Dean reports in a column entitled: “Hidden Agenda: A National Draft in the Future?” that two draft board members told him that the Selective Service has informed boards that a draft is coming next year: “Selective Service boards have already been notified that 20-year-olds and medical personnel will be called up first.”
http://www.yubanet.com/artman/publish/article_13568.shtml
Sept 27, 2004 – When the Rocky Mtn News noted the Feb. 11 memo itself was circulating on the Internet, SSS Spokesman Amon “said the memo was authentic, but he called it nothing more than a ‘food for thought kind of thing’ that was largely rejected inside the Pentagon.” These were the same exact words he used in early 2004, despite Flavahan’s “gear up” statement, and the revelation that the SSS had been “designing procedures” and data fields for the Skills Draft since Fall of 2003. http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/election/article/0,1299,DRMN_36_3212279,00.html
October 7, 2004 – Rock The Vote posts Feb. 11 Agenda memo on their Blog!
http://blog.rockthevote.com
HANG UP THIS FLYER EVERYWHERE!!
Printable pdf: http://somnamblst.tripod.com/draftalert.pdf
More: http://blatanttruth.org/draft.php
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