It's a Tin-Foil Hat day: Gen. Odom called Bush admin "the regime"!

[HamdenRice]

Did anyone else hear Democracy Now this morning? Amy Goodman was interviewing retired Gen. William Odom, probably the highest ranking military officer to be highly critical of the Iraq war. Odom is a super heavy weight in national security affairs -- the former head of the National Security Agency.


At one point he was saying that the highest ranking officers were being pressured to lie about conditions in Iraq. While doing so, he referred to the administration as "the regime" and then corrected himself. I could not believe my ears!

Does this mean that the uniformed insiders in the Pentagon refer to the administration as the regime? How pissed off are the generals? How pissed off can they get before they "do something." It's scary.

I have been waiting for the transcript to be put on the DN website, and it just went up. Here's the paragraph:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/04/144240

LT. GEN. WILLIAM ODOM: Sure. Just take the last one. You can see from the exchanges over the training of troops that went up to the Congress the other day, when General Abizaid and General Casey both gave a rather dismal picture of progress in training up units that can fight on their own in Iraqi’s forces. They said only one, Rumsfeld, previously had, within before, had told Congress that three, and the number was surging, and, you know, he gave her a rosy picture. And they were much more cautious.

Now, they've been turned around, and they're up on the Sunday morning news shows this week saying, ‘Well, things are rosier.’ It's clear that they themselves are how dubious about this. They cannot afford to stand up and contradict the regime -- rather the administration -- too forcefully. I think they can say some of the facts fairly clearly and without , if they can avoid it. But -- so the judgments out there are not good, and I have heard from many junior officers the view that, yes, we're winning tactically. Our unit wins every tactical battle. But the big picture, the strategic picture, we're losing. If they kill one of us for every thousand we kill -- they have over 20 million people, we have 123,000. You know, the numbers are just against us. And once one begins to look at it objectively like that, it – you’ve got to ask what this is worth, what you gain by doing this.

<edited>

[unpossibles]

1. Zing!

:laughing and crying:

[MildyRules]

2. Odom is retired, BTW

[HamdenRice]

4. OP edited to reflect this - thanks

Yes I need to make clear he is retired. But I assume he is very much in touch with the pentagon brass.

[MildyRules]

6. You're welcome

most of the three-stars do stay in touch of course.

[CottonBear]

3. Remember all of the retired officers who supported Kerry

and who wrote and signed a letter of support? They appeared at the convention too. I don't remember any such line up for *.

[electropop]

5. I don't think they would ever pull something.

There's no tradition of that in this country. However, these folks can be fairly influential politically, at least once they retire, and this may be significant.

[HamdenRice]

7. "There's no tradition of that in this country." One word answer:

Kennedy.

Oh oh -- shouldn't have said that! That's real conspiracy theory stuff.

[electropop]

8. That wasn't the military...

It was the CIA and Bush 41.

[HamdenRice]

9. I think the CIA may be a tad ...

angry at shrub 2 as well.

So I take it you don't think JFK was killed by a "lone nut" assassin? Even in the CIA centric theories, wasn't the military deeply involved?

[electropop]

10. I'm actually agnostic on the topic.

There have been some interesting TV shows, etc, but I don't have a strong opinion. Mainly repeating what I've heard.