MIA: infrastructure under the radar

….If anyone sees a missing building, please report it to the administration immediately.” Sound like a camp-wide megaphone public address from Robert Altman’s MASH movie of 1970. Irony and absurdity combined in that strange and often contradictory relationship between military and intelligence…But we live in “virtual age” so maybe the buildings exist, somewhere, in some cache file, but lacking the necessary material elements that would make them visible to the naked eye. That is, using the latest construction technology, the buildings are actually just over the frontier in the fourth dimension, just out of target range for the Taliban to detonate.

---M*A*S*H* de Robert Altman (1970)---

—M*A*S*H* de Robert Altman (1970)—

(see link at end)…WASHINGTON — The U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) says the United States is missing several buildings it thought it had built in Afghanistan.

John Sopko said on January 10 that he didn’t know where the buildings were or even if they were ever built.

In his first public remarks since his July 2012 appointment by President Barack Obama, Sopko said corruption, inadequate planning, poor security, and the questionable sustainability of projects are among the challenges facing U.S. reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan.

He said the United States risks wasting billions of dollars if the agencies charged with implementing new programs and constructing new facilities don’t answer basic questions about how they are carrying out their work….


---On the issue of Hagel and Israel, Haviv Rettig Gur dropped this bombshell: apparently some Israelis–including at least one top security official–aren’t fretting about the possibility of Hagel holding court at the Pentagon. When it comes to the criticism leveled at the presumptive nominee, including even a 2006 comment about the power of the “Jewish lobby,” which the ADL has said bordered on anti-Semitism, “nobody in Israel cares about that,” the source said.---Tablet Magazine...

—On the issue of Hagel and Israel, Haviv Rettig Gur dropped this bombshell: apparently some Israelis–including at least one top security official–aren’t fretting about the possibility of Hagel holding court at the Pentagon.
When it comes to the criticism leveled at the presumptive nominee, including even a 2006 comment about the power of the “Jewish lobby,” which the ADL has said bordered on anti-Semitism, “nobody in Israel cares about that,” the source said.—Tablet Magazine…

Sopko said Washington spends some $28 million per day on rebuilding and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. Read More:http://www.rferl.org/content/missing-buildings-in-afghanistan/24820976.html

In any event, Missing buildings and lost American military hardware may all be part of a new Bermuda triangle known as the back dunes and lost palm groves in the Sinai Desert where Pentagon material mysteriously vanishes without a trace as if swallowed up by the sand. But Chuck Hagel may be the man to find it: what America needs is a misanthrope as head of war; nothing like a whiff of a threat of nihilism to invoke a return of lost and stolen property…

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