Families Send Basics To Marines In Afghanistan

For Marines serving in Afghanistan, mail call can be a little bit like Christmas in July. A package from home can supply everything from basic needs to small luxuries.

snip

At a Piggly Wiggly grocery store in North Carolina, customers have been donating goods for Marines deployed with the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment out of nearby Camp Lejeune.

Assistant Manager Rosa Hamilton says some of the items catch shoppers off guard. "They were like, 'Clothes pins, huh? I never would have thought about that.' And we're like, 'Well, they don't have anywhere to hang their clothes,' " she says...........Rest Here

Or bring up the NPR Player with this link amd listen to the report

Listening to this report, or reading.......

But already known by many, it is frankly more then criminal the contrast between Afghanistan and Iraq. We went into Afghanistan to supposedly get the leaders of those who carried out 9/11 with promises of the sun and the moon on reconstruction, once again like after we supported the Mujahadeen against the Soviets but never kept those promises, for the Afghans after we rid them of the Taliban government.

"A lot of people think that Afghanistan is like Iraq right now, and it's not. They're two totally different things. Iraq is more set up with everything that the guys need," she says. "Afghanistan — they went in with nothing."

We quickly left and invaded Iraq taking our Military, everyone we could payoff to join us and all those promises, once again, of rebuilding monies. Dumping Billions, loosing same as well, in building bases, a huge Embassy, and in doing so much of that work was shoddy and unrecorded in a paper trail, paying off once insurgents so they wouldn't fight us, and on and on and on. And now we're back in Afghanistan, not yet leaving Iraq, trying to once again win 'Hearts and Minds!'.

Why Iraq, one reason it is centrally located not only for the oil in that region but the rivers, water, as well! The Neo-Cons, and their War Profitteers, wanted, and still want, the control over that region that occupying Iraq would give them, Afghanistan is none of that!!

And much of those billions are going to private contractors apparently because our leaders feel the professional military can't carry out their failed policy decisions alone, or their supporters need the War Profits of Blood Money:

Unfit translators struggling in Afghanistan

U.S. troops say companies that recruit military translators are sending linguists to southern Afghanistan who are unprepared to serve in combat, even as more are needed...........

Wartime Contracting...

Wartime contracting commission heads back to Iraq

A team investigating wartime contracting abuses has begun a 10-day trip to Kuwait and Iraq to examine the Defense Department's plans for transferring or disposing of $3 billion worth of in-theater property and equipment.

As U.S. troops begin to withdraw from Iraq, members of the congressionally mandated Commission on Wartime Contracting want to know the Pentagon's plan for removing more than 615,000 items of contractor-acquired, government-owned property from American bases in Iraq.......

The report said that as a result of poor documentation in the early days of Iraq operations and a shortage of property management officers, base commanders cannot account for every piece of property, document its ownership or confirm that it has been maintained properly......Rest Here