Lt. Col.: Army Manipulated Senators With Psy-Ops

According to Rolling Stone , a music periodical primarily concerned with the U.S. military, a lieutenant general serving in Afghanistan, William Caldwell, ordered a "psychological operations" team to target U.S. senators and other "VIPs" visiting Afghanistan who met with him to "leverage the delegation for more funds" and "give us more people." Apparently some senators are not always in favor of more defense spending at war. Some you have to do research on and try to mess with their brains so they'll do what you want. "What do I have to plant inside their heads?" Caldwell reportedly said, like some sad middle-aged man entering a Criss Angel chatroom for the first time. So did it work? Well, the Senate is continually throwing money at training Afghan troops, what Caldwell wanted. So yeah, the old men who are our senators are pretty easy targets. Even though it's illegal for the U.S. Army to do this to its own citizens.

At a minimum, the use of the IO team against U.S. senators was a misue of vital resources designed to combat the enemy; it cost American taxpayers roughly $6 million to deploy Holmes and his team in Afghanistan for a year. But Caldwell seemed more eager to advance his own career than to defeat the Taliban. "We called it Operation Fourth Star," says Holmes. "Caldwell seemed far more focused on the Americans and the funding stream than he was on the Afghans. We were there to teach and train the Afghans. But for the first four months it was all about the U.S. Later he even started talking about targeting the NATO populations." At one point, according to Holmes, Caldwell wanted to break up the IO team and give each general on his staff their own personal spokesperson with psy-ops training.

Hey, everyone's doing it! It's okay. Even if this Lt. Colonel Michael Holmes underling didn't like it.

But when Holmes brought his concerns to Col. Gregory Breazile, the spokesperson for the Afghan training mission run by Caldwell, the discussion ended in a screaming match. "It’s not illegal if I say it isn’t!" Holmes recalls Breazile shouting.

Try to guess what the Army did to Holmes. Just guess . That's right! They investigated him on a bunch of pointless and/or false charges and was formally reprimanded. It'll be sad when that's what'll be left blighting his otherwise perfect record of service when he finds himself dead in a ditch very soon.

Can't we just make robot senators that are automatically programmed to hand money over to the Military-Industrial Complex? It would be much easier than trying to control John McCain's dusty old brain. Albeit not that much easier. [ Rolling Stone ]